[rootusrootus]

Exactly. Someone way back when decided to call them neural networks, and now a lot of people think that they are a good representation of the real thing. If we make them fast enough, powerful enough, we'll end up with a brain!

Or not.

[voidhorse]

I wish McCulloch and Pitts could see how much intellectual damage that wildly bold analogy they made would do. (though seeing as they seemingly had no qualms with issuing such a wildly unjustified analogy with the absolute paucity of scientific information they had at the time, I guess they'd be happy about it overall).

[__loam]

Computational neurons were developed with the express intent of studying models of the brain based on the contemporary understanding of neuroscience. That understanding has evolved massively over the last 7 decades and meanwhile the concept of the perceptron has proven to be a useful mathematical construct in machine learning and statistical computing. I blame the modern business culture if software development more than I blame dead scientists for the misunderstanding being peddled to the public.

[voidhorse]

I also blame the modern business culture more, but we shouldn't act like McCulloch and Pitts were innocent. They well could have introduced neural nets without making the wild claims they did about actual neural equivalence. They are largely responsible for much of the brain = computer naivety and, in my view, they put forward this claim with shockingly little justification. The reasoned analogically without actually understanding the things they were trying to analogize. They basically took something that had the status of hypothesis at best and used it in the same manner one might if one had understanding.

To be clear, I'm not at all criticizing their technical contribution. Neural nets obviously are an important technical approach to computation—however we should criticize the attendant philosophical and neurological and biological claims they attached to their study, which lacked sufficient justification.

[karmakaze]

There was an actual simulation of a brain that could respond appropriately to stimuli. It ran many orders of magnitude slower than real-time but demonstrated the correlation. Probably not using the DNNs that we use now, but still a machine.