[red75prime]

> There is also an epistemological assumption that prevails, and that is that we understand (or we think we understand) how our brain/mind works.

It's good that it doesn't matter. Stochastic gradient descent works (or doesn't work) regardless of whether we know how the brain does its thing.

[dnautics]

we know the brain does not use gradient descent. (i agree it doesn't matter)

[anthonyrstevens]

How do we know this?

[dnautics]

i recall a hinton lecture where he talks about the mechanism of memory formation in the brain and it's not fully sussed out but it's also not backprop, its some sort of forward prediction and immediate reinforcement loop.

There's also no plausible biological/chemical mechanism to backpropagate.