Connectionists: How the brain works

[james bower]

perhaps instead of speculating, you might be interested in an article actually describing how a REAL brain model:  read: a model made of the actual brain itself, rather than some abstracted imagined idea about how brains work, has propagated between labs.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/erw705h4yyh3l9k/272602_1_En_5%20copy.pdf

I am more than aware that most people on this mailing list have no interest in these kinds of models - and, as most are aware, I personally believe that most of the models that people are interested in on this mailing list are fundamentally Ptolemaic in intent and effect.

However, I have no interest in continuing that argument.

I am also, of course, very aware that building model that transcend individual laboratories is hard and that boiling everything down to as few equations as possible would make that process much easier (as it did in physics) - sadly, biological systems are explicitly more complex by nature - and their success depends on the details.  That is absolutely clear.  I should also say that in the GENESIS project, we have been working for a long time on how you build and propagate community models - which requires a new form of publication.  But that is a much longer and more complex conversation than would probably be tolerated here. 

Accordingly, I post this link to the paper, just in case, someone new on the list is interested in actually understanding how actual physical models of the nervous system are very slowly being developed - more slowly than they should be, given the interest and hope of the majority that somehow a system that evolved over many hundreds of millions of years to do something VERY HARD, might somehow be captured in some mathematical structure simpler than itself.

Jim Bower  




On May 22, 2014, at 6:00 PM, Janet Wiles <janetw at itee.uq.edu.au> wrote:

> When does a model escape from a research lab? Or in other words, when do researchers beyond the in-group investigate, test, or extend a model?
> 
> I have asked many colleagues this question over the years. Well-written papers help, open source code helps, tutorials help. But the most critical feature seems to be that it can be communicated in a single equation. Think about backprop, reinforcement learning, Bayes theorem.
> 
> Janet Wiles
> Professor of  Complex and Intelligent Systems,
> School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering
> The University of Queensland
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Connectionists [mailto:connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu] On Behalf Of Yu Shan
> Sent: Friday, 23 May 2014 7:37 AM
> To: Juyang Weng
> Cc: connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu
> Subject: Re: Connectionists: How the brain works
> 
>> Suppose that one gave all in this connectionists list a largely 
>> correct model about how the brain works, few on this list would be 
>> able to understand it let alone agree with it!
>> 
> 
> Let's look at a recent example. Nikolic proposed his theory
> (http://www.danko-nikolic.com/practopoiesis/) about how the brain works a few weeks ago to the Connectionists. Upon finishing reading this paper, I was quite exited. The theory is elegantly simple and yet has great explanatory power. It is also consistent with what we know about evolution as well as the brain's organization and development.
> Of course, we don't know yet if it is a "largely correct model about how the brain works". But, to my opinion, it has a great potential.
> Actually I am thinking how to implement those ideas in my own future research.
> 
> However, the author's efforts of introducing this work to the Connectionists received little attention. Connectionists reach 5000+ people, who are probably the most interested and capable audience for such a topic. This makes the silence particularly intriguing. Of course, one possible reason is that lots of people here already studied this theory and deemed it irrelevant.
> 
> But a more likely reason, I think, is most people did not give it much thought. If that is the case, it raises an interesting question: what is the barrier that a theory of how the brain works need to overcome in order to be treated seriously? In other words, what do we really want to know?
> 
> Shan Yu, Ph.D
> Brainnetome Center and National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100190, P. R. China http://www.brainnetome.org/en/shanyu
>