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Ignoring the gross differences in circuitry between hippocampus and
cerebellum, etc., is not erring on the side of simplicity, it is erring,
period. Have you actually looked at a Cajal/Sxentagothai-style drawing of
their circuitry?<br><br>
At 01:07 PM 3/19/2014, Brian J Mingus wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Hi Jim,<br><br>
Focusing too much on the details is risky in and of itself. Optimal
compression requires a balance, and we can't compute what that balance is
(all models are wrong). One thing we can say for sure is that we should
err on the side of simplicity, and adding detail to theories before
simpler explanations have failed is not Ockham's heuristic. That said
it's still in the space of a Big Data fuzzy science approach, where we
throw as much data from as many levels of analysis as we can come up with
into a big pot and then construct a theory. The thing to keep in mind is
that when we start pruning this model most of the details are going to
disappear, because almost all of them are irrelevant. Indeed, the size of
the description that includes all the details is almost infinite, whereas
the length of the description that explains almost all the variance is
extremely short, especially in comparison. This is why Ockham's razor is
a good heuristic. It helps prevent us from wasting time on unnecessary
details by suggesting that we only inquire as to the details once our
existing simpler theory has failed to work.<br><br>
> On 3/14/14 3:40 PM, Michael Arbib wrote:<br>
<dl>
<dd>>> At 11:17 AM 3/14/2014, Juyang Weng wrote:<br>
<dd>>>> The brain uses a single architecture to do all brain
functions we are aware of! It uses the same architecture to do
vision, audition, motor, reasoning, decision making, motivation
(including pain avoidance and pleasure seeking, novelty seeking, higher
emotion, etc.).<br>
<dd>>><br>
<dd>>> Gosh -- and I thought cerebral cortex, hippocampus and
cerebellum were very different from each other.
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