Connectionists: How the brain works

[Thomas Trappenberg]

Some of our discussion seems to be about 'How the brain works'. I am of
course not smart enough to answer this question. So let me try another
system.

How does a radio work? I guess it uses an antenna to sense an
electromagnetic wave that is then  amplified so that an electromagnet can
drive a membrane to produce an airwave that can be sensed by our ear. Hope
this captures some essential aspects.

Now that you know, can you repair it when it doesn't work?

I believe that there can be explanations on different levels, and I think
they can be useful in different circumstances. Maybe my above explanation
is good for generally curious people, but if you want to build a super good
sounding radio, you need to know much more about electronics, even
quantitatively. And of course, if you want to explain how the
electromagnetic force comes about you might need to dig down into quantum
theory. And to take my point into the other direction, even knowing all the
electronic components in a computer does not tell you how a word processor
works.

A multilayer perception is not the brain, but it captures some interesting
insight into how mappings between different representations can be learned
from examples. Is this how the brain works? It clearly does not explain
everything, and I am not even sure if it really captures much if at all of
the brain. But if we want to create smarter drugs than we have to know how
ion channels and cell metabolism works. And if we want to help stroke
patients, we have to understand how the brain can be reorganized. We need
to work on several levels.

Terry Sejnowski told us that the new Obama initiative is like the moon
project. When this program was initiated we had no idea how to accomplish
this, but dreams (and money) can be very motivating.

This is a nice point, but I don't understand what a connection plan would
give us. I think without knowing precisely where and how strong connections
are made, and how each connection would influence a postsynaptic or glia
etc cells, such information is useless. So why not having the goal of
finding a cure for epilepsy?

I do strongly believe we need theory in neuroscience. Only being
descriptive is not enough. BTW, theoretical physics is physics. Physics
would not be at the level where it is without theory. And of course, theory
is meaningless without experiments. I think our point on this list is that
theory must find its way into mainstream neuroscience, much more than it
currently is.  I have the feeling that we are digging our own grave by
infighting and some narrow 'I know it all' mentality. Just try to publish
something which is not mainstream even so it has solid experimental backing.

Cheers, Thomas
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