Gary Marcus

astonished that anyone knowledgeable could claim that neural nets are (obviously) an “abstraction of neural processing” when we don’t yet know how brains work. if you don’t know how Y works you can’t really speak with certainty about whether X is an abstraction of Y. Period.https://twitter.com/tyrell_turing/status/1200072223299657728 …

Don't we know at least a little (if not everything) about how brains work? That there are many many neurons that communicate, etc. And is it not fair to say ANNs are a very simple abstraction from that current understanding of brains (there are many neurons, etc.)?

Maybe, but maybe not. We can't even model the worm, and have had wiring diagram since 1986. Maybe we are on right track, & maybe we aren't. Maybe it's ok to simplify everything dendrites do, and treat all cell types equally, and maybe we miss something fundamental by doing so.

I think that from a behavioral standpoint, we can infact model many aspects of the worm.

from a more detailed standpoint, I think there simply too many unknowns just now. As far as I know, we don't even have good neuron or synapse model of most neuron/synapses for the worm. a wiring diagram is not very useful without those, from a modeling perspective at least.

Important to keep in mind the neurons of the C elegans worm are different from most regular neurons. they don't fire spikes, but rather have slow graded potentials, and the relationship to synaptic release is not clear in that case. Mammalian neurons are somewhat "simpler".