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 …
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you are using “abstraction of” to mean “model of”, right? If so I think it would help move the discussion forward if you specified what you want to use the model for. Developing new drugs? For sure you need a molecular description? Inspiring better algorithms? Maybe not.
you can improve deep nets without regard to relation to the brain, bu pure engineering doesn’t imply a real model of a brain, simplified yet consistent with reality, rather than something merely “inspired” by neurosci + hard to know, since we don’t understand how brain works