Gary Marcus

There's a major difference: DL was guided in its infancy by ideas from neuroscience, so there is a relatively direct link between them. In contrast, the application of quantum mechanics to the c-word is taking two distinct fields and tying them together on speculative grounds.

The relation between deep learning - with its single neuron type and largely homogenous architecture - and the actual complexity of the human brain, with > 1000 neuron types, hundreds of proteins at each synapse and > 100 distinct brain regions - is risible.

Every model is an abstraction. Newtonian mechanics ignores air turbulence, molecular interactions, etc. Climate models capture coarse grained interactions, not the multitude of animals, plants, and wind-currents that truly shape the climate. Neural networks are no different.

Take Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) as a practically highly successful model: they have been used effectively to model bird migration behavior and stock market behavior. Does that mean that some biological aspect was identified to be common in the brains of birds and humans?

??? 1) Human and bird brains surely do have some common neural mechanisms. 2) MDPs are a very abstract model, which indeed, can be applied to many domains, thanks to their ability to capture basic dynamics. That does not imply much about biological equivalence...

I would say 1) human brains and bird brains are effectively identical within the space of possible brains 2) MDPs capturing behaviour is not evidence for biological or mechanistic similarity...it tells you about function, not mechanism.