This is then a place of honest disagreement for us. Because while I believe the outside world obviously impacts behavior, I see no way for it to do so other than through the nervous system.
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Replying to @neurograce @chazfirestone and
Possibly disagreement, but possibly not, because I do not necessarily disagree with your last claim but it seems to sidestep my point. So perhaps rather misunderstanding?
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Replying to @IrisVanRooij @chazfirestone and
Maybe? I believe that we should (at some point) be able to predict behavior at time t+1 based on neural activity at time t (with neural activity obviously being a result of past & present input from the outside world). Thus behavior can be fully explained by neural activity alone
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Replying to @neurograce @chazfirestone and
Ah! But prediction and explanation are not the same thing, and neither implies the other. I find this paper explains the distinction is an accessible way, using the tides as an example: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f5b1/b05e8313aee94ccd98e80eab3ec56dbd2c97.pdf …pic.twitter.com/Lflyct6xkD
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Replying to @IrisVanRooij @neurograce and
Predicting the tides can be and still is done using tide tables. The explanation did not improve our ability to predict. See excerpt if interested. (cc
@o_guest)pic.twitter.com/J7pzGnBrQV
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Replying to @IrisVanRooij @chazfirestone and
Sorry, I meant prediction via running a mechanistic model that maps to physical components of the system, not just descriptive statistical relationships. The idea being that we can build a model (an explanation, essentially) that can tell us behavior solely from neural activity
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Replying to @neurograce @chazfirestone and
Circling back to the Q of what is meant by ‘explanation’. I take it you propose simulation of a brain—in the sense if mimicking neural activity etc—is an explanation? Even if it generates no understanding in anyone’s mind about how that activity relates to cognition or behaviour?
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Replying to @IrisVanRooij @chazfirestone and
I think if we've been able to build a simulation of the brain that captures a lot of neural data & explains behavior, someone at some point has understood some stuff (so I can't really separate those things).
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Replying to @neurograce @IrisVanRooij and
And the model provides the opportunity to do things like discover which components of the system are necessary for different outputs, etc. Which counts as understanding to me.
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Can you imagine a situation in which the model is "perfect" like you describe and yet tells us nothing or very very little? Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm , for example? I don't think OpenWorm is a blip. I think it might be what happens w a lot of reductionist models.
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Replying to @o_guest @seymiotics and
OpenWorm is far from a perfect model. there are obviously things going on in C. elegans that we don't know about yet. But we are a lot closer to being able to describe the behavior of worms in terms of neural activity than we are for humans, in part due to efforts like OpenWorm
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Replying to @neurograce @o_guest and
Also, can someone just give me a clear example of something that has counted as an explanation to them in psych/neuroscience? Because I honestly think a lot of this is just having a different set of questions we consider interesting & thus different acceptable answers
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