Neuroscience Can't Solve Donkey Kong

We hear increasingly confident claims from advocates of neuroscience that we shall soon understand how the brain works.  How plausible are these claims?  Someone thought of a test.
The human brain contains 86 billion neurons, underlies all of humanity’s scientific and artistic endeavours, and has been repeatedly described as the most complex object in the known universe. By contrast, the MOS 6502 microchip contains 3510 transistors, runs Space Invaders, and wouldn’t even be the most complex object in my pocket. We know very little about how the brain works, but we understand the chip completely.

So, Eric Jonas and Konrad Kording wondered, what would happen if they studied the chip in the style of neuroscientists? How would the approaches that are being used to study the complex squishy brain fare when used on a far simpler artificial processor? Could they re-discover everything we know about its transistors and logic gates, about how they process information and run simple video games? Forget attention, emotion, learning, memory, and creativity; using the techniques of neuroscience, could Jonas and Kording comprehend Donkey Kong?

No. They couldn’t. Not even close.
Now, that's interesting, but it depends on an analogy that is increasingly questionable. Here's an article that argues that your brain does not process information, and is nothing like a computer.

1 comment:

Ymar Sakar said...

The soul may merely be the result of a quantum projection and field energy, which runs on the brain's hardware only peripherally according to biological impulses.

Much like a hyper volume is related to a regular 3d volume.

Those limited by this dimension, cannot comprehend issues on a higher dimension without utilizing abstract crutches to bridge the gap. Even on the quantum level, there might be several unknown relationships that affect higher dimensions, which right now people reject out of hand. Just as they rejected other potential scientific breakthrough in human history, with almost no exceptions.