We do know the components of the brain. "Hypocampus", "Prefrontal cortex", etc. The AIBS is studying how these regions map down to the individual elements (neurons, peptides, chemical transports etc).
You're discounting a significant amount of experimental science that is really going on right now. I don't understand why.
That's like saying we know the components of an airplane - there is the "hard shiny bit", "the bottom rubbery bits" and the "rotator thingys".
Decomposing the brain into groups of biological clumps of cells tells us literally nothing about how the brain as an information system works.
When we want to study the brain, we do so because we want to understand its information structure and build information processing models. The biochemistry of the wetware is irrelevant, except insofar as it might help us formulate an "information science".
Here we are no closer to the goal than 6000 years ago.
But we do. Check out the research into how our visual system works, or how spatial orientation works in mice. There's been quite a lot of puzzle pieces identified over the last decades. For some of those, we have good theoretical models that can make testable predictions.
We're far from having all the puzzle pieces, and even further from fitting them together. But what we already have and the progress that's happening are both reassuring.
I don't agree.
We have some very interesting ad-hoc empirical observations, but no theory.
We're not even in "alchemy" territory here yet, we're still in the "randomly mix colored rocks and see what comes about" phase, to use an analogy from how chemistry developed.
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We have an "information theory", but there is no such thing as an "information science". (Yet.)
The idea that we can study the brain when we don't even have any inkling of its structure and components is preposterous.
And no, the physical layer of neurons and amino acids is only tangentially related to the structure and component s of the brain.
We do know the components of the brain. "Hypocampus", "Prefrontal cortex", etc. The AIBS is studying how these regions map down to the individual elements (neurons, peptides, chemical transports etc).
You're discounting a significant amount of experimental science that is really going on right now. I don't understand why.
That's like saying we know the components of an airplane - there is the "hard shiny bit", "the bottom rubbery bits" and the "rotator thingys".
Decomposing the brain into groups of biological clumps of cells tells us literally nothing about how the brain as an information system works.
When we want to study the brain, we do so because we want to understand its information structure and build information processing models. The biochemistry of the wetware is irrelevant, except insofar as it might help us formulate an "information science".
Here we are no closer to the goal than 6000 years ago.
But we do. Check out the research into how our visual system works, or how spatial orientation works in mice. There's been quite a lot of puzzle pieces identified over the last decades. For some of those, we have good theoretical models that can make testable predictions.
We're far from having all the puzzle pieces, and even further from fitting them together. But what we already have and the progress that's happening are both reassuring.
I don't agree. We have some very interesting ad-hoc empirical observations, but no theory.
We're not even in "alchemy" territory here yet, we're still in the "randomly mix colored rocks and see what comes about" phase, to use an analogy from how chemistry developed.