> incidentally, this isn't far off from how the human brain is believed to work (at least with long term memories).
Not as literal words printed somewhere in our mind it isn't. This is more akin to things like the funnel transformer. [0] Nevermind that we hardly understand how our minds actually work.
No one knows how the brain works and how it is connected with the body. Did you know your gut is directly connected with cognition? An unhealthy digestive system has been linked with several neurodegenerative diseases. Also, walking and cardio in general is known to create new neurons and prevent cognitive degeneration.
It's always funny to me when people on online forums confidently proclaim to know what cognition and thinking is all about and that furthermore it can be reduced to symbol shuffling on computers. No one has any clue how to make computers intelligent and anyone that claims to know is either doing marketing for some "AI" company or thoroughly confused about what counts as biological intelligence.
Turns out Markov chains with a large context can do a lot and yet no one has figured out why LLMs can not solve sudoku puzzles. Why do you think that's the case if the goalposts have moved so much?
You're 100% right, no one knows how the brain works. And all the elements you described are probably relevant — including things you didn't mention, such as personality changes tied to heart transplants, etc.
But that's probably reading a little too deeply and seriously into what I said.
There's actually some very interesting criticism of modern cognitive sciences, one of them contradicting the common idea that neural network based methods were inspired by a model of "how the brain worked". The criticism basically says that instead, we should be looking at the opposite, with modern cognitive science coming out at a time when computers were the technology de jour.
It builds off previous histories and theories of technology which debunk the notion of "neutral" technology. Humans are very much influenced and inspired by doing things because of the technology they have at-hand.
Great example is looking at the most common mechanical models of the human heart. The original models for the heart describe it as a system of "pumps" because it was designed right during the height of the end of the industrial revolution, when the technology at the time were big mechanical pumps and machinery. So, the abstract model of the heart as a pump was born and used, not because necessarily its an "accurate" model but mainly because the terminology made sense to people at the time. Nowadays this model is criticised for a lot of reasons.
Cognitive science suffers from a lot of assumptions which may have been indirectly influenced by computer science (afterall, you're a researcher coming in at a time when you have these powerful machines that could crunch data. Well surely then you'll need to model the brain in a binary and computer-readable format).
For someone correctly claiming we don't know how the brain works, you seem to have a remarkable trust in the brain-gut axis pop sci articles. It's always good to remember that much of the 'established' data in neuroscience (such as the A beta hypothesis) are very well within the possibility of being based on a decent amount of fraud, as has been shown recently.
Not to say all brain-gut axis data is irrelevant, but, as with almost all of biology, the effect sizes of observables anyone typically cares about are pretty small.
However, the visual system in rodents is probably the best data source we have that maps to any formal theory right now, along with temporal difference learning and RL in neuroscience.
This is why the Turing Test tried to abstract away everything other than the text of a conversation. Because ultimately the mechanism is going to be inscrutable, and it’s the output that counts.
> this isn't far off from how the human brain is believed to work
> No one knows how the brain works
You sound very hostile, but I think OP agrees with you.
And I'm not sure why you're trying to dunk on them here. Perhaps at a high level the approach is very similar, even if the mechanics are very different. Would you scoff at someone saying "the robot moved its arm" and say "Ha! Robots don't have muscles, and humans don't have batteries! It's totally different!"?
incidentally, this isn't far off from how the human brain is believed to work (at least with long term memories).
https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2012/09/your-memory-is...