Neuroscience basics for LessWrongians
The origins of this article are in my partial transcript of the live June 2011 debate between Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky. While I still feel like I don’t entirely understand his arguments, a few of his comments about neuroscience made me strongly go, “no, that’s not right.”
Furthermore, I’ve noticed that while LessWrong in general seems to be very strong on the psychological or “black box” side of cognitive science, there isn’t as much discussion of neuroscience here. This is somewhat understandable. Our current understanding of neuroscience is frustratingly incomplete, and too much journalism on neuroscience is sensationalistic nonsense. However, I think what we do know is worth knowing. (And part of what makes much neuroscience journalism annoying is that it makes a big deal out of things that are totally unsurprising, given what we already know.)
My qualifications to do this: while my degrees are in philosophy, for awhile in undergrad I was a neuroscience major, and ended up taking quite a bit of neuroscience as a result. This means I can assure you that most of what I say here is standard neuroscience which could be found in an introductory textbook like Nichols, Martin, Wallace, & Fuchs’ From Neuron to Brain (one of the text books I used as an undergraduate). The only things that might not be totally standard are the conjecture I make about how complex currently-poorly-understood areas of the brain are likely to be, and also some of the points I make in criticism of Eliezer at the end (though I believe these are not a very big jump from current textbook neuroscience.)
One of the main themes of this article will be specialization within the brain. In particular, we know that the brain is divided into specialized areas at the macro level, and we understand some (though not very much) of the micro-level wiring that supports this specialization. It seems likely that each region of the brain has its own micro-level wiring to support its specialized function, and in some regions the wiring is likely to be quite complex.
Um...where’s the article? The above reads like it’s meant to be the part before the summary break.
ETA: Article now gone—I guess submitted by accident. I hope to see the full article eventually.
Interesting. I’ve been thinking about (internally commited, but have yet to actually start) a summary/intro post about computational neuroscience for LW. Lukeprog has an article summarizing cognitive science already, but comp neurosci is quite different. I’m most interested in summarizing the set of ideas that are highly relevant to current AGI designs, rather than all of comp neurosci, so this may end up being quite different than what you are proposing. Or perhaps not, and perhaps we would be (somewhat) competing!
A potential viewpoint difference:
Yes, there are specialized macro areas in adult brains. The more interesting question is how this specialization develops as a result of learning, because we also know that it is clearly not genetically pre-programmed in. In short, the cortex in particular appears to mainly use the same circuit everywhere, and all the various functionalities come out of local specialized wiring/synaptic adaptations that hint at powerful universal learning algorithms.