Yes, a chat could definitely be valuable. I’ll pm you.
I agree that connection costs definitely look like a real, modularity promoting effect. Leaving aside all the empirical evidence, I have some trouble imagining how it could plausibly not be. If you put a ceiling on how many connections there can be, the network has got to stick to the most necessary ones. And since some features of the world/input data are just more “interlinked” than others, it’s hard to see how the network wouldn’t be forced to reflect that in some capacity.
I just don’t think it’s the only modularity promoting effect.
Theory #4 appears very natural to me, especially in the light of papers like Chen et al 2006 or Cuntz et al 2012. And another supporting intuition from developmental neuroscience is that development is a huge mess and that figuring out where to put a long-range connection is really involved. And there can be a bunch of circuit remodeling on a local scale, once you established a long-range connection, there is little hope of substantially rewiring it.
In case you want to dive deeper into this (and you don’t want to read all those papers), I’d be happy to chat more about this :)
Yes, a chat could definitely be valuable. I’ll pm you.
I agree that connection costs definitely look like a real, modularity promoting effect. Leaving aside all the empirical evidence, I have some trouble imagining how it could plausibly not be. If you put a ceiling on how many connections there can be, the network has got to stick to the most necessary ones. And since some features of the world/input data are just more “interlinked” than others, it’s hard to see how the network wouldn’t be forced to reflect that in some capacity.
I just don’t think it’s the only modularity promoting effect.