The “eye basis” of this neurological account seems somewhat of a throwback. Hubert and Weisel won a 1981 Nobel for finding single ocular cells mapped to single neurons. This spawned a huge attempt to identify feature detection neurons, one per feature. This wasn’t very successful; the field moved on to identify neural networks, complex patterns that emerge from different neural groups. Glimcher instead looks at mean firing rates, not patterns. It’s interesting that those rates correlate with utility hypothesis, but in science magnitude is not necessarily the most important evidence. Economic utility theory is a black box, without explicit mechanisms, only preference magnitudes. Glimcher’s research finds neuron groups with preference magnitudes. But there are still no rules, no instructions that monkeys or people get born with or learn that generate these levels. It’s simply reductive.
The “eye basis” of this neurological account seems somewhat of a throwback. Hubert and Weisel won a 1981 Nobel for finding single ocular cells mapped to single neurons. This spawned a huge attempt to identify feature detection neurons, one per feature. This wasn’t very successful; the field moved on to identify neural networks, complex patterns that emerge from different neural groups. Glimcher instead looks at mean firing rates, not patterns. It’s interesting that those rates correlate with utility hypothesis, but in science magnitude is not necessarily the most important evidence. Economic utility theory is a black box, without explicit mechanisms, only preference magnitudes. Glimcher’s research finds neuron groups with preference magnitudes. But there are still no rules, no instructions that monkeys or people get born with or learn that generate these levels. It’s simply reductive.