A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

Re:A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain ... by mrtksn on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @04:01PM (#27753523)

It sounds like they depend on the smoke test, doesn't it? Despite the huge advancements in biological sciences, when I get interested in something and read about it I would encounter the "We don't know why exactly it works but it works" much more often than I am used to. It feels so wrong.

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Re:A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain ... by meepmorp on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @04:06PM (#27753581)

Life follows a simple set of rules with an extensive set of exceptions.

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Re:A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain ... by wallacoloo on Tuesday July 06, 2021 @04:38PM (#27753920)

Nitpicking here, I would tweak the wording:

> Life follows a simple set of heuristics with an extensive set of exceptions.

And that's OK: heuristics allow a person to intuit some high-level behavior without having to derive it from the lower-level rules (laws). It's readily admitted that the heuristic isn't 100% accurate, and when it's inaccurate you fall back to that explicit derivation process.

From the outsider view of biology, there appear to be many heuristics for which we don't know how to derive from the underlying laws. Chemistry, at various points in time, has had similar issues, but over time we've expanded the amount of things we can derive from underlying physics. Biology, I hope, will follow in time.

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