Re:The brain as a universal learning machine (2015)
by marginalia_nu on Saturday October 30, 2021 @05:27AM
(#29047338)
I don't really have an opinion on the subject, but I do think this argument you are making isn't all too convincing.
Hypothetical scenario: Imagine if we hadn't discovered the medium of air. Yet we have discovered that putting a sail on a boat makes it randomly push the boat forward. In that case, we could explain the mechanics of the sail with simple spring models, we would observe how the sail is perturbed as it accelerates, we could see that it's made out of atoms and see how those atoms build molecules which build threads which make a fabric, we could even convincingly model the fabric in computers, yet it would tell us very little about why the boat is animated by the sail.
Hypothetical scenario: Imagine if we hadn't discovered the medium of air. Yet we have discovered that putting a sail on a boat makes it randomly push the boat forward. In that case, we could explain the mechanics of the sail with simple spring models, we would observe how the sail is perturbed as it accelerates, we could see that it's made out of atoms and see how those atoms build molecules which build threads which make a fabric, we could even convincingly model the fabric in computers, yet it would tell us very little about why the boat is animated by the sail.