Would you say to someone they really don't understand what is happening in an Internal Combustion Engine, thus the manual/schematics to their Car is completely pointless. Wont help them understand things at all.
"You dweeb, it is completely pointless, but here is a manual and blue-print for your car, but you just wont understand it until you can solve for the fluid turbulence in the cylinder. Man, why are they even trying"
Obviously I'm equating "power" with comprehensibility. and that's probaly not completely valid. But I wonder if theres some truth in it.
Also we can use abstraction to understand complex things, but brains seeem to be a mess of evolutionary shortcuts and cludges that I'm not sure how far abstraction gets us.
Just musings.
I would rather say that the claim that new brain atlases will unlock the secrets of the human mind is just as pretentious as the claim that the James Webb Telescope will unlock the secrets of what happens beyond the observable universe. I don't believe the mind problem is unsolvable but also I don't believe we have some crucial data missing. I believe we have collected too much noise and new data makes the situation worse in some sense.
>" beyond the observable universe."
Equating understanding something that is actually physically impossible, to understanding something that is physically right in front of us? We can map brains, dissect them, model them.
It's engineering.
If we followed these arguments, then ancient man would have just thrown up their hands "what, everything is composed of little particles, you're crazy, it's beyond our understanding, stop trying".
Maybe the magazine used some hyperbole in the title of an article, that doesn't mean this isn't doable or that this isn't valuable step.
But - you do say, it isn't unsolvable. SO maybe we are agreeing in general, but not about the way articles hype things up.
Seeing beyond the observable radius is indeed impossible but getting through the tremendous amount of data is next to impossible. I believe this is a content for neurosurgeons but not for AI world.