What if neurons are only the surface of intelligence? Joscha Bach thinks neuroscience is still missing where most brain computation happens
TLDR: According to Joscha, neuroscience is discovering more and more ways intelligence could be "stored" inside a network, and the electric signals sent between neurons could only be one part of the story. Recent evidence? Glial cells.
---
➤The Current Understanding
In this day and age, the fundamental structure of the brain is very well known. There are neurons, exchanging information through synaptic signals, and the whole system is known as a network.
Each neuron picks up on patterns of reality, and shares them with the other ones in order to allow us to build a complete model of the world, which is then constantly updated in accordance with new information provided by our senses.
As our model of the world changes in real time, the invariants i.e. the knowledge that remains constant get crystallized and baked into the connections between neurons (known as "weights"). This is long-term memory.
➤Are We Too Obsessed With Neurons?
Here is the problem: most contributions to the field have always centered around either the immediate information exchange (the firing patterns) or the more durable long-term neural connections. The other fundamental parts of the brain have largely been ignored.
But what if there was more to intelligence than those electric signals exchanged between neurons? Or if traditional neurons themselves were only one part of the story?
➤The Evidence
Joscha Bach bases his claim on 4 reasons:
1- Neuroscience has recently discovered new roles for glial cells, which unlike what was previously assumed, do play an important part in information processing
2- Recent studies have suggested that RNA could be an overlooked support for memory
3- We essentially recreated a worm brain in a computer and we still don't get anything close to worm-like behaviour
4- While transforming into a butterfly, the caterpillar’s nervous system is almost completely dissolved and totally reorganized in a way that the structure of the network (the neurons, firing patterns, and interconnections) seems largely destroyed. Yet the butterfly still remembers many learned behaviors from its childhood as a caterpillar.
It is hard to see how its memory or intelligence could come entirely from the traditional view of neural nets when such a network has essentially been wiped out.
➤How Big Such a Hypothesis Could Be
Joscha Bach compares the electric signals exchanged between our neurons to the antennas used by our civilization: they help us share information over long distances but intercepting those signals wouldn't allow an alien to understand human civilization. They would be missing the real source of information: nature and actual humans, which is far more significant.
What do you think?
---
OPINION
I think Joscha points out something truly fascinating here: the possibility that we may not have even fully mapped out all the important components of the brain yet. If intelligence is also hidden inside the neural cells, then all bets are off. But I personally remain skeptical that the things happening outside of the traditional network, or even inside (through the RNA) are that essential (Adam Marblestone explains why here)
Btw this would contradict Adam and his connectome project (to map out all the neural circuits of the human brain) so I kinda hope Joscha is wrong lol
SOURCE