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Comment by dicroce | Hacker News Reader

Do you know how your brain works? I mean, in detail. No you do not, and you cannot. Nothing can truly understand itself. Even if the brain is composed of higher level "computation units" and you can understand how those units are linked you still don't really how those black boxes work. Even if you understand how one of those black boxes work, you can't really know the details of how they all work because if you did you would need a second brain to hold it all.

So, its fine that we don't understand in detail what every artificial neuron firing means....

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Evidence? Hypothesis?

I’m personally tired of this ass backwards argument.

Of course it’s possible to understand how brains work. It’s called science. We (collectively) are well on our to understanding the biochemistry of neurons and brain structures.

Everything exists in the same universe and follows the same physical laws.

Agreed. Even if it's impossible for someone to understand all of it, it's possible for scientists to understand parts of it, make models, and use those models to understand more, and improve them. After many iterations you'll get a full working model than can be used to invent better brains than ours.

That we're so early in this cycle doesn't mean it's impossible.

Let me try to explain another way. Lets say your brain had 10 neurons... Well, then you certainly could understand it. What if it had 1000? Sure... You could probably handle that. Ok, but the human brain has 100 billion neurons. Where are you storing that knowledge?

The good news is that there is a lot of evidence that computation in the brain is more modular than that... It's not necessary to understand each neuron... Just like it's not necessary to understand each artificial neuron in a large nueral network.

I'm not entirely convinced of this argument myself, that it's impossible for us to "truly" understand how brains work .

However, I entirely agree with the sentiment: We don't necessarily understand brains now, but we don't dismiss their capabilities just because we can't explain precisely how they do what they do. By the same token, complex tools like deep learning shouldn't be dismissed just because we can't satisfactorily interpret them.

"Nothing can truly understand itself."

Recursion is a thing so it is not clear why this statement is self evident. Perhaps the word "truly" does some mysterious heavy lifting?

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