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Comment by mallowdram | Hacker News Reader

This is patently false.

"I’ll remind you that biologists do not, in the year 2025, know memory’s physical substrate in the brain! Plenty of hypotheses — no agreement. Is there any more central mystery in human biology, maybe even human existence?"

A hypothesis is very distinct from theoretical knowledge. A hypothesis lacks empirical evidence. A theory uses empirical information. That CS personnel are lacking both the scientific method and the ability to discern the current state of the art empirical research to disprove such wildly unsupported statements speaks to the field's total failure to develop present-day relevant tools. I would direct the author to two critical books

Evolution of Memory Systems

https://academic.oup.com/book/26033

How we remember: brain mechanisms of episodic memory

https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/2909/How-We-RememberB...

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If the author wrote the same sentence, but with "Plenty of theories -- no agreement", would you have an issue? I think the point works just as well.

"Theory" and "hypothesis" are pretty interchangeable in colloquial usage, and the post's tone is very colloquial. On top of that, there are things referred to as hypotheses that have empirical evidence, like the amyloid beta hypothesis. There is empirical evidence that supports it, but there is also evidence that doesn't, and it's an open question (depending on who you ask).

I don't think it shows that the author lacks the ability to discern state of the art research or is making wildly unsupported statements, I think they were using plain-English terms to describe a state where there's a lot of uncertainty about the physical mechanism as opposed to say, how a car engine works (which at a certain point relies on theories of physics, but they're theories that are almost universally agreed upon).

Theory and hypothesis are not interchangeable. Hypothesis precedes theory. Always. Had he said "theories" he would be saying something completely different. It's another stage of scientific process altogether. In order: Hypothesis, empirical observation, theory, demonstration, new theoretical stage or field.

The bizarre CS idea of using "plain English" as a propagandic thrust to infantilize complex scientific theory is suspect. Let's eschew the idea. "Plain English" is Orwellian dumbing down.

There is a general agreement which links ontogeny and phylogeny, details working memory, its relationship to the allocortex, and subsequent episodic memory. So the neural correlates have been worked out.

The working memory and episodic memory papers in the last few years have isolated the correlates, we a have a fairly empirical neurobiological description of memory function and process.

What we're lacking now are the molecular mechanisms.

> The working memory and episodic memory papers in the last few years have isolated the correlates, we a have a fairly empirical neurobiological description of memory function and process.

Would you kindly provide some references? I'm very interested in this research as an armchair enthusiast, but in my own reading I've yet to find anything this confident.

My favorite molecular mechanisms paper

https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-02...

In terms of NCC of memory, the papers beginning around the mid 2000s are seismic. The encoding and retrieval are subtly varied depending on the lab.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17425535/

Also the cohort studies are immensely helpful, dementia, Down's syndrome let us see the impairment.

Thank you very much, this is exactly the starting point I needed. I'll keep following the citations trail into more recent years, but your second link from 2007 reinforces my feeling that we're still very far from understanding the mechanisms:

> Second, within LIPC, we found a gradient in which a more dorsal-posterior region was involved in SR, a mid region was involved in both SR and EE, and a more ventral-anterior region was involved in EE, but only when SR was high.

To me, these are merely clues about how the high-level pieces fit together, and there's a long road to actually understanding the neural correlates of memory.

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