I appreciate the open source approach over the startup's sensational claims. This is more transparent.
That said, I think it still presents itself as if the fly is being controlled by the connectome, when (if I'm reading the source correctly) it's more accurate to say scripted behaviors have been hooked up to be triggered by the connectome.
Put another way, you might as well have the "escape" trigger open a YouTube video of a fly flying away. That would probably be less misleading too.
I would argue that this is pretty disingenuous (as is most connectomics research I suppose) since its implying we have a fully wired connectome of the fly thats actually meaningful.
More than that, real neurons don’t behave anything like the ones we model in neural networks - real ones signal with pulses, in a manner where the timing seems as significant as the magnitude of the impulse. Typically simulated neural networks use continuous analog values instead of pulses and a sigmoid function to shape the output.
Basically, the “wiring” might be the same but nothing beyond that is.
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Actually, I may have spoken too soon. Looking over the code this does look like it implements spikey activation, which is more similar to living neurons. You are correct they don’t have the original weights though - in as much as the concept maps to biology.
I am curious if this has a way to dynamically modify the weights as it runs - I consider that a major missing gap between real brains and computer simulated neural networks.
I feel like probably a graph of sigmoid or whatever weights of sufficient size can probably model a network of biological neurons signaling frequency and phase and magnitude.
Isnt there also a theory and some evidence that the connectome is not enough to model a brain. Based on the fact that butterlies connectome dissolves during metamorphosis to butterfly but it still remembers things from before that stage of life.
Butterflies dissolving is an urban legend. They don't dissolve. Caterpillars have wing stubs inside them.
Someone probably cut open a chrysalis and saw goop come out, so they assumed it was just a bag of goop. But goop would also come out of a cut open caterpillar, or a cut open butterfly, or a cut open human.
They do kind of dissolve; we have better imaging now and can watch.
What isn't true is that it completely dissolves. There are parts that don't and are part of the rescaffolding process. One of those bits that does not completely dissolve is a chunk of the brain; it is probably via this that memory persists through the metamorphosis.
Wing stubs are present from the beginning as well as you noted.
That says the butterflies have a back up mechanism, it doesn't say that connectomes are insufficient for modelling running neural processes.
We don't actually know what is sufficient for modelling neural processes until we do it. But we can't really do that until we figure out how to read all the connection strengths.
No, the nervous system is one of those things that don't fully dissolve. Partial info retention is perfectly consistent with partial connectome retention.
cursor input get scripted into loom input to the LC4s which are evidently simulated faithfully enough to drive giant fibers, which is actually how fly escape behavior works. what more could you want
That said, I think it still presents itself as if the fly is being controlled by the connectome, when (if I'm reading the source correctly) it's more accurate to say scripted behaviors have been hooked up to be triggered by the connectome.
Put another way, you might as well have the "escape" trigger open a YouTube video of a fly flying away. That would probably be less misleading too.