Thanks for the recommendation! The pathways of scientific progress here seem very interesting (for example: physics → neuro → AI → … v. physics → AI → neuro → …), particularly if we think about feeding back between experimental and theoretical support to build up a general understanding. Physics is really good at fitting theories together in a mosaic—at a large scale you have a nice picture of the universe, and the tiles (theories) fit together but aren’t part of the same continuous picture, allowing for some separation between different regimes of validity. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it says something about physics’ ability to split the difference between reductionism and emergence. It would be nice to have a similar picture in neuroscience (and AI), though this might be more difficult.
Thanks for the recommendation! The pathways of scientific progress here seem very interesting (for example: physics → neuro → AI → … v. physics → AI → neuro → …), particularly if we think about feeding back between experimental and theoretical support to build up a general understanding. Physics is really good at fitting theories together in a mosaic—at a large scale you have a nice picture of the universe, and the tiles (theories) fit together but aren’t part of the same continuous picture, allowing for some separation between different regimes of validity. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it says something about physics’ ability to split the difference between reductionism and emergence. It would be nice to have a similar picture in neuroscience (and AI), though this might be more difficult.