Abraham Samma🔬🔭 🇦🇺🇹🇿May 14, 2024

One mm³ of brain mapped. Reductionists 0, Nature 1

The 3D map covers a volume of about one cubic millimetre, one-millionth of a whole brain, and contains roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses — the connections between neurons. It incorporates a colossal 1.4 petabytes of data. “It’s a little bit humbling,” says Viren Jain, a neuroscientist at Google, and a co-author of the paper. “How are we ever going to really come to terms with all this complexity?”

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01387-9

#science

Cubic millimetre of brain mapped in spectacular detail

Google scientists have modelled a fragment of the human brain at nanoscale resolution, revealing cells with previously undiscovered features.

Show threadDavid Hoeffer
@abesamma how's that a defeat for reductionists?
May 14, 2024 at 3:38amWeb
Show threadAbraham Samma🔬🔭 🇦🇺🇹🇿May 14, 2024
@dhoe great question. This is more of me subtly ranting than anything. There is a tendency amongst knowledgeable people to hand wave the complexity of the brain and complex systems in general. They forget that there is such a thing as emergent phenomena that is more than the sum of the parts, and that these systems cannot be reliably understood well enough by naive modelling based on reductionist thinking. I call these people naive reductionists. That's what I mean by this.
Show threadAbraham Samma🔬🔭 🇦🇺🇹🇿May 14, 2024
@dhoe this effectively kills mind uploading in its crib as a concept so I suspect many folks don't want to believe that that is the case. They want to reduce the brain to a mere computer which is a more comforting idea as computers are more well understood than the human brain.