Great thread from @michaelhendricks.bsky.social! Reminds me of something Larry Abbott once said to me at a summer school: Many physicists come into neuroscience assuming that the failure to find laws of the brain was just because biologists aren't clever enough. In fact, there are no laws. 🧠📈 🧪 - ThreadSky

tyrellturing.bsky.social • 129 days ago

Great thread from @michaelhendricks.bsky.social!

Reminds me of something Larry Abbott once said to me at a summer school:

Many physicists come into neuroscience assuming that the failure to find laws of the brain was just because biologists aren't clever enough. In fact, there are no laws.

🧠📈 🧪

Reposted from Michael Hendricks 🇨🇦

I came across a quote in an article, which I will paraphrase: the ultimate goal of neuroscience is to model the brain and derive laws that define the brain’s computational abilities. Statements like this are common and presented as self-evident, but I think they are wrong.

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bakerblue.bsky.social•129 days ago

📌

matttkk.bsky.social•127 days ago

amen

janellebelle.bsky.social•129 days ago

Would something like the Free Energy Principle qualify as a neuro law?

tyrellturing.bsky.social•128 days ago

No, because it's not an empirical claim that can be falsified, really. Rather, it's a framework for re-interpretting data (one that I don't think is super useful, TBH...)

janellebelle.bsky.social•127 days ago

I had to think about this. I'm not sure I agree. It can be argued that the FEP likely does qualify as a neuroscientific law because of: (1) Falsifiability--it is based on mathematical models that make testable predictions about how the brain processes information and maintains its internal states

janellebelle.bsky.social•127 days ago

which can be empirically tested and therefore potentially falsified through experiments, (2) Predictive power--FEP has been successful in explaining a range of phenomena in neuroscience including sensory perception and motor action, and other adaptive behaviors. Therefore by providing

janellebelle.bsky.social•127 days ago

a unifying explanation for different phenomena it may capture a fundamental principle of brain function, (3) Empirical support--there's now plenty of evidence in vitro & in vivo supporting the FEP's core tenets that neural systems minimize prediction errors and

janellebelle.bsky.social•127 days ago

maintain their internal states within a limited range, and (4) Integration with other theories--it integrates with other established theories in neuroscience, such as Bayesian (active) inference and predictive coding. Therefore it's giving a coherent and consistent framework for

saiprasanna.in•121 days ago

I have been thinking about what intrinsic motivation objectives and ActInf. While minimising free energy results in reward maximization, explict information gain objective both state info gain and bayesian param info gain, it doesn't lead to intrinsic motivation objective like empowerment!

saiprasanna.in•121 days ago

One can always wrap any objective into agent's prior preference (or shudder "reward func") but that's tautological. Directly aiming at empowerment has computational realizability.

saiprasanna.in•121 days ago

Similar to how ActInf people criticise "reward is enough" hypothesis saying what about exploration, one could criticise ActInf by saying what about empowerment 🤔

taylorwwebb.bsky.social•9 days ago

What about something like this? https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.3629243 surely there are laws governing information processing systems in general, if not brains specifically? But I can see how these may not be practically relevant for some goals like understanding neurological disease.

tyrellturing.bsky.social•9 days ago

My guess is that anything like this, as in any life sciences endeavour, will end up being a "soft law".

What I mean by that is we may find it applies to 95% of observed phenomena, but there will always edge cases which prove it to not be a "law" in the sense of, e.g. the laws of thermodynamics.

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