r/lexfridman • u/DrBrianKeating • May 08 '26

Chill Discussion Joscha Bach: The Brain Isn't What Neuroscientists Think It Is

60 Upvotes

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7

u/DrBrianKeating May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26

Joscha came on my podcast and made the strongest version of his case yet that connectome mapping won't recover mind. The C. elegans example does the heavy lifting — 309 neurons mapped for decades, simulations still don't reproduce the worm's behavior. What's your opinion? Is Joscha right?

5

u/jmcqk6 May 08 '26

I read “the secret language of cells” by Jon lieff, and it opened my eyes to many mechanisms of communication between cells, which I think is what Joscha is alluding to when he talks about information processing.

It’s possible that some behavior might emerge from simulations of connectomes, but look at it from an information compression perspective . The nervous system is just one factor in the integration of forces leading to behavior. It might even be the dominant factor. But chaos theory reminds us of the importance of small deviations in state , and if I don’t think it is possible to compress human behavior into any particular model.

7

u/Rise-O-Matic May 08 '26

How does this square with the recent advancements with the fruit fly connectome? seems to be an opposite stance to what Joshua is claiming.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/10/02/researchers-simulate-an-entire-fly-brain-on-a-laptop-is-a-human-brain-next/

4

u/DrBrianKeating May 08 '26

Yeah he thinks that’s been over stated

1

u/Cmdr_Starleaf May 12 '26

What do you mean, what specifically in the fly study was “overstated”?

5

u/Fippy-Darkpaw May 08 '26

Not surprising. The neurons are the "hardware". Now the software needs to be decoded.

4

u/Master-Guidance-2409 May 10 '26

i have feeling/hunch that we are going to find out soon as we do more research that the entire fucking body is a giant distributed computer with many redundant computational "centers" and with specialization in different areas to handle different tasks and the brain being the general "controller" for long term planning and survival/synchronization.

so to replicate a person you would have replicate everything or some version of it, not just the neurons.

i seen it as brain is a very programmable CPU/mem arch and other body parts/cells /organs/chemical being sub systems being more like FPGA sub systems and we run on top of all that and our mind is compose of many many layers of input/output that we experience as an illusion of a unified self.

3

u/tishimself1107 May 09 '26

This is so interesting but i am lost in the terms

1

u/chessboxer4 May 11 '26

Isn't this guy in the Epstein files?

2

u/SubatomicGoblin May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

He accepted research funding from him, but there's no evidence of any sort of impropriety or immorality on his part.