Jonas & Kording showed that neuroscience methods couldn't reverse-engineer a simple 6502 processor [0]. If the tools can't crack a system we built and fully documented, our inability to simulate brains just means we're ignorant, not that substrate is magic. It also doesn't necessarily say great things for neuroscience!

And "who said this?"... come on. Searle, Dreyfus, thirty years of "syntax isn't semantics," all the hand-wringing about how machines can't really understand because they lack intentionality. Now systems pass those benchmarks and suddenly it's "well nobody serious ever thought that mattered." This is the third? fourth? tenth? round of goalpost-moving while pretending the previous positions never existed.

Pointing at "multidimensional electrochemical complexity" is just phlogiston with better vocabulary. Name something specific transformers can't do?

[0] https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

> If the tools can't crack a system we built and fully documented, our inability to simulate brains just means we're ignorant, not that substrate is magic

Nobody said the substrate is magic. Just that it isn't understood. Plenty of CS folks have also been trying to simulate a brain. We haven't figured it out. The same logic that tells you the neuroscientific model is broken at some level should inform that the brains-as-computers model is similarly deficient.

> Pointing at "multidimensional electrochemical complexity" is just phlogiston with better vocabulary

Sorry, have you figured out how to simulate a brain?

Multidimensional because you have more than one signalling chemical. Electrochemical because you can't just watch what the electrons are doing.

> Name something specific transformers can't do?

That what can't do. A neuron? A neurotransmitter-receptor system? We literally can't simulate these systems beyond toy models. We don't even know what the essential parts are--can you safely lump together N neutransmitter molecules? What's N? We're still discovering new ion channels?!

> just phlogiston with better vocabulary

So, a decent approximation that only turned out to be wrong when we looked closely and found the mass flow was in the opposite direction, but otherwise the model basically worked?

That would be fantastic!

So everyone in neuroscience is ignorant but not you?

I'm curious what you think understanding means.

I personally do not think operational proficiency and understanding are equivalent.

I can do many things in life pretty well without understanding them. The phenomenon of understanding seems distinct from the phenomenon of doing something/acting proficiently.