Yeah but we didn't need to fully understand how animal wings actually work, we just needed to understand what they do (generate lift). Similarly I don't understand the focus in this conversation on fully understanding the protein interactions that make neurons work. We just need to understand what neurons do. And I thought what they do is actually pretty simple due to the "all or nothing" principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-or-none_law
That’s pretty far from “when you do this, you get generalizable thought required for AGI”. The lyft equation said “this equation shows that when you do this, this object moves upward against the air”, which was the goal of flight- for AGI we have “when you do this, the loss goes down for this task”, we are missing so many pieces between that and the concept of AGI.
People think maybe the missing pieces might be in the other things we don’t understand about the brain. It makes sense- it does what we want, so the answer must be in there somehow. I agree we don’t need to perfectly understand it, it just seems like a good place to keep looking for those missing pieces.
