logoalt Hacker News

jeffybefffy519today at 9:38 AM4 repliesview on HN

Isnt there also a theory and some evidence that the connectome is not enough to model a brain. Based on the fact that butterlies connectome dissolves during metamorphosis to butterfly but it still remembers things from before that stage of life.


Replies

inigyoutoday at 12:29 PM

Butterflies dissolving is an urban legend. They don't dissolve. Caterpillars have wing stubs inside them.

Someone probably cut open a chrysalis and saw goop come out, so they assumed it was just a bag of goop. But goop would also come out of a cut open caterpillar, or a cut open butterfly, or a cut open human.

ben_wtoday at 11:13 AM

That says the butterflies have a back up mechanism, it doesn't say that connectomes are insufficient for modelling running neural processes.

We don't actually know what is sufficient for modelling neural processes until we do it. But we can't really do that until we figure out how to read all the connection strengths.

melagonstertoday at 12:16 PM

We also have the connectome of Nematode (Caenorhabditis elegans), but researchers lack funding to determine the weights, too.

ACCount37today at 11:32 AM

No, the nervous system is one of those things that don't fully dissolve. Partial info retention is perfectly consistent with partial connectome retention.