alt Hacker NewsPeople really overstate the relationship between ANNs and the brain, they have very different mechanisms and only have a similarity if you squint at 100000 feet. ANNs don't have neurotransmitters or even action potentials.
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While I agree with this statement, one could argue that what's important is not much the support but the emergent properties - in the same way that a wave is still a wave whether it is in the water or in the air.
Thus putting things similar to neurons in a network and making them able to learn could create behaviors similar to the brain. The fact that that biology used chemistry + electrical signal and computers use ReLU-like activation could be merely choosing the most efficient way to enable training.
Correct. Worst of all, even if you do build a spiking neural network, the update rule is kind of a mystery. To have a good update rule, a biological neuron needs to be kind of like a tiny computer in its own right. You might be able to model synapses as weights between neurons, but the neuron carries further internal states within in itself and how the "update rule" uses those internal states is not known at all.
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But neurotransmitters and action potentials don't help in modeling symbolic structure.
That is, yes, ANNs are not brains. There are countless differences. But are there differences at the computational level? ANNs are meant to model brain computation, not brain biology.
(There is still a lot to debate there, I'm not saying "ANNs are perfect computational models for the brain")