All of tcstewar's Comments + Replies

Yup, I'd say that's a fair way of expressing it, although I think we take "neural substrate that is structurally similar to the human brain" much more seriously than other people that use phrases like that. It's a similar enough substrate that if fixes a lot of our parameter values for us, leaving us less open to "fiddle with parameters until it works".

We've also tried to make sure to highlight that it can't learn new tasks, so it's not able to work in the fluid domains people do. It also doesn't have any intrinsic motivation to do th... (read more)

Hi, it's Terry again (one of the researchers on the project)

The interesting thing (for me) isn't that it can shift from task to task, but that it can shift from task to task just like the human brain. In other words, we're showing how a realistic neural system can shift between tasks. That's something that's not found in other neural models, where you tend to either have it do one task or you have external (non-neural) systems modify the model for different tasks. We're showing a way of doing that selecting routing and control in an entirely neural way ... (read more)

Hi, I'm Terry Stewart, one of the researchers on the project.

I like the roadmap, and it seems to be the right way to go if the goal is to emulate a particular person's brain. However, our whole goal is to understand the human brain, so we want to reach for whole-system understanding, which is exactly what the WBE approach doesn't need.

I believe that the approach we are taking is a novel method for understanding the human brain that has a reasonable chance of producing results faster than the pure WBE approach (or, at the very least, the advances in unde... (read more)

Hi, I'm Terry Stewart, one of the researchers on the project, and I'm also a regular reader of Less Wrong. I think LW is the most interesting new development in applied cognitive science, and I'm loving seeing what comes out of it.

I'd definitely be up for answering questions, or going into more detail about some of the stuff in the reddit discussion. I'll go through any questions that show up here as a start...