Are Our Brains Really Configured for Unlimited Understanding?

Excellent piece by John Duncan:

"A neural network is composed of hundreds of millions of separate neurons, each incredibly small, yet often coding highly specific information in the electrical impulses it fires. Take the example of a toad noticing a worm. The toad responds with characteristic movements: it turns towards the worm, approaches, fixes its head in position and snaps its jaws.

Describing in detail how neurons make this happen, from the firing of a single neuron indicating the presence of the long, thin, wormlike object in one part of the visual field, right through to the integration of different kinds of information that will allow the toad to eat the worm, took three pages in my book - and that was an account for non-specialists.

At the same time, this also reveals how much is still missing, even in our explanation of this relatively simple case. We could not even begin to build an artificial neural network capable of mimicking the complexities of the toad's behaviour.

When it comes to the massively more complex mental ability of humans, we must also flip between what we are pretty sure about and what is eluding us. On the plus side, we are confident that the IRM of the stickleback or the toad has been replaced in humans by an almost entirely flexible structure that can focus on virtually any kind of problem - from daily functioning to abstract reasoning.

We can begin to see how these enclosures are assembled in the brain, providing the essentially human element of our intelligence. It is a partial picture, like an early map of the world: some countries are clearly drawn, others no more than a sketch, and still others simply labelled "unknown". But it is a picture that at last begins to realise Lashley's dream.

There are also, I suspect, countries we don't even know are missing. Our human brain has allowed us to understand the atom and probe the boundaries of the universe, but is it really configured for unlimited conceptualisation or understanding? Is just one species so very different from all the others? Or is it rather that, like all the others, we can imagine only so far as our own nervous system allows us?"