How little do we know about Biology and Neuroscience

Marco Palombi

Jan 1, 2011 — 1 min read

I spent the Christmas Holidays in Naples with my parents. A few days after the traditional family meetings were over, I organized a lunch with friends (and friends of friends) with backgrounds in Engineering, Computer Science and Complex Systems. Some of them are teaching in Italy and the US, others have start-up companies. This kind of lunch is good to exchange ideas and get up to date with what they have been doing.

Among other things, we discussed about biology and complex systems, and the lack of understanding we have about how biology and complex systems should be modeled. We smiled about Engineers trying to model cells (or what happens inside a cell) with differential equations, just because they know how to use them!

All this reminds me of a discussion I had with Tony Bell, about two years ago in Sardinia at a Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop organized by ETH Zurich. I found a lecture, recorded a few days ago in Berkeley, where Tony tries to convey a sense of how little do we know about Biology, Neuroscience and what we call complex systems. I agree that we do not have the mathematical tools to model Biology yet, and that the traditional horizontal approach is doomed to fail.

Kudos to Charlie Stross who summarizes all this nicely in his year ending post:

There's been enormous progress in genomics; we're now on the threshold of truly understanding how little we understand. While the anticipated firehose of genome-based treatments hasn't materialized, we now know why it hasn't materialized, and it's possible to start filling in the gaps in the map. Turns out that sequencing the human genome was merely the start. (It's not a blueprint; it's not even an algorithm for generating a human being. Rather, it's like a snapshot of the static data structures embedded in an executing process. Debug that.)

To the above I would add that the static data structure embedded in the executing process could be a piece of cake compared to the complexity of biology, which is not based on the Turing machine abstraction.

A much needed update

The truth is, I've been busy with a significant breakthrough: the first implementation of a Geneosophic expression. Specifically, I've been working on the conceptual expression of a neuron, which can be verified in the third person and executed on a computer.

What is Life?

This article suggests that the scientific community is far from reaching a consensus. While I concur with the premise that our current paradigm falls short in answering this question, I part ways with the view that we are at the beginning of our journey. In fact, we have developed Geneosophy,

A new conceptual dimension

Today, I was having a conversation with one of the individuals I collaborate with on Geneosophy. As is often the case, I asked him if we haven't collectively lost our minds with Geneosophy. This question arises because when you delve into Geneosophic comprehension, you enter a realm where

The Curse of Meaning in ChatGPT

This is an unusually long post, but also quite interesting in my humble opinion. Given the extraordinary success of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, how should their capabilities be evaluated? Will LLMs eventually replace humans in their jobs, or will they primarily serve as productivity tools, similar to

Read more

A much needed update

What is Life?

A new conceptual dimension

The Curse of Meaning in ChatGPT