A scientist who mapped the roundworm’s brain jokes that he knows less now than before. Hey, the brain mappers know a lot but here’s the problem: A map is not the territory:
When it comes to a world more complex than cars, the gap between map and reality widens. That’s especially likely to be true of the human brain. But it turns out to be true even of a worm’s brain. Gilder recalls a personal conversation with a worm genome mapper,
“Only one biological connectome has been mapped in detail. That is the nervous system of a nematode, the millimeter-long roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, which comprises 300 neurons linked by 7,000 connections. Defining this connectome took ten years. Engaged in nematode neural research for four decades, from the Nobel labs of Sydney Brenner to his own explorations at the University of Wisconsin, Anthony Stretton sardonically observed: “And knowing the connectome does not answer the question of how the nematode brain actually works. In many ways, I ‘knew’ more about the nematode brain when I started than I do now.”
GEORGE GILDER, GAMING AI (P. 34)
Of course Stretton and other scientists have learned a great deal about C. elegans but, just as the map is not the territory, the research is not the subject. The division between information about a thing and the thing itself is fundamental so 1) the thing can change from the mapped information and 2) more information leads to more questions, not fewer.
News, “Maps are not territories and reality needn’t follow our rules” at Mind Matters News
You may also enjoy: Can we understand the brain the way we understand New York City? The “connectome” (a complete “wiring diagram” of the brain) is giving neuroscientists pause for thought