For cognitive computing, you will need to know precisely how the brain is wired together, down to the single neuron level. I know a few people, like Henry Markram, believe you can forward engineer the brain, but I don’t agree with him on this, and I don’t want to go into the reasons. Let’s just accept that you need to know precisely how the brain is wired together, before you can even think about simulating brain networks and cognitive computing.

Modha is using a public database, called CoCoMac, of monkey (macaque) connectivity that has been around for over a decade. It consists primarily of cortico-cortical connectivity, but also recently added thalamic and striatal connections. CoCoMac is a very coarse resolution database of connectivity, and it is very incomplete. This is a big problem for Bodha, because if the connectivity information that he is relying on is flawed, then his study and any analysis he does on the data is flawed. I am stating, unequivocably, that the connectivity data in CoCoMac is deeply flawed, on many different levels, which I can discuss further if need be. But let’s move on.

It follows that any analysis Bodha does using this connectivity is flawed. That is my primary objection to the paper.

My second objection is that I don’t see any contribution that he makes in the paper, to either cognitive computing, or anything else for that matter. But amazingly, Bodha makes the following statement in his blog:
1) “We have successfully uncovered and mapped the most comprehensive long-distance network of the Macaque monkey brain”

and in the discussion section of the paper, he states:
2) “We have collated a comprehensive, consistent, concise, coherent, and colossal network spanning the entire brain”

Both of these statements are absurd and blatantly false. In 1), he did not map anything. He used a literature collation (CoCoMac) that someone else came up with, based on other people’s mappings. And in 2), he is stating that he, himself, did the collation, which is false. Rolf Kotter, the developer behind CoCoMac, did the collation, not Bodha. And 2) is also wrong because the network does not span the entire brain. Not even close.

Bodha is lucky I wasn’t one of the reviewers for this paper. I’m really amazed that some of the nonsense statements he made in the paper got past peer review. The only novel contribution you can argue for, that this paper makes, is the maximum entropy exponential distribution of the connectivity, but even this loses its significance in the light of my primary objection above.

As far as the relation of this paper to cognitive computing, there is none I can see, in light of the points above. IF the analysis of degree distributions in the network was based on reliable and meaningful connectivity data, then that would have been a legitimate contribution. However, that still would not be significant because anyone studying biological networks knows that degree distributions, in and of themselves, tell you very little about the network. And analyzing degree distributions is the primary analysis of the paper.

Note the last sentence in the paper:
“This hints at an evolutionarily preserved core circuit of the brain that may be a key to the age-old question of how the mind arises from the brain.”
Truly idiotic.

In what way do the recent advances in Photosynthesis show that quantum effects contribute to “Consciousness” (I am aware of the quantum-walk nature of electron paths to which you are referring in Photosynthesis, so no need to repeat it all)?

I have no doubt that there are quantum processes operating within the brain. I can even see that neural pathways might be selected in the same way that the path of an electron is selected through a channel in photosynthesis.

But, I don’t see how this process would mean that quantum processes were necessary for the formation of a consciousness (how I hate that word too). It just means that without some form of quantum process, a different method of passing data between brain regions (or their simulations) would be needed…

Of course, I am incredibly ignorant of most things to do with Hameroff and Penrose. I got to see Hameroff speak at one of the “Beyond Belief” conferences a few years ago at UCSD, and I was not impressed with the answers he gave during the Q&A (Especially the questions from Sam Harris, a real neuroscientist, and not an anesthesiologist – sorry, but I don’t think his “qualifications” give him the knowledge he claims, and in that talk, he certainly failed to live up to the claims of knowledge)… But, then… ignorant… me, etc…

MB