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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

That's because increasingly complex code is increasingly hard for the coder to understand (& thus to modify without error). But em (and human) brains don't need to be understood in order to self-modify.

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Jon Bratseth's avatar

Our programs consists of code and data. The data may include e.g machine-learned models such as the weights and biases of neural nets. Data is not subject to code rot and a program with such data can continue to adapt to changing circumstances forever.

So is the brain more similar to our programs data or code? If it's more like code, and learning depends on pieces of the brain observing, abstracting, and then acting to modify other parts, then I agree it might rot (or it might not). But this seems to me a far-fetched model of learning in the brain.

It there is rot then we should be able to observe increased cross-talk between brain modules as the brain is occupied with specific tasks in older subjects. I haven't seen such a study but it could be done.

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