[atarian]

it’s amazing to me how we’re still discovering new pieces of the human body every year. you would have thought by now we’d have discovered everything

[bbor]

To paraphrase the great Noam Chomsky: cognitive science is in a pre-Gallilean stage.

Many thousands of incredible scientists have done amazing work over the past ~century, but cutting-edge neuroscience still doesn't have the conceptual tools to go much farther than "when you look at apples this part of your cortex is more active, so we'll call this the Apple Zone".

Sadly/happily, I personally think there's good reason to think that this will change in our lifetime, which mean's we can all find out if trading the medicalization of mental health treatment (i.e. progressing beyond symptom-based guess-and-check) for governmental access to actual lie detecting helmets (i.e. dystopia) is worth it...

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

There's a new theory that we might actually gain a greater understanding of the human mind by studying the AI systems we create, because we can basically get a perfect X-ray of their neural nets at any particular state.

When we look at the "apple zone" part of an AI model that lights up, we see it in way higher resolution than our best scans of the human brain, and this might tell us something about how apples are perceived by both systems, or how language is represented neurally, or any number of other things.

[Sniffnoy]

An interesting post I read recently about why we haven't: https://svpow.com/2024/09/07/were-not-going-to-run-out-of-ne...

Of course, that's specifically about human anatomy. In this case we're talking about a feature that I'd bet is present in other animals too, so the factors discussed here don't all apply. In this case though there seems to be a straightforward answer -- the structures involved are very small! The post I linked is largely talking about larger structures we failed to find...

[b800h]

Science teachers in schools and TV documentaries play a large part in driving this perception.

[fsloth]

Yup. You teach only 1/4th of the Rumsfeld matrix (known knowns). And TV shows are there for a good story, not philosophy of knowledge.

[thinkingtoilet]

Find me one science teacher who says that we literally know everything about the human body there is to know. Just one.

The amount of anti-education/anti-school rhetoric on HN these days is worrying.

[stronglikedan]

> by now we’d have discovered everything

Until we both discover everything down to the Planck length, and then prove somehow that the Planck length is truly the smallest "unit", then we have not discovered everything. And we have probably hardly discovered anything, relatively.

[VagabundoP]

The one thing we're discovering is how little we've discovered.

[vmilner]

I always think about this when alien technology gets reverse-engineered in a remarkably short time in SF novels.

[fragmede]

Given that we're basically in the stone age still as far as the brain is concerned, we've got a long long way before that could be remotely true.

[copperx]

But we said the same about GenAI.

[therein]

>you would have thought by now we’d have discovered everything

I genuinely wouldn't.