Dwarkesh Podcast: Adam Marblestone on the Brain

A detailed brain-wiring map could help researchers choose between theories of learning without immediately explaining intelligence. In Dwarkesh Patel's interview with researcher Adam Marblestone, Marblestone argues that a connectome, a map of neural connections, would impose many additional constraints on competing explanations of how the brain works.

For example, knowing whether connections between different brain regions follow the same pattern could narrow the architectures a theory must explain. Marblestone distinguishes that use from building a biological simulation, which would require further information and investigation. The proposed value of the map is to make theories answer to more anatomical evidence, rather than treating wiring alone as a recovered learning algorithm.

“I think evolution may have built a lot of complexity into the loss functions actually, many different loss functions for different areas turned on at different stages of development.”

Adam Marblestone

“The fact that we don’t have value functions at all in the LLMs is crazy. I think because Ilya said it, I can say it.”

Adam Marblestone

“The cortex doesn’t know about spiders, it just knows about layers.”

Adam Marblestone

“If every iPhone was also a brain scanner, you would not have this problem and we would be training AI with the brain signals.”

Adam Marblestone

“What I actually want to do is go and map the entire mouse brain and figure this out comprehensively and make neuroscience a ground-truth science.”

Adam Marblestone