HTM theory being experiementally derived and verified from actual Neuroscience literature explain a lot of things happening in the Neo cortex like Sparsity , and blood regulation to selective parts of the brain.
But does it explain the Conscious bran and sub conscious brain ? This is recognized concept in Neuroscience that we have a conscious side of the brain that is the creative experience we feels all centered around us and then there is sub conscious brain which is the work horse of the brain during all the decision making with modalities putting together all the data that is needed for the conscious experience. Does HTM explain this ?
Nobody explains it. Neuroscience does some measurements on a (mostly) black box, if you give 50 years ago scientists a today’s laptop they will measure currents, voltages, look with microscopes at, etc… yet won’t be able to draw a full schematics of the thing nor explain how windows, browsers and spreadsheets do their “magic”.
edit: even current artificial neural networks (e.g. GPT-2) can’t be fully explained how they do what they do, despite full schematics and weights being disclosed.
Some say any theory of consciousness is intrinsically problematic because it cannot be falsified or haven’t yet found a methodology to falsify it.
We formally describe the standard experimental setup for testing these theories. Based on a theory’s application to some physical system, such as the brain, testing requires comparing a theory’s predicted experience (given some internal observables of the system like brain imaging data) with an inferred experience (using report or behavior). If there is a mismatch between inference and prediction, a theory is falsified. We show that if inference and prediction are independent, it follows that any minimally informative theory of consciousness is automatically falsified. This is deeply problematic since the field’s reliance on report or behavior to infer conscious experiences implies such independence, so this fragility affects many contemporary theories of consciousness
In 50 years time they will be looking back and wondering why on earth GPT-x was viewed as so good… I can just imagine the exchange : “very basic, minimal and so overly complicated”