6000 years ago they had dudes (whole tribes, actually!) who practiced ritual trepanation for reasons unknown to us.
This "mapping the human brain" is no different and no more scientific.
The human brain is an information processing machine, and the science of information and its structure was discovered less than 100 years ago.
We don't even have a name yet for this science!
And our baby steps in this scientific field are nowhere close to beginning to study the brain. To use an analogy, we discovered how to make paper airplanes, but that gets us no closer to building a supersonic jetliner.
> 6000 years ago they had dudes (whole tribes, actually!) who practiced ritual trepanation for reasons unknown to us.
I'd thought it was established it was done for medical reasons - people realized that it sometimes helps with conditions nothing else helps with. Arguably most of the things humanity did until the last few hundred years was based on empirical correlations and stores to help remember them (but lacking predictive power). It's only recently that we've developed proper theoretical understanding of most things we do, in form of specific, tested theorems with lots of predictive power.
> This "mapping the human brain" is no different and no more scientific.
It is different because nowadays we do have proper science - and more importantly, we know how proper science looks like. So even if we still know very little, we at least know what can and what cannot be done with that knowledge.
> (...) the science of information and its structure was discovered less than 100 years ago.
> We don't even have a name yet for this science!
Isn't that just "information theory"?
> To use an analogy, we discovered how to make paper airplanes, but that gets us no closer to building a supersonic jetliner.
IMO that would be a good analogy for the clockwork age. Today, we not only know how to make paper airplanes, but more importantly, we can imagine a supersonic jetliner being a thing, we have justified confidence that there's a path from here to being able to build one, and that studying the phenomena behind the flight of a paper airplane are important steps towards building a supersonic jetliner.
We do know the components of the brain. "Hypocampus", "Prefrontal cortex", etc. The AIBS is studying how these regions map down to the individual elements (neurons, peptides, chemical transports etc).
You're discounting a significant amount of experimental science that is really going on right now. I don't understand why.
That's like saying we know the components of an airplane - there is the "hard shiny bit", "the bottom rubbery bits" and the "rotator thingys".
Decomposing the brain into groups of biological clumps of cells tells us literally nothing about how the brain as an information system works.
When we want to study the brain, we do so because we want to understand its information structure and build information processing models. The biochemistry of the wetware is irrelevant, except insofar as it might help us formulate an "information science".
Here we are no closer to the goal than 6000 years ago.
But we do. Check out the research into how our visual system works, or how spatial orientation works in mice. There's been quite a lot of puzzle pieces identified over the last decades. For some of those, we have good theoretical models that can make testable predictions.
We're far from having all the puzzle pieces, and even further from fitting them together. But what we already have and the progress that's happening are both reassuring.
I don't agree.
We have some very interesting ad-hoc empirical observations, but no theory.
We're not even in "alchemy" territory here yet, we're still in the "randomly mix colored rocks and see what comes about" phase, to use an analogy from how chemistry developed.
This "mapping the human brain" is no different and no more scientific.
The human brain is an information processing machine, and the science of information and its structure was discovered less than 100 years ago.
We don't even have a name yet for this science!
And our baby steps in this scientific field are nowhere close to beginning to study the brain. To use an analogy, we discovered how to make paper airplanes, but that gets us no closer to building a supersonic jetliner.