This is a message I received in private conversation by someone who I trust reasonably highly in terms of general epistemics. I’m reposting it here because it goes against the general “vibe” of the EAF and it’s good to get well-informed contrarian opinions.
I used to be very very sceptical of their work (a lot of red flags for ‘woo’, including lack of positive evidence and being so confusingly/indirectly expressed as to be difficult to even evaluate).Then I read their 2019 neural annealing work (https://opentheory.net/2019/11/neural-annealing-toward-a-neural-theory-of-everything/) and found that it did seem to make some sense and seemed to generate some specific novel predictions. But, as I commented at the time, the things that seemed sensible and useful were almost all related to predictive processing, not their core STV theory and the connection to the major novel parts of their theory seemed unclear.Their responses in the Forum thread were a large negative update for a variety of reasons, but largely because they seemed unable or unwilling to spell out core parts of their theory.Their responses seemed fairly inexplicably bad to me though, because it seemed like there were many cases where (even based on my very slight knowledge of their theory) they could have given much more convincing responses rather than be super evasive or waffly.For example, if they had given the response that they gave in one of the final comments in the discussion, right at the beginning (assuming Abby would have responded similarly) the response to their exchange might have been very different i.e. I think people would have concluded that they gave a sensible response and were talking about things that Abby didn’t have expertise to comment on:
_______ Abby Hoskin: If your answer relies on something about how modularism/functionalism is bad: why is source localization critical for your main neuroimaging analysis of interest? If source localization is not necessary: why can’t you use EEG to measure synchrony of neural oscillations?
Mike Johnson: The harmonic analysis we’re most interested in depends on accurately modeling the active harmonics (eigenmodes) of the brain. EEG doesn’t directly model eigenmodes; to infer eigenmodes we’d need fairly accurate source localization. It could be there are alternative ways to test STV without modeling brain eigenmodes, and that EEG could give us. I hope that’s the case, and I hope we find it, since EEG is certainly a lot easier to work with than fMRI.
Abby Hoskin: Ok, I appreciate this concrete response. I don’t know enough about calculating eigenmodes with EEG data to predict how tractable it is.
This is a message I received in private conversation by someone who I trust reasonably highly in terms of general epistemics. I’m reposting it here because it goes against the general “vibe” of the EAF and it’s good to get well-informed contrarian opinions.