John Cleese, of all people, summarized our current knowledge of the nervous system best in this video: https://youtu.be/FQjgsQ5G8ug?t=20
We are clueless. A lot of what is published is just neurobabble, even in 'serious' journals. As others have pointed out, we still don't even know how to simulate a brain of a tiny worm with 302 neurons. Talking about simulating billions of neurons is beyond fantasy, and funding such a projects is.. well.. not surprising from politicians, but that is another matter.
Similarly, a lot of scientists are researching themes like 'consciousness' and 'executive functions' and still don't know how to make a robot walk like a normal person on two feet. We should be concentrating on trying to understand the simple stuff - the reflex arc, muscle control, grasping, and pointing a finger toward something.
[Ok, I just saw in another one of you're posts your MA involved perceptual control theory, so yah, right on. I have this written already and feel a little silly now, but I figure the links are good and worth posting.]
I am finishing up my undergraduate right now in psychology, and while I want to defend the work that is being done by cognitive psychologists on concepts at higher levels of abstraction (Many researchers working in more mathematical areas of psychology tend towards working on things like consciousness, perception, concepts and categorization. There are cool advances in it, but I won't go too much into it in this post. I guess I'm just trying to say that you end up working with constructs that have higher barriers of entry to communicating outside of groups of researchers who get excited about modeling and the perceptual measurement theory.) I digress with that though. The main reason I wanted to comment is that your comment on understanding things like pointing hit on one of my favorite areas of psychology that has tragically always been somewhat nitch, but provides a lot of interesting connections between different areas if you take the time to get into it. There is a thread in the field of psychology that does just this kind of research, termed sometimes ecological psychology. It is often referred to colloquially as Gibsonian psychology, termed after [JJ Gibson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Gibson) who is seen as the father of the field(its practitioner's are known colloquially as Gibsonians).
I was lucky enough to take the Geoffrey Bingham's (who specializes reach to grasp behavior iirc) Perception/Action course a few years back, and found it immensely rewarding.* The primary text for the course was JJ Gibson's classic book "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception". The philosophical foundations of gibsons theory of affordances is to take a realist approach to perception. (Avoiding the troubles that mind-body dualism imposes; taking a more Heidegerrian approach). The classic mantra of the field is ask not what is in you're mind, but what you're mind is in.
I wish I had time to say more now, but I need to run here.
But I'll leave you with a few snippets of what I took away from the course, and some links I think you'll enjoy, and can furnish more if you would be interested.
The Archival Gibson Video Series (Whoever assembled these had perfect choice in music)
We are clueless. A lot of what is published is just neurobabble, even in 'serious' journals. As others have pointed out, we still don't even know how to simulate a brain of a tiny worm with 302 neurons. Talking about simulating billions of neurons is beyond fantasy, and funding such a projects is.. well.. not surprising from politicians, but that is another matter.
Similarly, a lot of scientists are researching themes like 'consciousness' and 'executive functions' and still don't know how to make a robot walk like a normal person on two feet. We should be concentrating on trying to understand the simple stuff - the reflex arc, muscle control, grasping, and pointing a finger toward something.