Virtual animal models: useful for enumeration, risky for claiming real mechanisms

neuroecology · x · 2026-11-05

@neuroecology wraps up the virtual-animals-for-neuroscience thread: he's suspicious of taking virtual systems and claiming "this is what animal X is doing" (his own papers notwithstanding), but finds it interesting to enumerate how similar animals could be built—as a way of mapping the space of possible neural mechanisms.

Related event: Neuroscientists Bet on Deep RL "Virtual Animals" for Brain Research(5 posts)→

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