alt Hacker NewsI'm not an expert but as far I understand, plasticity is central to most complex operations of the brain and is likely to be involved in anything more complex than instinctive reactions. I'm happy to be corrected but it is my understanding that if you're thinking for a while on the same problem and establishing chains of reasoning, you are creating new connections and to me that means it's fundamental in the process of thinking.
Also not an expert :) I thought plasticity is an O(hours-days) learning mechanism. But I did some research and there is also Short Term Plasticity O(second) [1] which is a crucial part of working memory. We'd need that. But it seems it’s more of a volatile memory system, eg calcium ion depletion/saturation at the synapse, rather than a permanent wiring/potentiation change (please someone correct me if this isn’t right :) ).
So I guess I’d just clarify “read only” to be a little more specific - I think you could run multiple experiments where you vary the line of what’s modeled in volatile memory at runtime, and what’s immutable. I buy that you need to model STP for thought, but also suspect at this timescale you can keep everything slower immutable and keep the second-scale processes like thought working.
My original point still stands - your subjective experience in this scenario would be thought without long-term memory.
1: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/computational-neuroscie...