Some comments on the efficient coding hypothesis

I wrote some stuff.  I held off on doing this for a while, but now seems like a good time to be a nitpicker.  Here's some thoughts.

At the end of the day, it seems likely that early brain regions are doing joint source-channel coding, and I wish I had a good way to think about that.

Just to update: I have two pieces of work on this with Simon Dedeo.  We take the view that rate-distortion theory is a mathematical description of the efficient coding hypothesis, and because we're not sure what else to do, we randomly draw distortions and probabilities.  We find two things.  In this paper, we find that there are two regimes-- one in which resources grows with the number of environmental states, and one in which it doesn't.  In this other paper, we find an experimental mathematical result (that looks like but isn't the Central Limit Theorem) which says that the rate-distortion curve doesn't change much from environment to environment.  Hence, no need to change the number of sensory neurons, and no need for sensory neurogenesis.