> loss objective

There is no prediction or desired output, certainly explicit. I was playing with those things in my work to try and understand how our brains cause the emergence of intelligence rather than solve some classification or related problem. What I managed to replicate was the learning of XOR by some nodes and further that multidimensional XORs up to the number of inputs could be learned.

Perhaps you can say that PCAish is the implicit objective/result but I still reject that there is any conceptual notion of what a node "should" output even if iteratively applying the learning rule leads us there.