The brain is not a computer
aeon.co
The brain is not a computer
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Re: The brain is not a computer
#2I don't see it.
- The brain is more fuzzy, but it still stores the link between the smell of roses and the look of roses. Just as a probability, like a Bayes network. And you will fall for Illusions, just like a Bayes network can be wrong ("for a second I thought this was..." and than more information from the senses falsifies/corrects the probabilities).
- The brain is imperfect in reading from memory, but it still does. It just uses really good, lossy compression. It's loosing much detail, but often filling holes probabilistically. Besides neural nets, in computers this would be: defaults, recovery blocks etc. In part the good compression comes from an additional layer of abstraction, but computers can do this too. A very simple example are the the blurry color layers in jpg.
- We are better at recognizing than recalling, because a highly compressed memory is not enough to recreate the original, but has enough indicators to verify. This us very much like a checksum.
What there is, is the bias of the "hardware". Our brains are not good at deterministic iterations, computers struggle with the complexity of forming wisdom and fuzziness and feedback does not come naturally to them either. But in principle, we are both turing complete or something :)
Re: The brain is not a computer
#3Provocatively naive - does anyone nowadays really think the brain Works like a computer? A much more interesting focus is on non-representationalistic understandings of the world seen in the discussion.
Re: The brain is not a computer
#4But it can certainly compute.
Re: The brain is not a computer
#5Ok. For one, we really still don't know a lot about the brain. Secondly, well...as far as I can tell, the brain is like an computer that adds more and more traces as it goes. The logic is the circuit, no real analogue to software. The hardware is the algorithm, and we can add new hardware. There is storage, but it's fuzzy...with a MTBF that's not well understood. The actions that we take are based on potentials, just like in a circuit with sense amps that aren't perfectly tuned, nor is the switch amp binary....there's a lot of muxing going on (again, that we don't understand). But to say that the brain isn't like a computer is extremely naive. Cells make up the brain, each cell's logic can be worked out using well...logic. Putting those cells together into a complex system produces behavior that is obviously complex, and hard to understand. Ever tried to understand the behavior of a multi-threaded, multi-node, multi-socket compute system down to the microsecond? It's complex right? Yeah, we barely can grasp that, give it a few decades and we'll probably figure out a bit more about how the brain works...and how to quantify it.
Re: The brain is not a computer
#6The map is not the territory. But that doesn't mean that maps can't be useful.
Re: The brain is not a computer
#7This article falls somewhere between a strawman argument and a deliberate misrepresentation of scientific understanding.
> "But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers"
We are born with most (if not) all of these things, and we develop more of them as we grow and learn. Sure, the nomenclature here was chosen for ridicule, but functionally those elements are present.
The brain is not a magical pudding that works in a completely occult and mysterious manner. While we do have a ways to go in deciphering the minutiae of its architecture and operation, the article engages in assertions that run completely counter to neurobiological facts we have already learned:
> "We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not."
This is at best a half-truthy strawman argument. Both our computer technology and the brain's architecture employ different mechanisms by virtue of their underlying implementation. However, the functions performed do converge if you look at what's actually being computed. There are entire fields of both CS and neuro research that are completely based on this overlap.
> "Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms.
Humans, on the other hand, do not – never did, never will. "
This is utter bullshit. Humans totally operate on symbolic representations, decades of neuroscience has shown us that. Humans absolutely do store, process, and retrieve information. Humans possess without a doubt physical memories, just because they're not encoded byte-wise doesn't give you an excuse to make these garbage claims.
Re: The brain is not a computer
#8Electronic computers as we have them now are different in many aspects from our brains - right. But they are also similar in many ways and surely we can have some metaphor that would fit both.
What he forgets is that information processor is a metaphor also in respect to the machines we have on our desks. They don't really process information - they just route some electrons around. But metaphors are useful.
Re: The brain is not a computer
#9Ok. For one, we really still don't know a lot about the brain. Secondly, well...as far as I can tell, the brain is like an computer that adds more and more traces as it goes. The logic is the circuit, no real analogue to software. The hardware is the algorithm, and we can add new hardware. There is storage, but it's fuzzy...with a MTBF that's not well understood. The actions that we take are based on potentials, just…
BRAINS ARE COMPUTERS is a useful conceptual metaphor for many purposes. But metaphors are imperfect. It's not literally true that LIFE IS A JOURNEY or SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS ARE PLANTS.
Re: The brain is not a computer
#10Electronic computers as we have them now are different in many aspects from our brains - right. But they are also similar in many ways and surely we can have some metaphor that would fit both. What he forgets is that information processor is a metaphor also in respect to the machines we have on our desks. They don't really process information - they just route some electrons around. But metaphors are useful.
Metaphors are useful, but taking them too literally is like overfitting your model.