The brain is not a computer

Fascinating how somebody can say nothing at all with so many words and give the impression he has a clue. He doesn't seem to know how computers or brains work. For example in the baseball catching story, there is no reason why a computer/robot shouldn't be able to use the same heuristic as a human. ("to catch the ball, the player simply needs to keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationship with respect to home plate and the surrounding scenery" - why should that be incompatible with information processing?)

Right, I don't see the point of this article. At first I thought it's the yearly "humans have a soul and are better than AI algorithms" story we get.

Of course a mere year ago the fact that computers can't get good moves in Go was an argument. And all the arguments that came before that, voice recognition, reading, chess, games, even counting itself at one point. Of all those things that computers/"information processing" couldn't achieve we now know : computers have recognized more spoken text, read more books, letters, envelopes and ... than humans ever will. Computers have played more chess games, and certainly have processed more numbers than humans ever did or ever will. Humans probably still have a mild advantage in amount of Go processing, but it's clear that's not going to last much longer either.

This article takes another approach : because the type of processing that happens in our minds differs "so much" from what we do with computers, they must be fundamentally different. The emphasis lies on the human mind being different : humans don't work like computers, not the opposite. That wouldn't work : because computers do work like humans. That's why we build them, and use them. Computers analyse stocks, sell apples and cars and home insurance, they mail letters, they work out what a business should schedule tomorrow, they move their arms to glue soles onto shoes, ...

One might also analyse why computers are working so very differently. Why Von Neumann ? Well, because we don't really know ahead of time what we want computers to do, and even when we do, we want the ability to change it later. We want computers, to a large extent, and maybe even to 100%, to work like humans do, but we can't do that. As illustrated above, we get closer every year. Computers simulate other machines, that's what they do. So what you should compare is not instruction sets versus neurons, but neural network models those instruction sets simulate with biological neurons.

And then the differences melt away. Not fully. Not yet. We don't know how. Not fully. Not yet.

But more every year.

A better title: Your Brain is Not an IBM-Compatible PC with 64k of RAM

"The information processing (IP) metaphor of human intelligence now dominates human thinking, both on the street and in the sciences. ...But the IP metaphor is, after all, just another metaphor – a story we tell to make sense of something we don’t actually understand. And like all the metaphors that preceded it, it will certainly be cast aside at some point – either replaced by another metaphor or, in the end, replaced by actual knowledge. ...the IP metaphor is ‘sticky’. It encumbers our thinking with language and ideas that are so powerful we have trouble thinking around them. ...The idea, advanced by several scientists, that specific memories are somehow stored in individual neurons is preposterous...no one really has the slightest idea how the brain changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. ...The mainstream view is that we, like computers, make sense of the world by performing computations on mental representations of it, but Chemero and others describe another way of understanding intelligent behaviour – as a direct interaction between organisms and their world."

RTWT.

That's his whole point. It doesn't store or retrieve.