As the link is not resolving for me:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1UZsMv...
The brain is not a computer
51–60 of 166 posts
Re: The brain is not a computer
#52He has a very limited definition of a "computer". His description is how modern computers work. But that's not strictly what a computer could be. When people compare a computer to a brain. They are not saying it's like a modern pc. They are saying it like a computer in a loose sense. A lot of people don't get that, they think were comparing to the thing on desk. A computer can mean lots of things with many different…
Some people forget that there's more than one computer architecture. A computer doesn't even have to be digital.
But that's expanding the definition to "Arbitrary processing architecture we haven't even invented yet which really could simulate a human brain, if only we knew what it was and how to build it - which we don't, but that's just an engineering problem."
Re: The brain is not a computer
#53Google cache for those who can't connect to the paper
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
TLDR Response:
After taking a look at the paper, take a look at this post by the Google deep learning team. Take a look especially at the images.
http://googleresearch.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/inceptionism-go...
I think most if not all of the author's arguments that the brain is not a computer, can also be applied to Google's deep learning (which obviously runs on computers).
Long response:
I think the author is very naive about how broad a computer is and what a computer can do. Deep learning is obviously running on a computer, but like the author states for the brain, any single image or fact is probably not encoded in a single place.
In addition, we have probabilistic data structures, for example a bloom filter. Would a computer running a bloom filter to recognize data it had seen before not be a computer because it did not store an complete representation of any one item?
What we are seeing now, is that as computers go beyond just storing and retrieving data, to actually doing stuff like speech/image/pattern recognition, the representation is becoming more and more like the brain representation.
In addition, the author ignores that the brain did indeed develop a way encode information exactly. If the author would like more information about this, I suggest they look up "drawing" and "writing" in wikipedia. With drawing and especially with writing, the brain developed a way to encode information exactly that could later be retrieved. In addition, it could be retrieved by other brains (if they know the language).
Also, the author proposes straw man arguments for the other side. I am somewhat familiar with both computers and brains ( I trained in Neurosurgery, but work now as a programmer), and I never met a professional who claimed that memories are stored in individual neurons! I was always taught that memories are encoded in the connections between neurons - which is very similar to how neural networks encode information ( as the strength of connections between elements of the neural network ).
It is also interesting that he quotes Kandel. When I actually read Principles of Neural Science (by Kandel and Schwartz - http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Eric-Kandel/...), I got the distinct impression that Kandel actually viewed the brain as an information processor, with lower level information being processed into higher level representations (see for example the chapter on the visual system).
So overall, the author takes a very limited view of both computers and brain and concludes (I think falsely) that the brain is not a computer.
Re: The brain is not a computer
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people forget that there's more than one computer architecture. A computer doesn't even have to be digital.
But that's expanding the definition to "Arbitrary processing architecture we haven't even invented yet which really could simulate a human brain, if only we knew what it was and how to build it - which we don't, but that's just an engineering problem."
A computer is something that computes. Doesn't really matter how it does it.
Re: The brain is not a computer
#55Hmm probably a brain that wrote this, to confuse us.
Re: The brain is not a computer
#56I'm a PhD student who studies this stuff. This article is, quite simply, poorly argued. Most importantly, there's nothing in here that directly argues against the information processing metaphor. The author gives a bad argument that he thinks lies behind the metaphor and shows why that argument is bad. But a) I don't recognize this argument as what motivates the metaphor and b) to show that one argument for a conclus…
In fact several people in this thread have explicitly compared human visual memory to lossy compression of images in a computer system. That's his main point, about the metaphor leading people astray.
Understood in the right way, there's nothing wring with that comparison.
Certainly, people misuse/misunderstand the information-processing metaphor/claim. (Though the people who do this tend not to be cognitjve scientists.) But that's not to say that the metaphor is complete garbage.
Re: The brain is not a computer
#57Cited in the article: Radical Embodied Codnitive Science, by Anthony Chemero
http://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Anthony-Chemero...
Re: The brain is not a computer
#58This is just another version of the Chinese Room "argument" and still based on the same fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes conscience and erroneous insistence that there is some sort of magic about humans.
The brain, like the computer are both pattern recognizing feedback loops which uses input to simulate phenomena.
The computer is still evolving. The human brain much less so.
Humans evolved from animals, why should computers not be able to evolve from humans.
Re: The brain is not a computer
#59He has a very limited definition of a "computer". His description is how modern computers work. But that's not strictly what a computer could be. When people compare a computer to a brain. They are not saying it's like a modern pc. They are saying it like a computer in a loose sense. A lot of people don't get that, they think were comparing to the thing on desk. A computer can mean lots of things with many different…
It also never gets into whether the brain is an exception to our laws of physics; if it is not, then it's trivially computable because the laws of physics are. If you're going to argue the brain is not a computer, you need to give plausible reasons for thinking the laws of physics are incomplete (which is what Penrose does, for example).
Any quantum randomness in the brain can be simulated because we know how to generate quantum randomness, then just feed that into a deterministic physics emulator.
To deny that requires new laws of physics.
Re: The brain is not a computer
#60I 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…
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 proces…
> We want computers, to a large extent, and maybe even to 100%, to work like humans do
http://yosefk.com/blog/ai-problems.html
"We don't build machines in order to raise them and love them; we build them to get work done.
If the thing is even remotely close to "intelligent", you can no longer issue commands; you must explain yourself and ask for something and then it will misunderstand you. Normal for a person, pretty shitty for a machine. Humans have the sacred right to make mistakes. Machines should be working as designed."