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The brain is not a computer

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Re: The brain is not a computer

#71

Post by cristianpascu »

Freaky wrote: post #68

> Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. Next up, an ornithologist tries to argue that birds don't fly, because they have muscles instead of engines and nobody can pinpoint the ailerons or control stick. What else could a brain possibly be doing? What do you think a brain responding to stimulus and changing as a result of it is , if not a form of information processing and stor…

The day before this article appeared, I participated to a talk about consciousness, and the presented dismissed the functional approaches to explaining consciousness. That is, if consciousness processes information, it is not a information processor LIKE the computer is. You can not define a thing by what it does, but only what it is. The electron is not something that moves through space, but something that has mass, charge, and so on. That is, you define it by its intrinsic properties. Otherwise, you could say consciousness is what made possible this comment here. That'd tell you absolutely nothing.

But there was a biologist that basically said what you're saying: what is then 'walking', don't you define it by a 'is doing'? And this objection misses the mark because 'walking' is an action, not an entity. On the other hand, the brain, presumed to be responsible for consciousness is not (not equal to) 'talking', 'walking', 'imagination', 'recognition'. These are faculties, but not the underling physical/ontological support that make these faculties possible.

The whole project of explaining consciousness must reveal the underlying substance, be it matter or something else, that make it possible, and the mechanism by which all faculties associated with consciousness arise.

And one more thing: the main conundrum of explaining consciousness is 'qualia', that which is experienced by being conscious, that which is it like to be conscious.

Re: The brain is not a computer

#72

Post by deepnet »

The author conflates brains and minds.

Of course brain wetware is not computer hardware, but Minds run on wetware as computation runs on hardware.

He claims we don't use algorithms to catch balls but then describes the heuristic we do use algorithmically.

He attacks von Neumann's nascent speculations that the mind can be usefully modelled digitally but ignores von Neumann's proposal for an alternative type of computation, indeterminate & probabalistic - from the same book The Computer & the Brain (1958).

The inability of most people to draw from memory as accurately as from life is evidence of compatmentalisation not a lack of storage of mental images - as drawing from memory is a skill that can be aquired.

Then he goes all in by proposing hard AI as fact: "Reasonable premise #1: all computers are capable of behaving intelligently"

No doubt minds and brains are a deeper mystery than silicon and software but the author fails to demonstrate why or propose how.

IMHO the Roboticist Rodney Brooks was onto something when he proposed intelligence must be embodied - AI will come from interacting with the world.

The author cites Chemero's work Radical Embodied Cognitive Sciencr which is very very well argued and interesting.

Re: The brain is not a computer

#73

Post by tremon »

realitycheckxxx wrote: post #46
anotheryou wrote: post #2

I 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…

Bravo. You can understand that only if you offer an abstract definition of terms like 'computer', 'computation', 'calculation' etc. If you define 'computing' as something these clusters of regular matter we call 'computers' do, then if would exclude animals and other things. But, when you're thinking in abstract terms, then you come to the conclusion that a lot of things in nature are 'computing'. The same thing coul…

Current definitions of intelligence are not abstract definitions [..] but rather are labels/descriptions of particular human traits.

Agreed with the rest of what you wrote, but "intelligence" is more or less uniformly defined as the ability to quickly assimilate and apply information. What we try to measure is the speed, accuracy and complexity of that process. We have tried to measure the same process with dogs, parrots, monkeys, and ravens, and we even use comparable scales (e.g. general opinion is that adult dogs can handle the same mental complexity as toddlers).

You are correct that the tests we use incorporate human traits. But that's as much because we are mainly testing humans as because we use humans as our reference.

Re: The brain is not a computer

#75

Post by tremon »

RobertoG wrote: post #34
panglott wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of this article is the argument that the metaphor that human brains work just like computers is leading people astray in figuring out how human brains actually do work.

Maybe we don't know how human brains actually do work (in my opinion we do, but for the sake of the discussion..) but we know what they do: brains compute. To use computers as a simile is not so strange.

Brains associate. Compute is too narrow a definition in my opinion.

However, what we still lack completely is any kind of model for autonomy, i.e. how the brain decides what to "compute".

Re: The brain is not a computer

#76

Post by chongli »

UK-AL wrote: post #54
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And what does it mean for something to compute?

Re: The brain is not a computer

#77

Post by deadfece »

pttrsmrt wrote: post #3

Provocatively 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.

"Computer" used to be an occupation for humans.

In The New York Times was February 3, 1853, an obituary stated: "Mr. Walker was widely known as an accomplished Astronomer and a skillful Computer."

So to claim that the very thing which enables us to be a computer, is not a computer, might simply be short-sighted or trying to be absurd.

Re: The brain is not a computer

#79

Post by bweitzman »

cristianpascu wrote: post #71
Freaky wrote: post #68

> Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. Next up, an ornithologist tries to argue that birds don't fly, because they have muscles instead of engines and nobody can pinpoint the ailerons or control stick. What else could a brain possibly be doing? What do you think a brain responding to stimulus and changing as a result of it is , if not a form of information processing and stor…

The day before this article appeared, I participated to a talk about consciousness, and the presented dismissed the functional approaches to explaining consciousness. That is, if consciousness processes information, it is not a information processor LIKE the computer is. You can not define a thing by what it does, but only what it is. The electron is not something that moves through space, but something that has mass…

If walking is not an entity then how is consciousness an entity? Further, the mass, charge, etc that we define an electron by are shorthands for describing the way it behaves which is all we can glean based on observation. You cannot observe the property of mass directly

Re: The brain is not a computer

#80

Post by tkahnoski »

cristianpascu wrote: post #71
Freaky wrote: post #68

> Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. Next up, an ornithologist tries to argue that birds don't fly, because they have muscles instead of engines and nobody can pinpoint the ailerons or control stick. What else could a brain possibly be doing? What do you think a brain responding to stimulus and changing as a result of it is , if not a form of information processing and stor…

The day before this article appeared, I participated to a talk about consciousness, and the presented dismissed the functional approaches to explaining consciousness. That is, if consciousness processes information, it is not a information processor LIKE the computer is. You can not define a thing by what it does, but only what it is. The electron is not something that moves through space, but something that has mass…

This triggered a thought in my head, that homo sapiens are basically "better" consciousness machines where as a chimpanzee or dolphin a slightly less powerful conscious machine, and so on down to a cockroach which is a tiny pre-programmed micro-controller.

This would imply some of us are less conscious than others to some degree. However, I now see the crux of the issue you've discussed by asking, "How do I measure consciousness?" Is it binary or is it a gradient (a multi-dimensional gradient)?

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