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The brain is not a computer

aeon.co

81–90 of 166 posts

Re: The brain is not a computer

#81
post #20

He 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…

As a matter of fact, many computers do not store exact copies of data. The data may be rearranged or compressed on many different levels. The data may be stored in such a way that an exact copy can be retrieved, but it is not necessarily stored as an exact copy.

Moreover, if you include the various checksum algorithms from different vendors as part of "storing", then even if you perform a bit-for-bit copy between different disks, they are not stored exactly the same.

Re: The brain is not a computer

#82
One argument of embodied cognition and enactivism is that all our concepts have an embodied basis - even abstract things like math, computation, language, philosophy, etc.

The article mentioned radical enactivism from Anthony Chemero. Another person who's written a lot from this perspective is Dan Hutto: https://uow.academia.edu/DanielDHutto

Here for example is an article describing "Remembering without Stored Contents" https://www.academia.edu/6799100/Remembering_without_Stored_...

and he has a book: Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content. First chapter: https://www.academia.edu/1163887/Radicalizing_Enactivism_Bas...

But for a more general, less radical background on this topic, see also work by Rafael Nunez and others: http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~nunez/web/publications.html

The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience http://www.amazon.com/Embodied-Mind-Cognitive-Science-Experi...

George Lakoff & Rafael Nunez: Where Mathematics Come From: How The Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being http://www.amazon.com/Where-Mathematics-Come-Embodied-Brings...

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson: Philosophy in the Flesh http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Flesh-Embodied-Challenge-We...

Mark Johnson: The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason http://www.amazon.com/Body-Mind-Bodily-Meaning-Imagination/d...

And there are now around 30-40 books on this topic, at least.

Re: The brain is not a computer

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm looking up Anthony Chemero's book "Radical Embodied Cognitive Science", and the first sentence of the preface is: "Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher. I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything. ...My goal is that this book is for non-representational, embodied, ecological psychology what Fodor’s The Language of Thought (1975) was for rationalist, computational psychology."

Jerry Fodor himself was fond of saying, of his ideas with Ernie Lepore, "Absolutely no one agrees with us, which leads me to believe we might be right."

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Re: The brain is not a computer

#84

Cited in the article: Radical Embodied Codnitive Science, by Anthony Chemero http://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Anthony-Chemero...

Some interesting ideas. He points out that cognitive science is young and can be multi-paradigmatic, and is clear that this is non-mainstream cognitive science. It is an attempt to explain cognition without involving appeals to mental gymnastics on mental representations of the world: the world is its own model.

"The term radical embodied cognition is from Andy Clark, who defines it as follows: Thesis of Radical Embodied Cognition[:] Structured, symbolic, representational, and computational views of cognition are mistaken. Embodied cognition is best studied by means of noncomputational and nonrepresentational ideas and explanatory schemes, involving, e.g., the tools of Dynamical Systems theory."

"...antirepresentationalism (which implies anticomputationalism) is the core of radical embodied cognitive science."

There's a long discussion of Randall Beer's 2003 paper "The Dynamics of Active Categorical Perception in an Evolved Model Agent" that uses a continuous time, real-valued neural network (CTRNN). https://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~meeden/DevelopmentalRobotics/... "Using the model of the CTRNN alone, one can only tell how an instantaneous input will affect a previously inactive network. But because the network is recurrent, the effect of any instantaneous input to the network will be largely determined by the network’s background activity when the input arrives, and that background activity will be determined by a series of prior inputs. This model of the CTRNN, in other words, is informative only if one knows what flow of prior inputs to the neural network typically precedes (and so determines the typical background activity for) a given input. The impact of the visual stimulus is determined by prior stimuli and the behavioral response to those prior stimuli. The model of the CTRNN is useful, that is, only when combined with the models of the whole coupled system and the agent–environment dynamics. These three dynamical systems compose a single tripartite model. ...The models also show that the agent’s "knowledge" does not reside in its evolved nervous system. The ability to categorize the object as a circle or a diamond requires temporally extended movement on the part of the agent, and that movement is driven by the nature and location of the object as well as the nervous system. To do justice to the knowledge, one must describe the agent’s brain, body, and environment. Notice that none of these dynamical models refers to representations in the CTRNN in explaining the agent’s behavior. The explanation is of what the agent does (and might do), not of how it represents the world. This variety of explanation—of the agent acting in the environment and not of the agent as representer—is a common feature of dynamical modeling..."

Re: The brain is not a computer

#85

Google 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…

> I never met a professional who claimed that memories are stored in individual neurons! http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/123485-mit-discovers-the-...

Re: The brain is not a computer

#86
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…

Birds don't store flights, they fly. Human brains don't store memories, they remember: they reimagine internal mental states and tell stories.

Re: The brain is not a computer

#87
post #76
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A computer is something that computes. Doesn't really matter how it does it.

And what does it mean for something to compute?

Being able to follow an algorithm, a set of steps(parallel or in series) to reach a result.

The brain has input, goes through various connections, and you end up with a result.

Re: The brain is not a computer

#88

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.

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Re: The brain is not a computer

#89
post #87
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what does it mean for something to compute?

Being able to follow an algorithm, a set of steps(parallel or in series) to reach a result. The brain has input, goes through various connections, and you end up with a result.

The steps don't even have to be discrete. An analog computer can give a continuously varying response to varying inputs with no sequential operations.

Re: The brain is not a computer

#90
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One look at the age pyramid of the world, or fertility statistics, will immediately drive home the point that we will in fact build machines to raise them and love them. I mean even in the places that for some reason currently feel comfortable with their birth statistics, there's no denying that the current generation is the last one to be larger than the one that came before it. In most countries, even that is not t…

If one doesn't want living child, why on earth would they need mechanical one? (Except for Japanese of course. Excluding them from this question) Seriously, fertility will become no issue if we prolong fertile period of our lives. Imagine having one kid at thirty, and another one at sixty.

I sort of get you, personally I feel the same. But then I walk around here and see people with dogs in baby carriages. Why ? Because they could never have a child, they're too old, or cannot or don't want to spend the money they think it'll require.

The problem does not tend to be that it's physically impossible to get a child.

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