Neither is a computer a brain.
But the brain and the computer are both pattern recognizing feedback loop one just isn't as developed yet.
The computer doesn't see the image but neither do I. We simulate it.
The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
31–40 of 75 posts
Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
#32It is trivially true that the brain is not a digital electronic computer. You cannot, however, use that simple fact to show that the brain is not some sort of information-processing device, and as for the notion that brains do not store information, I wonder what he thinks memories are.
The author concludes by asking "Given this reality, why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?" He offers no support for the proposition that this view is common, and I suspect he is often taking, as literal, speech that was intended to be metaphorical.
Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
#33The author smugly assumes we all lack imagination in how the human mind might work, when in reality, it is he who lacks imagination in how computers or algorithms might someday work.
Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
#34The dollar bill thing seems silly. The fact you can draw anything without looking at a dollar bill means something is being stored, right? That means the brain stores information. There's no way out of that. And that fact that you can draw the dollar bill on cue means something is being retrieved. No way around that either. It doesn't matter how the information is represented. The brain as a computer analogy doesn't…
Yeah, you could make the same complaints about jpeg compression.
Jpeg compression was my thought exactly. This author knows extremely little about computers.
Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
#35The article has so many errors that it is hard to write a reply. Let's pick one:
> The information first has to be encoded into a format computers can use, which means patterns of ones and zeroes (‘bits’) organised into small chunks (‘bytes’)
The author should have read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer
Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
#36The author seems to be hung up on a distinction between two representations and trying to argue that they cannot be the same thing, despite the fact that we have abundant evidence that both are readily interconvertible. Now, I would agree that a neural net that converges to a grammar might not be a grammar, but at that point we would seem to be missing the forest for the trees.
Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
#37In a former life I was a cognitive neuroscience researcher.
This reads like a piece written by someone who heard a neuroscientist take issue with the "brain as computer" metaphor, but didn't quite grasp what it was all about.
The "brain is not a computer" meme has to do with the fact that the brain does not process information in the same way as a digital computer. It is not saying that the brain is not a symbol-processing/computational system.
Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
#38I think us commenters are all on the same page here :)
The author is almost making it seem like models are reality and that people think that. They're not and I don't think anyone has ever thought they were...
Further and like other comments already mentioned, the brain is thought of and treated as a turing machine, not a digital computer. It's done this way, because the brain can be mapped to the definition of a turing machine.
And I have to defend Von Neumann. In his book, he explored turing equivalencies between the brain and computer concepts at the time used to implement the digital turing machine, he didn't actually think that the brain was a one-to-one mapping to a digital computer... He knew the difference between models and reality.
Even for the history of models the author mentions (hydraulics, automata, etc.), these all contain some turing equivalencies if implemented correctly and they were simply using the language and examples at the time to express this.
The author also continues to mangle any and all ideas of modeling, abstraction, and equivalence throughout the whole article. With regard to his 'uniqueness problem', I mean 'information loss' is modeled digitally for a reason.. just because humans are lossy, doesn't mean we can't model them that way. Think of a compressed image file.
I don't think there's a single researcher worth their salt that thinks the 'IP Metaphor' is gospel. That is just a grossly unscientific idea to assume.
We're all free to choose any model or collection of models we wish to approximate reality, but some of them work better than others and the brain is a complicated thing to model.
The author is trying to dramatize a triviality.
Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
#39I think us commenters are all on the same page here :) The author is almost making it seem like models are reality and that people think that. They're not and I don't think anyone has ever thought they were... Further and like other comments already mentioned, the brain is thought of and treated as a turing machine, not a digital computer. It's done this way, because the brain can be mapped to the definition of a tur…
How can the brain be mapped to the definition of a Turning machine? It doesn’t have an equivalent to an infinite tape and it doens’t work accoriding to anything like the table of rules for a Turning machine. Can you point me to a reference for this claim?
Most of the comments I’ve read don’t like the article but almost all of the commenters I’ve read don’t seem to have studied this issue. It gives me the impression that these are visceral reactions. The article is not an article for experts. It’s expository in nature.
One thing that stood out for me was this quote:
The Future of the Brain (2005), a snapshot of the brain’s current state might also be meaningless unless we knew the entire life history of that brain’s owner – perhaps even about the social context in which he or she was raised.
If true this seems to me (very much a non-expert) to give serious doubt to the notion that the brain is a computer.
Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
#40Dunning Kruger effect going on with the author of the article. He's too ignorant of the subject he's writing about, to understand the difference between the low-level way computers works and the high level sophistication algorithms can exhibit.
Quite ironically, I think his line of thought shows precisely why the brain is probably quit like a computer. The algorithm going on in his brain was probably like this:
1. Assuming I'm like a computer leads to negative emotions (because lack of free will and reduction in self-esteem it implies). 2. Therefore give high weights to facts contradicting this, and low weights to facts supporting this. 3. For a range of subjects regarding the behavior of the brain, do: 3.1. If the subject feels like it's logically supporting my view on the subject, add it to the article. 3.1.1. Anything I know the brain does and I have no clue on how can a computer do, will automatically feel like it supports my conclusion. Since I'm pretty clueless as to how computers work in general, most things are actually going to seem like something a computer can't do. 3.2. Otherwise, ignore this and keep going on to the next example.