I feel bad that this guy has to really strain the analogy here (at least in the introduction). It would probably be a lot easier to study how the brain works if we could abandon the idea that they are computers. Marrying ourselves to the idea that the brain must be doing computation as we understand it is harming the field imo.
The computational power of the human brain
11–20 of 44 posts
Re: The computational power of the human brain
#12> The brain has always been compared with a highly sophisticated computer. This is not strictly true. In ancient times, Plato compared the mind to a chariot pulled by two horses, representing emotion and reason. This reflected the importance of horses for transportation at the time. In the 1600s, Descartes saw the mind as akin to a mechanical clockwork machine, reflective of the clockwork and automatons built then. I…
The difference is, there's no Church-Turing thesis for chariots.
True, but there was Ben-Hur's thesis that "a chariot is capable of carrying any person", which says as much about brains as the Church-Turing thesis does unless you beg the question.
Re: The computational power of the human brain
#13> The brain has always been compared with a highly sophisticated computer. This is not strictly true. In ancient times, Plato compared the mind to a chariot pulled by two horses, representing emotion and reason. This reflected the importance of horses for transportation at the time. In the 1600s, Descartes saw the mind as akin to a mechanical clockwork machine, reflective of the clockwork and automatons built then. I…
Insightful. And the next era will describe it in terms of quantum interactions.
> Insightful. And the next era will describe it in terms of quantum interactions.
Roger Penrose already talks about a theory of consciousness based on non-computable quantum effects in microtubules. http://www.consciousentities.com/penrose.htm
Re: The computational power of the human brain
#14> The brain has always been compared with a highly sophisticated computer. This is not strictly true. In ancient times, Plato compared the mind to a chariot pulled by two horses, representing emotion and reason. This reflected the importance of horses for transportation at the time. In the 1600s, Descartes saw the mind as akin to a mechanical clockwork machine, reflective of the clockwork and automatons built then. I…
> This reflected the importance of horses
Very marginally, in front of the basic direct image of "dominating the animal", consistently with the charioteer being the subtle part in the "chariot system".
Re: The computational power of the human brain
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is, there's no Church-Turing thesis for chariots.
True, but there was Ben-Hur's thesis that "a chariot is capable of carrying any person", which says as much about brains as the Church-Turing thesis does unless you beg the question.
Do you mean that it's begging the question to assume that the brain comes to its conclusions via a physically deterministic procedure that terminates in finite time?
Re: The computational power of the human brain
#16This kind of question is meaningless, and I’m pretty sure it comes from the old view of neurons being somewhat akin to a 1-1 or many-1 digital switch (it isn’t).
In fact, we currently don’t even know the full extent of the types of neurons in the brain or the way they function and interact [1]
There are neurons that only fire when a certain percentage of their inputs are stimulated, some that have a temporal component to their firing and more.
In all the computer neural net research I read I never saw an implementation that truly explored or implemented more than a few types (like 3-4) of neuronal input and only one type of output
Re: The computational power of the human brain
#17computers (IC's) are both analog and digital. same goes for the brain.
imo all the "analogies" are authors imagination and will only distract him from understanding how brain really works.
Re: The computational power of the human brain
#18I feel bad that this guy has to really strain the analogy here (at least in the introduction). It would probably be a lot easier to study how the brain works if we could abandon the idea that they are computers. Marrying ourselves to the idea that the brain must be doing computation as we understand it is harming the field imo.
Rodney Brooks has also expressed similar ideas, criticizing the computational metaphor in studies of the brain. However, I find his writings on this topic to be a bit vague.
Re: The computational power of the human brain
#19This kind of question is meaningless, and I’m pretty sure it comes from the old view of neurons being somewhat akin to a 1-1 or many-1 digital switch (it isn’t). In fact, we currently don’t even know the full extent of the types of neurons in the brain or the way they function and interact [1] There are neurons that only fire when a certain percentage of their inputs are stimulated, some that have a temporal componen…
I think there's gonna be a new wave of idea, I see more and more concepts related to distributed / massive parts related through their topologies / tissue like structures.
Re: The computational power of the human brain
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, but there was Ben-Hur's thesis that "a chariot is capable of carrying any person", which says as much about brains as the Church-Turing thesis does unless you beg the question.
Do you mean that it's begging the question to assume that the brain comes to its conclusions via a physically deterministic procedure that terminates in finite time?
> [...] to assume that the brain comes to its conclusions via a physically deterministic procedure [...]
I don't think determinism makes any difference here?
There are various flavours of non-deterministic Turing machines, and whether the brain is deterministic is more of a philosophical question than anything else.
(I would say it's convenient and proper to model the brain as using a lot of random noise, eg even if just from thermal noise. And that kind of biological cellular level is the probably the 'right way' to think about the brain in most circumstances.
One could try to argue that the noise comes from deterministic chaos. And then someone else could argue that the underlying quantum processes are already non-deterministic. And yet another person can argue that quantum mechanics is completely deterministic, if you go by the many worlds interpretation and not the silly Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Etc)