The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
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Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
#2The author seems to have far to narrow an idea of what a computer is.
Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
#3Oh dear. This isn’t my field at all, and maybe I’m just doing a bad job of understanding their point, but this sounds completely bogus.
Really...the brain doesn’t create representations of visual stimuli or store memories? Under what possible definitions of those words can this statement be sensical?
Surely the author believes that visual stimuli cause measurable changes in brain state, and that people can indeed remember past visual stimuli. Then how is it true that brains don’t create representations of visual stimuli and store and retrieve them? I’m at a loss here.
Perhaps the author means that the brain doesn’t do these things in the same way as digital electronic computers we’re familiar with. That’s certainly the case at the most basic level.
Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
#4“The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary.”
I actually like this as an idea that our tools for understanding brain functions are still too primitive and the traditional comment base compute models are lacking.
Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
#5Then wtf is it?
Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
#6Oh dear. This isn’t my field at all, and maybe I’m just doing a bad job of understanding their point, but this sounds completely bogus. Really...the brain doesn’t create representations of visual stimuli or store memories? Under what possible definitions of those words can this statement be sensical? Surely the author believes that visual stimuli cause measurable changes in brain state, and that people can indeed rem…
> this sounds completely bogus
It is.
http://blog.rongarret.info/2019/01/are-you-turing-machine.ht...
Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
#7“The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary.” I actually like this as an idea that our to…
I’m struggling with the definition of “retrieve” used here. According to the meanings of “retrieve” that I’m familiar with, I can’t conceive of any sense in which songs or finger movements aren’t retrieved by the brain.
Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
#8I've been meaning to write an essay for a long time now about how our personal abstractions of things and how they are defined/work can make nuanced discussions about certain ideas difficult; I believe this post is a victim of that.
Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
#9> Those changes, whatever they are, are built on the unique neural structure that already exists, each structure having developed over a lifetime of unique experiences.
What does he mean by "neural structure" here and how is it different from "memory" and "representations" which supposedly we don't have?
Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)
#10The author seems to have far to narrow an idea of what a computer is.
Yes, this is precisely what I thought as I read it.
I don't doubt his expertise on the brain side, but he characterises the computer in a very limited way, almost perfectly suited to make his argument.
With the reconstruction of the dollar there are plenty of examples how computers need not store entire instances of a thing to be able to recognise it later, such as applications of hash functions or doing spam filtering.