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The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)

aeon.co

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Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)

#11

Post by skywhopper »

baddox wrote: post #3

Oh 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…

Yes “computer” here means “digital electronic computer” and yes the storage, retrieval, and processing all happens very differently in the brain than digital computers are capable of.

You may think these are dumb points for the author to make, but it’s not clear to me at all that the media or the VCs who buy the hype about machine learning, AI, and self-driving cars realize just how different they are.

Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)

#12

Post by [deleted] »

baddox wrote: post #3

Oh 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…

[deleted]

Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)

#14

Post by leftyted »

The 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 specify that "neurons are bits" or whatever.

I don't expect the brain to work like any computer we've ever built (which seems to be the point of view this writer is attacking), but I do expect that it has the capacity to store, retrieve, and process information and so the computer analogy seems useful.

Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)

#15

Post by your-nanny »

The author's notion of computer does not serve him well. It is too grounded in his experience of digital computing devices rather than an understanding of computing as a kind of process. Furthermore, the field of computational neuroscience is doing quite well, thank you. Tempral difference learning is both an algorithm and instantiated in brains in some form.

Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)

#16

Post by imh »

leftyted wrote: post #14

The 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.

Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)

#17

Post by [deleted] »

baddox wrote: post #3

Oh 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…

[deleted]

Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)

#18

Post by naasking »

seiferteric wrote: post #2

The author seems to have far to narrow an idea of what a computer is.

This seems like the appropriate response to the article. In fact, the article is even factually wrong on the matter of what we're born with, and it's even wrong on what it considers "information".

I suspect this misunderstanding of "information" is the core of the confusion. He needs to revisit physics and learn some computer science, because information and physics are inextricably intertwined, so the brain very much operates on information using rules.

Edit: and further, the brain is a finite state automaton due to the Bekenstein Bound, a physics theorem.

Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)

#19

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

baddox wrote: post #3

Oh 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…

I'm not sure I understand the piece either, but I think it's trying to say that human memories are associative, sequential, and distributed rather than localised.

So there isn't "a representation" in the discrete sense. It's more like the entire system changes, and it's impossible to physically scan specific elements of it to retrieve selected content.

You can trigger selective recall, but you're triggering a complex and noisy process which generates an experience that may include remembered elements - not pulling out a predictable bit pattern.

There isn't an exact equivalent in CS. Traditional binary memory is obviously nothing like human memory. Neural nets have some superficial similarities, but they lack generality.

I'm not completely convinced by the argument, but I'm glad someone is making it.

The problem with it is that we can remember specific discrete facts quite easily. If you ask me how many flats the key of F major has, I can tell you without being distracted by other memories.

What we don't know is how that fact is represented, how exactly my brain changed after I learned it, how similar those changes would be to changes in other brains learning the same fact, whether everyone has similar subjective experiences on recall, or how to scan someone's brain to check whether or not the fact is known.

Re: The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)

#20

Post by naasking »

skywhopper wrote: post #11
baddox wrote: post #3

Oh 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…

Yes “computer” here means “digital electronic computer” and yes the storage, retrieval, and processing all happens very differently in the brain than digital computers are capable of. You may think these are dumb points for the author to make, but it’s not clear to me at all that the media or the VCs who buy the hype about machine learning, AI, and self-driving cars realize just how different they are.

> Yes “computer” here means “digital electronic computer” and yes the storage, retrieval, and processing all happens very differently in the brain than digital computers are capable of.

No, it's incorrect to use "digital computer" here. More correct might be a von Neumann architecture computer. But then that shows that the author is attacking a strawman: people comparing brains to computers aren't limiting themselves to such an architecture.

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