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The brain is not a computer

aeon.co

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Re: The brain is not a computer

#101

Post by [deleted] »

panglott wrote: post #86
Freaky wrote: 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.

[deleted]

Re: The brain is not a computer

#102

Post by karmajunkie »

radarsat1 wrote: post #42
alexwebb2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. This article struck me as exceedingly pedantic. Given the author's background, I'd put money on the idea that this is the result of years of frustration at having his life's work dismissively reduced by casual observers to something like "yeah, it's basically a computer" and thinking they therefore understand all the intricacies of the human brain. I can see how that might grate on a person in his field and t…

It's not even pedantic, it's just wrong. He's ignoring years of neuroscience. We know that the brain uses signals, and that these signals are composed of codes. We know that to interpret the world, certain information processing must take place. We are learning more about the exact nature of this processing, more about how neurons and even other fundamentals of the body code information and contribute to processing (…

Got a few citations on that? Neurons react to stimuli, that's certainly well-established. But codes?

Re: The brain is not a computer

#103

Post by panglott »

Freaky wrote: post #99
panglott wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And you're suggesting they do this without storing information? Hmm.

The author and several of his sources argue that they do this without internal mental representations of objects.

Re: The brain is not a computer

#104

Post by karmajunkie »

delinka wrote: post #23
panglott wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's his whole point. It doesn't store or retrieve.

Indeed it does. If not, how then can you, "recall" the names of your family upon seeing their faces? You've stored a representation of each face, you've stored their names, and you retrieve that information to maintain the relationship.

pattern recognition. you see a face, and the visual stimulus refires the same set of neurons, which then fire additional neurons, creating a chain that eventually fires off the set that is connected with the sound of that face. This is a pattern of neuron activity, and its not the same as retrieval.

Re: The brain is not a computer

#105

Post by karmajunkie »

I find it somewhat amusing that all of the top comments on a story about how the human brain is not a computer seek to analogize the computer to the brain in order to prove that the brain is in fact a computer, while actual experts on the brain have gone into detail on exactly why that isn't the case. Dunning-Kruger much?

Re: The brain is not a computer

#106

Post by panglott »

projectramo wrote: post #92
panglott wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chemero's book has a long section criticizing Fodor's reasoning in arguing that connectional networks are not a good model of human thinking. Looks like there's little skepticism about the power of neural networks here, even if some of the arguments are framed in terms of computationalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectionism#Connectionism_vs...

I was studying Neural Networks in grad school (advisor was statistician from Bell Labs) at Rutgers and took a bunch of classes with Jerry, so I had these debates on a daily basis. Unless you summarize Chemero's critique, though, I can't really respond to it. Fodor didn't claim that connectionist models couldn't encode symbolic manipulation, just that the pertinent activity from the perspective of "thought" is symboli…

I posted a link and very brief summary elsewhere here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730489 He discusses Fodor on p. 26 as part of a critique of conceptual/a priori (Hegelian) arguments.

Re: The brain is not a computer

#107

Post by ef4 »

panglott wrote: post #103
Freaky wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you're suggesting they do this without storing information? Hmm.

The author and several of his sources argue that they do this without internal mental representations of objects.

Which is a distinction without a difference.

"Information" has a precise meaning. It is easy to design an experiment that proves information is being stored within yourself somewhere.

What form it takes hardly matters at all, if we can put bits in and get them back out later, information is being stored, and that is memory.

It's obvious that your immune system also stores information. Nobody would really question that -- it's a necessary precondition for vaccines to work. These are information-theoretic memories too. They are all that's required to show that the body computes.

Re: The brain is not a computer

#108

Post by facepalm »

panglott wrote: post #47
facepalm wrote: post #11

Fascinating how somebody can say nothing at all with so many words and give the impression he has a clue. He doesn't seem to know how computers or brains work. For example in the baseball catching story, there is no reason why a computer/robot shouldn't be able to use the same heuristic as a human. ("to catch the ball, the player simply needs to keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationsh…

There's he's talking more about paradigms that require or oppose mental representations that simulate the motion of a ball. The point there is that it's unnecessary to have an internal mental representation simulating the motion of the ball in order to catch it.

That's a funny way to claim brains are not like computers then. After all the usual argument is that computers have no internal representation of anything.

Why would anybody demand that there has to be an internal mental representation of a ball to catch it?

Re: The brain is not a computer

#109

Post by eli_gottlieb »

panglott wrote: post #24
iofj wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I don't see the point of this article. At first I thought it's the yearly "humans have a soul and are better than AI algorithms" story we get. Of course a mere year ago the fact that computers can't get good moves in Go was an argument. And all the arguments that came before that, voice recognition, reading, chess, games, even counting itself at one point. Of all those things that computers/"information proces…

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.

>leading people astray in figuring out how human brains actually do work.

In order to make any point remotely like this, he'd have to go talk to some actual neuroscientists, which he very plainly didn't.

Re: The brain is not a computer

#110

Post by chongli »

UK-AL wrote: post #100
chongli wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is fire a computer? It goes through a series of steps to reach a result.

Is fire able to follow an algorithm? I mean some creative person could probably make a computer out of using fire.

Well, what is an algorithm?

Anyway, before we stray too far from the point I was hoping to make, I'll claim that when most people use the word "compute" they mean a particular task performed at the behest of a human being. This sort of definition is problematic if we're ever to attempt to build an artificial brain or to encounter intelligent alien life radically different from our own.

It all falls back to the problem of agency and the philosophical concept of the self.

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