The brain is not a computer

- The brain's network is not very well understood. For example, half your body's neurons are in your cerebellum. There people that don't have a cerebellum, and they only seem to walk later, and have balance issues [0]. That is half of all your neurons, and until you do a scan, people can't tell you are missing them. Alternatively, we have Henry Molaison (known in literature as HM), who could not remember a thing from after his surgery to save his life. All the surgeons took was his hippocampus (and some other stuff) back in 1953, which we then found out was SUPER important for memory [1]. He lived to be 82 and died in 2008, incidentally. Suffice to say, the neurons, their local network, and the long range network (aka, your whole body) are all very important in terms of how it all works. You can take out a ton, and not loose really anything, or you can take out some special ones and never remember a thing again. The brain is not 'fuzzy' and really 'fuzzy' all at the same time. It's like lumping all of China's politics into just their Chairman's ideas; you loose any sense of what is going on.

-The brain's recall system is also not well known. As with HM's life, you take out this special part, and it all goes to shit. However, when HM sang or played music, he could do an entire song or piece, even if it was Indagardadavida's length. Also, he remembered shocks to his hand when a surgeon put a joke buzzer in one day; he was hesitant to shake the next day. Our memory is not in any way good or lossy. Look at PTSD victims, they remember it ALL. Typically, it comes down to the motivations of the person. If you have to remember for the future, like an important fact for a test, or the sound a wolf makes right before it leaps onto you, then you will remember it very well. If you don't need to remember, then you typically do not. Again though, the brain is not well understood and we all have experienced exceptions to this.

-Some people are better at recognizing, some are better at recalling, and we don't know why. People that are face blind [2] are really bad at remembering faces; Brad Pitt says that he is face blind. Some people are really good with faces and really bad with names, some are the opposite. Some are synesthetes [3] and will recall equations or speeches by the taste that they experience when doing it. Some people are savants and can recall an entire phonebook and then draw it, nearly as a cc, from memory [4]. Memory is a fascinating subject and whenever you think you know what is going on, something new opos up and kills the theory.

-Our brains can be very good at deterministic calculations. Any major league ballplayer is very good in the outfield (the D-backs excepted this year) and can very accurately catch a ball hit from 100s of feet away. They may not be good with math, but some of them are much better than any computer [5].

The brain is not well understood at this time. Calling it a computer is obvious nonsense, but it's a good working theory to approach from, especially considering we have no other real ideas.

[0] http://www.iflscience.com/brain/24-year-old-woman-born-witho...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

[4]www.neatorama.com/2008/09/05/10-most-fascinating-savants-in-the-world/

[5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet

To continue with the IP metaphor that the author decries, it's like we only have crude wireframes and physics models in our heads, and we project the stimuli we receive to those models as best we can in realtime in order to create our conscious experience. Perhaps the sparsity of the "models" our brains contain is what allows to adapt/reuse them to comprehend such a broad array of phenomena.

The disorientation that people can experience during sensory deprivation or even extreme social isolation is perhaps another indication that the coherence of our conscious experience is so linked to our real-time environmental stimuli.

This all makes one wonder whether we could make better intelligent agents by somehow measuring the "coherence" of an agent's experience and turn that into a positive reinforcement learning signal.

Maybe that's a defining characteristic - complexity.

This kind of phrasing implies that you aren't hearing what I'm saying. You're still picturing physical bits that can be twiddled. I'm not making an analogy to any physical bits at all, I'm not even making an analogy.

I'm talking about bits in the information-theoretic sense. If I can send a signal to a person and as a result that person can do better than random at picking an intended symbol out of a set of symbols, then bits of information were conveyed.

If the person can do the same thing at a later point in time, then bits of information were also stored.

No analogies are required, this is literally the definition of "information" and "bits" since 1948.

The evidence I presented of alternative models of computation, neurons, and implementations in those models is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11731697