The Empty Brain?

The Empty Brain

by Robert Epstein

No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.

Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer.

Senses, reflexes and learning mechanisms – this is what we start with, and it is quite a lot, when you think about it. If we lacked any of these capabilities at birth, we would probably have trouble surviving.

But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever.

I remember reading this ~ on here, or somewhere else...

Nevertheless, great article.

I remember reading this ~ on here, or somewhere else...

Nevertheless, great article.

Yeah it popped up as an article people are recently reading, not sure why the spike of readers for an article that is years old.

I'd hoped it was updated, but it seems to be the same article now offered via a new app?

This was already discussed in an earlier thread (at https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-r...rt+Epstein ), and my post there is still my opinion:

"Epstein is rather vague about exactly how the brain (physically) achieves consciousness. His big problem is that he still seems to assume, like almost all neuroscientists, that the physical neurons and synapses of the brain somehow create consciousness. He says that the way it does that is not through the Turing machine information processing model, but is coy about the specifics of how. This is probably because he has no idea of that other than some notion based on the interesting catching the baseball pitch example. 

(From Epstein's article):

"My favourite example of the dramatic difference between the IP perspective and what some now call the ‘anti-representational’ view of human functioning involves two different ways of explaining how a baseball player manages to catch a fly ball – beautifully explicated by Michael McBeath, now at Arizona State University, and his colleagues in a 1995 paper in Science. The IP perspective requires the player to formulate an estimate of various initial conditions of the ball’s flight – the force of the impact, the angle of the trajectory, that kind of thing – then to create and analyse an internal model of the path along which the ball will likely move, then to use that model to guide and adjust motor movements continuously in time in order to intercept the ball.

That is all well and good if we functioned as computers do, but McBeath and his colleagues gave a simpler account: to catch the ball, the player simply needs to keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationship with respect to home plate and the surrounding scenery (technically, in a ‘linear optical trajectory’). This might sound complicated, but it is actually incredibly simple, and completely free of computations, representations and algorithms."
 

"The basic materialist/reductionist assumption still runs squarely into the famous "hard problem". How can the physical interaction of the brain's neurons and synapses (the electronic and chemical parameters of which are in principle detectable and quantifiable through high tech machines) be one and the same as qualia - the stuff of consciousness? The properties of consciousness are clearly in another ontological existential category than the physical properties of the basic elementary particles and fields making up matter on up to the size range of cells and their organelles.       

It seems to me that the only meaningful point he makes is about the digital information processing model of human consciousness being just another failed model based on (then) current technology in a long series going back into antiquity. That does seem to be the case. Unfortunately he won't even suggest that the most likely explanation for this is the basic category error at the root of the "hard problem". Of course he won't go there because he is a good well credentialed and influential materialist reductionist scientist and wants to remain one."

Note:

It occurs to me now that to the materialist computationalist brain scientist, Epstein's baseball catch example, though technically free of "computations", still basically involves an algorithm or algorithms analogous to computer algorithms. This would be a crude vary parameters, try, look at error, vary parameters again, look at error, etc. etc., until the algorithm converges on a solution (minimum error). This process would solve the problem iteratively without incorporating any of the actual physics equations. A lot of software systems today incorporate this problem solving strategy for certain problems because it is more efficient, probably because deriving and solving the complicated equations is more time consuming in those cases.

It seems the first occurence of the article dates from 18 May, 2016.
Though we arrived at it here rather later, in May of this year,
https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-a...a-computer

I found it interesting, not so much because I feel it makes a strong case, but because of the way it set me thinking, of the way our memories are so often tied up with the experiencing of something, rather than a mere mechanical reproduction.

I found it interesting, not so much because I feel it makes a strong case, but because of the way it set me thinking, of the way our memories are so often tied up with the experiencing of something, rather than a mere mechanical reproduction.

It looks like memories might be moderated by prior memory. Take a look at Research Finds It Might Not Be Consciousness That Drives The Human Mind (if it has not already been discussed).
Another factor that I think needs to be considered is the selective influence of instincts. We turn toward that which is of interested and tend to ignore the rest.

It looks like memories might be moderated by prior memory. Take a look at Research Finds It Might Not Be Consciousness That Drives The Human Mind (if it has not already been discussed).
Another factor that I think needs to be considered is the selective influence of instincts. We turn toward that which is of interested and tend to ignore the rest.

This article seems to be a techno-speak version of the old unconscious vs conscious mind and most of the article is "we believe", "we think", "we would argue" etc with few facts proposed that link any of it to an actual brain and the best he could come up with to explain the theory of mind is that 'rainbows are pretty for no reason'.

With regard to your second statement, would you care to expand on your direction here?

I found it interesting, not so much because I feel it makes a strong case, but because of the way it set me thinking, of the way our memories are so often tied up with the experiencing of something, rather than a mere mechanical reproduction.

To expand a little on my point here.

One example which came to mind was related to the power of the sense of smell to evoke strong emotional responses due to previous encounters with that particular smell.

Two examples, personal experiences I had:

There was a particular chair which belonged to my grandmother, it was a thickly upholstered and comfy armchair. Visits to her home were quite rare, and the first thing which struck me each time was a particular scent of the house, probably related to the foods which were cooked in her kitchen. After she died, my mother inherited that chair, and it took its place in our own house. I discovered by accident, that by poking one's nose deep into a corner of the padded armrest, that the smell was stored there, and it instantly transported me to the other house, and its associated memories.

Another, quite unrelated accidental discovery. After some initial disappointing encounters with French cheeses, there was one time when a friend insisted I retry some of his favourite delicacy. I found the flavour quite interesting, even delicious, and after buying some more for myself, and inhaling its pungent aroma, found myself transported to an old stone building, a farmhouse in the French countryside. (I'd never been to or even seen such a place.) Almost certainly the cheese came from some more modern production facility. It seemed the recall I had was taking me to a previous lifetime. (Of course smelly cheese in itself is not proof of past lives, but together with other evidence, formed part of a coherent picture.)

Because of the similarities and differences of these two examples, The role of the brain in all of this is for me substantially diminished. It certainly is not sufficient in itself to explain memory.