[Article] Your brain does not process information, and it is not a computer

https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-n...a-computer

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.

Thoughts?

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[Added an empty quote so he it gets a message. Wonder if there's a better system for this?]

stephenw, I'm especially interested in what you would have to say, because of your leanings towards an information processing-centric universe.

I believe there are  functional aspects of the brain that can be modelled using computers as an analogy but it is not enough.  It is nowhere near enough!

I believe there are  functional aspects of the brain that can be modelled using computers as an analogy but it is not enough.  It is nowhere near enough!

Agreed. Aspects of the brain can be loosely modeled, but again, it is a poor substitute for an actual understanding of how the mind works, and what its relation to the brain and body are.

Also from the article:

Just over a year ago, on a visit to one of the world’s most prestigious research institutes, I challenged researchers there to account for intelligent human behaviour without reference to any aspect of the Information Processing metaphor. They couldn’t do it, and when I politely raised the issue in subsequent email communications, they still had nothing to offer months later. They saw the problem. They didn’t dismiss the challenge as trivial. But they couldn’t offer an alternative. In other words, the IP metaphor is ‘sticky’. It encumbers our thinking with language and ideas that are so powerful we have trouble thinking around them.

I can’t recall reading some neurologist saying memory appears to be “everywhere and nowhere”.

I've said this before, but it still seems appropriate to me: whenever we attempt to use the technology of the current era in order to describe the nature of things, we are on shaky ground, history has shown that. To me it is a kind of hubris to use either computing or information technologies as the metaphor of choice. Inevitably both will find themselves together with the rest, as a quaint piece of history.

I've said this before, but it still seems appropriate to me: whenever we attempt to use the technology of the current era in order to describe the nature of things, we are on shaky ground, history has shown that. To me it is a kind of hubris to use either computing or information technologies as the metaphor of choice. Inevitably both will find themselves together with the rest, as a quaint piece of history.

Like looking back on episodes of Doctor Who from the late 1970s, where the technology of the Time Lords was represented by a Killer Gorilla-type animation on a BBC microcomputer?

I can’t recall reading some neurologist saying memory appears to be “everywhere and nowhere”.

Can, I think you might mean?

Maybe you're referring to Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who suffered a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain?

This TEDx video, perhaps?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU

Agreed. Aspects of the brain can be loosely modeled, but again, it is a poor substitute for an actual understanding of how the mind works, and what it's relation to the brain and body are.

Loved the article.  I do think that the science tracking of how information (both meaningful and formal) shows a reductive process similar to the evolution of physical objects.  I advocate side-by-side analysis to seen the linkage and the differences between physical objects and informational objects.

Epstein knocks John Von Neumann's view of the comparison of brain signals processing information and computers processing information.  Von Neumann was speaking about formal information for the most part; and I believe with true insight.  JVM was working at the abstract process level.  So - when moving to the common sense level -  his abstracted process view is lacking in a full scope of the problem.  Epstein does a great job of noting that the representation of understandable meaning --- is not physically/deterministically connected to the bits and bytes of bioinformation.

Yet - organically - living things "get it".  I have a simplistic (heuristic) "outside of the box" method to attack the problem.