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

These days, when the subject of how memories are stored comes up, I'm reminded of the Disney/Pixar movie Inside Out. I teased my ultra-materialist son - who loved the film - that it was a piece of materialist propaganda, confirming to its young audience that the brain does indeed store memories, allegorically representing that storage as stacks of shelves holding a multitude of memory orbs.

http://theconversation.com/does-pixars-i...orks-43311

Great article.  Will be interesting to see how the pro "IP metaphor" science community responds.

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

Yes, can lol..

https://hydrogen2oxygen.net/en/2016/05/2...d-nowhere/

A quick google reveals lots of people seem to have said it lol.

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 relate to your post - but have a context for thinking about how this works, with an eye toward realism.  People understand physical structure.  Science has relied upon math structure.  I am going to promote informational structure, which (in my humble opinion) underlies manifest physical structure, math/logical structure and the structure of scientific models that give us context for natural patterns and their empirical outcomes.

Any technology of a time - soon evolves.  What stays - is the structures that were logically correct.  This leads to Structuralism - an outlook that replaces a naive scientific realism.  QM replaces Newtonian physics - by it didn't replace the general structure of F=MA.  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physi...cturalism/

This outta-the-box context for tackling how mind works - will assert, strongly, that there is informational structure and information objects.  Where has this been for the last 3000 years in science?  Well the basic quasi-empirical tool for analyzing informational structure is logic and the data from reasoning.  So for my story - science started out accepting this natural structure to reality.

Information science started its headlong plunge into useful applications with the algebra of George Boole.

 Boolean Algebra is used to analyze and simplify the digital (logic) circuits. It uses only the binary numbers i.e. 0 and 1. It is also called as Binary Algebra or logical Algebra. Boolean algebra was invented by George Boole in 1854.

In my worldview - numbers, equations, algorithms, logical operators and the laws of physics are all structured information and the resulting constructions are information objects.

I think a lot of this turns on the word "information".

Even computer can be separated from a Turing Machine but then words become too diffuse to really pin down what someone means.

I think a lot of this turns on the word "information".

Even computer can be separated from a Turing Machine but then words become too diffuse to really pin down what someone means.

When formal information in bits and bytes is the subject - the primary definitions are from Claude Shannon's 1948 paper with the rules he and Warren Weaver expressed as the Mathematical Theory of Communication.  Others referred to it as the opposite of entropy, with the term negentropy.  This implies that what is communicated is available for "work" in organizing and ordering a system.  Norbert Wiener based his conception and math of Cybernetics on how feed-back information does exactly that.

Just like something that is a physical object has mass (as matter) and a state of energy; information has measurable structure and inner relationships; and has a state of meaning in its environment.  These states of meaning get described as semantic information.  Please note that L. Floridi is a Informational Structural Realist and has defended this stance in a number of papers.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/infor...-semantic/

Yes, the brain is not a computer of today, it's way more sophisticated than that, but it does process, it does add up, it does store access to experience, and store associations.

The brain seems to store spatio-temporal patterns, a bit like the two dimensional pattern of dots in a join the dots puzzle book. Get enough of the right dots activated by weighting in your network, and you can see a cat. Because all of your past dot patterns get added up to the present... and you experience the cat.

Is any of this actually proven science or your personal belief on the subject?

If its the former and I'm simply lacking in my own knowledge then I apologize.  If its the latter, then I think these types of authoritative commentaries are at the root of the problem.

Is any of this actually proven science or your personal belief on the subject?

If its the former and I'm simply lacking in my own knowledge then I apologize.  If its the latter, then I think these types of authoritative commentaries are at the root of the problem.

The question of whether the brain or the mind processes information is hinged on what definition of information is used, as Sci pointed out.  A common sense view is that brains process formal information as defined in computer science and that minds process information that is about meaningful circumstances.

Formal information in science gained its ability to be quantified - precisely when it purposefully divorced itself from meaning and focused on units of measure that are objective.

Here is a statement from science professionals that describes formal information processing in the brain.  While referencing psychology it completely avoids addressing why any living thing understands anything at all.  Received (accepted) science avoids the topic. 

 Computational neuroscience is the study of brain function in terms of the information processing properties of the structures that make up the nervous system. It is an interdisciplinary science that links the diverse fields of neuroscience, cognitive science and psychology with electrical engineering, computer science, mathematics and physics.
 

Computational neuroscience is distinct from psychological connectionism and machine learning in that it emphasizes descriptions of functional and biologically realistic neurons (and neural systems) and their physiology and dynamics. These models capture the essential features of the biological system at multiple spatial-temporal scales, from membrane currents, protein and chemical coupling to network oscillations, columnar and topographic architecture and learning and memory.

These computational models are used to frame hypotheses that can be directly tested by current or future biological and/or psychological experiments.