Excerpt from an interesting article. The empty brain: Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer

Quote:

---

The faulty logic of the IP metaphor is easy enough to state. It is based on a faulty syllogism one with two reasonable premises and a faulty conclusion. Reasonable premise #1: all computers are capable of behaving intelligently. Reasonable premise #2: all computers are information processors. Faulty conclusion: all entities that are capable of behaving intelligently are information processors.

Setting aside the formal language, the idea that humans must be information processors just because computers are information processors is just plain silly, and when, some day, the IP metaphor is finally abandoned, it will almost certainly be seen that way by historians, just as we now view the hydraulic and mechanical metaphors to be silly.

---

Interesting article, but I think he goes a little too far in his rant. For instance, I see no practical limitation that would keep us from being able to digitize a brain in the next couple hundred of years. Sure it's complex as hell and we don't understand it now, but being biologic is not some special barrier to understanding.

On the failed analogy part, I get his frustration. There is a thread on here right now where I could spend pages explaining in excruciating detail that DNA is not information, it's a chemical. Still, some imperfect analogies can be very useful and only fail in really specific arguments.

You should read up on the complex mathematical functions that our brains perform just to hear.
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-03sc-differential-equations-fall-2011/unit-iii-fourier-series-and-laplace-transform/odes-with-periodic-input-resonance/hearing-i/

Digitize a brain.. but it seems information limited / state specific. If he's right you'd need some kind of initial condition to work forward from.

Heck we can't really model analogue tube circuits and those are simple.

Awesome article. I have a real interest in how the brain works. I have a friend who is a real life researcher in this area.

Two things. One, is that the book Bounce makes a compelling case that "muscle memory" demonstrates that our brains do organize responses to stimulus in a similar way as a computer pulling a stored procedure. So, that aspect of the brain, that we store things that are used later without much thought, I think is likely to be true.

However, the articles point that we are not like a computer resonates with me significantly. Every computer eventually calculates digitaly, 1 or 0. I doubt that is the case with organisms. Binary is just too simple of a system to explain what's going on.

Well a Fourier series/ analysis isn't really all that complex, as math goes. It's just translating a time domain signal to frequency domain. Think of it like this: imagine a building built with all kinds of legos, some purple, blue, black. From far away it just vaguely looks purple.

A Fourier analysis kind of breaks the building and puts each type of lego in its own pile, and then you can say - a ha! 20% of this is actually blue!

But the brain is not doing this - you're falling victim to the exact subject of the article. And in fact the prof explains it. The brain doesn't do a Fourier transform. It has a tuned hair for each frequency, so it is a mechanical Fourier sieve, using resonance as the filter.

The point he's making I think is st some point the metaphor becomes a constraint rather than a useful tool.

Looks like I'm guilty of a "fun fact" from a math page on Facebook and not truly researching it properly, brb kms

Nah. All experience underrepresents reality. Models are incomplete abstractions of reality by definition.

Is our sensory perception not less than the available information by inspection?

All I need to do to prove that is show one piece of reality you can't perceive.

Infrared. Right now.

Quote:

---

This is inspirational, I suppose, because it means that each of us is truly unique, not just in our genetic makeup, but even in the way our brains change over time. It is also depressing, because it makes the task of the neuroscientist daunting almost beyond imagination. For any given experience, orderly change could involve a thousand neurons, a million neurons or even the entire brain, with the pattern of change different in every brain.

---

I don't have much in the way of analysis to add to this article, however, this paragraph is very pretty.

Very interesting article. I enjoyed it immensely.