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Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer - Robert Epstein | Aeon Essays
Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer - Robert Epstein | Aeon Essays
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.
aeon.co




I find this really questionable. Of course our brains process and store information. Of course we have physical memories in our brains. How else do we have memories? I do research in computational neuroscience and my specific area is in bird song and is quite literally modeling how the song of a particular species of bird is stored in its brain. This author seems to have a very limited view of what "information processing" and "computer" mean.
Edit: and the idea that the "grandmother cell" is a popular neuroscientific explanation for memory is laughable. It is a hypothesis, and one of my professors actually proved it's not completely impossible (which a lot of neuroscientists thought it was), but it's far from the number one theory on how memory works for neuroscientists.
The author seems to really be hung up on precise metaphors. No, of course we don't store memories the same way a digital computer does. But "changing to better perform a certain task" is exactly what computers do to store information.
Also, it's kind of ludicrous to say "humans are not computers" when the original definition of "computer" was a "human who computes".
A computer scientist would say "a human can perform all the tasks of a universal Turing machine, therefore they are computers".
As for the argument that we will never be able to completely model a human brain, there is currently a fairly successful open science project that models the brain of a nematode. It's called the OpenWorm project. There's no fundamental reason we can't model an entire human brain, we just don't have enough understanding or compute power yet.
There are many people who have an ideological problem with the idea that they are "just" a computer. So they claim human brains are inherently different and find arguments to support it, like using Gödel's incompleteness theorems to claim there are things humans can do but computers can't, or stating that brains use quantum entanglement or something, etc.
This is a terrible, terrible article. I've already seen it eviscerated on various blogs, but it doesn't take an expert to see that the author's reasoning is built on a flawed foundation. To boil it down, Dr. Epstein seems very confused about what information is, or how it is quantified in information theory.
[ Entry level reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory ]
Certainly the brain is an information processor. Whether the nature of its processing can be profitably compared to a logic-gate based universal computing machine may be a subject worthy of debate, but the fact that it processes information is not seriously in contention.
Reading between the lines, it seems like Dr. Epstein may be closet dualist. He seems to be trying to suggest that thought in the brain is not driven by physical processes. He's basically making a case for phlogiston, or chi.
I call shennanigans. This is not a science article. It is a sneaky religious article dressed up in sciencey clothing.
Thanks, I will no longer compare our brains to computers.
Don't be persuaded by this malarkey, ifindkarma. Compare computers to brains or brains to computer if it helps you understand something or explicate a point to others.
The article's author is a goof.
This is an interesting article. But I think the problem that it's addressing has more to do with the limitations of human language (especially English) than with our understanding of the brain. Yes, the brain is complex and yes, we are continually learning about it and needing to reassess what we thought we knew. But we talk about brains as computers not because they're JUST LIKE COMPUTERS, but because it's the best metaphor we have, among our limited options.