Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer
aeon.co
aeon.co
Sorry, now you are looking at a computer at the logical level, not the physical, what is it REALLY doing. If you are going to claim there is no place in the brain where a word or a piece of music is stored (presumably because there is no literal, printed word representation in your brain?) then you can't quite make the same claim of a computer.
We consider the components of a computer to be logically digital, but under the covers all transistors are analog, and all the workings of the computer are analog. We just throw away voltage transitions and we lump some range of voltages as "on" logically and some other range of voltages as "off" logically. It takes time for the circuits to reach their final state.
I assume the same is true of the brain. At some level, there are no symbols or numbers or memories to be found. There's just neurons firing or not, in context with other neurons. Same with computers, there's just little amplifiers supporting some voltage in some context with other amplifiers. That's it.
Or not, depending on what level you want to look it.
> 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.
Looks like a terminological difference?
Yes. Another very clear example is where he states:
>> 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.
It boggles my mind that the author doesn't realize that "keeping the ball in a linear optical trajectory" is in fact, canonically, an algorithm.
As a matter of fact, it's pretty much exactly the algorithm that computers on (earlier model) antiaircraft missiles use to collide with their targets.
The author exhibits similarly muddled thoughts about "memories". The dollar bill drawing exercise shows nothing except that our brains (rather obviously) employ lossy techniques when storing information. By default, our brains don't remember "irrelevant" details like all the scrollwork on the bill. We remember "1", George Washington, and perhaps a couple other details.
However, our brains must be able to correctly retrieve information at times, or I would have been unable to type this message...
A comment I very much agree with:
> radarsat1 on May 19, 2016 [-]
> It's not even pedantic, it's just wrong. He's ignoring years of neuroscience.
> We know that the brain uses signals, and that these signals are composed of codes. We know that to interpret the world, certain information processing must take place. We are learning more about the exact nature of this processing, more about how neurons and even other fundamentals of the body code information and contribute to processing (e.g. chemical processes), but they definitely process information. We even know some of the codes.
> On the other hand, if the author wants to argue about the nature of what is information, what is processing.. he's going to have a steep hill to climb.
That is an opinion not a statement of fact.