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Comment by skydhash | Hacker News Reader

By computation, do you mean problem solving? The most simplistic model I have of the brain (not a psychologist, just from thing I read) is that the brain is an advanced pattern matcher. I don't think we even do linear "computation", just because of the quantity of data we are ingesting, storing and retrieving.

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how would you do pattern matching without computations?

I think anything that could be described through logic gates or turning machines would be a "computation". And any object or organ that processes information would be a "computer "

Because things are just are. An analogy I can come with is a graph like irrigation canals. You fill them with water and they just are. Or something like an adder circuits. You "input" the numbers and the result is just there. There isn't an algorithmic process with loops, conditions and recursions. We don't store information, we store its patterns and link it to other patterns. We don't process information as much as we filter it through patterns we've stored. Like logic gates do not process electricity, our brain do not process information.

(This is very much armchair psychology theory)

I'm not seeing the distinction. All computation "just is". computation happens through the physical world. adder circuits are performing a computation. an x86 CPU is nothing but a bunch of dumb circuits. water canals can do computations just like electrical circuits. as can biological neurons.

This is a computer with all the abstractions stripped away [1]. It's hard to see the loops and conditionals from the falling marbles, but it is processing information. And electrical computers are essentially the same thing, just scaled up to an unimaginable degree

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BOvLL8ok8I

At every point in history, people thought that they could describe the brain using whatever advanced technology they had.

<https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...>

Read the comments on that link for a summary of my thoughts.

> But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions

Oof

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