The brain is not a computer (2016)

I was irritated by how strongly the author insists that "nothing is stored in the brain", almost to a point where the author seems to suggest it's stored somewhere else entirely, when after paragraphs of paragraphs the gist of it is that information is not stored directly, like in the case of the dollar bill, not as a bitmap, so to speak. There is still some form of incomplete, lossy encoding of information and knowledge stored in the brain. I don't see how this would invalidate the analogies with computers.

This isn't new or groundbreaking in any way. Cognitive science basically tries to figure out the "algorithms" at work when we store or retrieve information. They're still analogies of course, but that we don't have an image of a dollar bill stored in some synapses hardly isn't news to anyone in the field.

We know no such thing. The human brain behaves nothing like an LLM.

This article stands the test of time, whereas you appear to be subscribing to the fallacy that whatever strange new ideology comes out of silicone valley is the truth.

Do check out neurology some time.

Neural networks are a total misnomer and absolutely butcher any biological insights it may have been loosely based upon.

The whole idea that memory is stored in a distributed, lossy, and redundant fashion is hardly a new one; I read about the concept of Sparse Distributed Memory in Science News as a youngster more than 3 decades ago, and it in turn was informed by earlier ideas of sparse and spatial-coded memory (e.g. holographic metaphors of recollection).

LLMs provide evidence that you can build systems with these exact properties; no individual perceptron stores a concept, and the encoding is extremely sparse and redundant.

Of course, LLMs don't demonstrate conclusively that the brain works this way, but given that this form of information storage and retrieval works across a real analogous system refutes those that said this would be impossible for the brain to do.

This has become the most plausible theory to me over the years.

The biggest piece of evidence I see is our ability to memorize non trivial sequences with perfect recall even after decades of time elapse.

Who can still recall things like the home phone number from their childhood, or CD keys from various games and operating systems?

What about a piano sonata that takes more than an hour to perform? Where the hell is that being stored while all the other things are going on?

The author builds up quite a straw man (looking for individual neurons storing a memory and that this is critical to the concept of the brain as an information processing device) and then readily tears it down.