This topic is contributed or inspired by the posts of TheVat and ThusSpoke in the Philosophy Updates thread. Write4U's reply has also also added --> go here to read it. Intro line from the Robert Epstein article "The Empty Brain": Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer. - - - - - - - - - - - - Stephen Wiltshire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire video link --> Who is Stephen Wiltshire? - - - - - - - - - - - - (divided opinion) Is Your Brain A Computer? https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/25/1030861/is-human-brain-computer/ EXCERPTS: Today, all these years later, experts are divided. Although everyone agrees that our biological brains create our conscious minds, they’re split on the question of what role, if any, is played by information processing—the crucial similarity that brains and computers are alleged to share. [...] Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, echoes that sentiment. “There’s a more broad concept of what a computer is, as a thing that takes in information and manipulates it and, on that basis, chooses outputs. And a ‘computer’ in this more general conception is what the brain is; that’s what it does.” But Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist and philosopher at the University of Cincinnati, objects. “What seems to have happened is that over time, we’ve watered down the idea of ‘computation’ so that it no longer means anything,” he says. “Yes, your brain does stuff, and it helps you know things—but that’s not really computation anymore.” _
Yup. A classic case where a debate hinges on little more than equivocating the definition of the word in-question. (It's virtually inevitable that this happens when one stops to realize that a vast majority of speech and concepts are built of abstracted analogies and metaphors. There have got to be at least a half dozen abstracted metaphors in my four sentences alone.eg. "hinges", "built", "concepts" are all abstractions of simpler concepts.)
How does Epstein manage to justify this statement? How convoluted must his definition of 'information processing' be in order to draw this conclusion. I have heard assertions that knowledge/memories are stored off-site, in a supernatural 'mind' so to speak, reducing the brain to a sort of interface. But even an interface is an information processor, and the proposal doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Your brain isn't a computer, is an obvious statement of course. It also doesn't store and retrieve memories like a computer. Everything is distributed to many areas and it's more accurate to say that memories are recreated each time, which is nothing like a computer.
Well now my curiosity has been twigged... OK. The article has some elaboration - but not until half way through. The "dollar bill" demonstration, and his theory of it are at the crux. It's too long to do it justice here. Scroll down the illos of the dollar bills and read the relevant paragraphs. https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer The very crux of the crux is: No image of the dollar bill has in any sense been ‘stored’ in the subject's brain. The subject is not recalling it; they essentially have to "relive the experience" of having seen a dollar bill before.
His assertion is deeper than that. He's not simply talking about the mechanical layout and processes being different, or where physically it's being retrieved from. See previous post. Memory "recall" is a misnomer. A better description might be "simalcrum reconstitution"*. (simalcrum, because what we get back is but a shadow of what went in; reconstitution because it has to be rebuilt from building blocks.) *© DaveC426913, Dec'23
Though it sounds akin to the general territory, I don't know whether Epstein's view officially factors into externalism (also Externalism About the Mind) or not. Recalling an interview by Riccardo Manzotti some years ago (I can no longer find that particular one), he seemed to be radically contending that instead of memories, we have the original experiences of events in the outer world still circulating around in our heads for years, which combine to create novel thoughts. I suspect some (if not all) of these externalism movements are related to panpsychism, which seems born out by the second article excerpt below. Interview with Riccardo Manzotti on "The Spread Mind" book https://eightify.app/summary/philos...ith-riccardo-manzotti-on-the-spread-mind-book Our perception of the world is not like a movie projected inside the brain, but rather we are constituted by the world itself, challenging the idea of internal representations. [...] Dreams, memories, and hallucinations are all cases of delayed and recombined perception, challenging the traditional understanding of these phenomena. [...] According to Riccardo Manzotti, his theory predicts that it is possible for people to have a visual experience through a mechanoreceptor on the skin, which challenges traditional understanding of sensory perception. - - - - - - - - - - Do We Have Minds of Our Own? https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/do-we-have-minds-of-our-own EXCERPT: . . . Leibniz struggled to accept that perception could be explained through mechanical causes—he proposed that if there were a machine that could produce thought and feeling, and if it were large enough that a person could walk inside of it, as he could walk inside a mill, the observer would find nothing but inert gears and levers. “He would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would he find anything to explain Perception,” he wrote. Today we tend to regard the mind not as a mill but as a computer, but, otherwise, the problem exists in much the same way that Leibniz formulated it three hundred years ago. [Tim] Parks’s skepticism stems in part from his friendship with an Italian neuroscientist named Riccardo Manzotti, with whom he has been having, as he puts it, “one of the most intense and extended conversations of my life.” Manzotti, who has become famous for appearing in panels and lecture halls with his favorite prop, an apple, counts himself among the “externalists,” a group of thinkers that includes David Chalmers and the English philosopher and neuroscientist Andy Clark. The externalists believe that consciousness does not exist solely in the brain or in the nervous system but depends, to various degrees, on objects outside the body—such as an apple. According to Manzotti’s version of externalism, spread-mind theory, which Parks is rather taken with, consciousness resides in the interaction between the body of the perceiver and what that perceiver is perceiving: when we look at an apple, we do not merely experience a representation of the apple inside our mind; we are, in some sense, identical with the apple. As Parks puts it, “Simply, the world is what you see. That is conscious experience.” Like Koch’s panpsychism, spread-mind theory attempts to recuperate the centrality of consciousness within the restrictions of materialism. Manzotti contends that we got off to a bad start, scientifically, back in the seventeenth century, when all mental phenomena were relegated to the subjective realm. This introduced the false dichotomy of subject and object and imagined humans as the sole perceiving agents in a universe of inert matter. Manzotti’s brand of externalism is still a minority position in the world of consciousness studies...._
But you are presenting a very limited profile of the brain, the most complicated biological data processor we can imagine...Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! And perhaps it might be more accurate to say that memories of recurring phenomena are "augmented" each time by new synaptic connections, in addition to existing "fixed" memories. AFAIK, memories in the brain are "fixed" in special memory "pyramidal neurons". Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramidal_cell# Making memories Circuit orchestration https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/12/how-neurons-form-long-term-memories/ In addition there are the Purkinje neurons. Histology, Purkinje Cells Nov 14, 2022 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK545154/# ------------------- Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell ... more ..... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3117417/#
I wonder what Robert Epstein thinks about a neural network such as ChatGPT. Would he consider that to be a computer, or not?
LLMs are natural language machine learning algorithms that are run on a network that simulates some aspects of neural architecture. It is stochastic parroting without any understanding of meaning (or what Chomsky would call semantics) or the world. So, yeah, GPT is mos def a computer. What John Searle called the Chinese room. Epstein does make an obvious point, that a brain changes constantly in its physical structure as it interacts with the world, something computers do not do. I think his strongest point is how little we understand of brains.... The information processing (IP) metaphor of human intelligence now dominates human thinking, both on the street and in the sciences. There is virtually no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour that proceeds without employing this metaphor, just as no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour could proceed in certain eras and cultures without reference to a spirit or deity. The validity of the IP metaphor in today’s world is generally assumed without question. Epstein also does a good job of presenting contrasts between the IP model of brains and the anti-representational view (Chemero et al) where mind emerges as a direct interaction between an organism and the world. I liked the fly ball example. The IP perspective requires the player to formulate an estimate of various initial conditions of the ball’s flight – the force of the impact, the angle of the trajectory, that kind of thing – then to create and analyse an internal model of the path along which the ball will likely move, then to use that model to guide and adjust motor movements continuously in time in order to intercept the ball. 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. Personally I remain agnostic on this kind of thing, and would lean towards a bit of both IP and externalism. I do agree that simply reproducing a connectome snapshot cannot really capture what it is to be a person. Epstein memtions this.... What’s more, as the neurobiologist Steven Rose pointed out in The Future of the Brain (2005), a snapshot of the brain’s current state might also be meaningless unless we knew the entire life history of that brain’s owner – perhaps even about the social context in which he or she was raised.
I found this on Hopkins medical . Org The brain is a complex organ that controls thought, memory, emotion, touch, motor skills, vision, breathing, temperature, hunger and every process that regulates our body. Together, the brain and spinal cord that extends from it make up the central nervous system, or CNS I guess that's what one is. :/
I don't think it requires volition or even consciousness to calculate. There are cases of idiot savants doing complex calculations quickly that would otherwise take much longer if at all if attempted by someone else deliberately and consciously. Prime number identification in idiots savants: can they calculate them? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8040161/
I would say so. If calculation and even computing can go on without consciousness and volition, even in a human brain, I doubt that it can explain consciousness. Intelligence yes...as in AI. But not consciousness. which is a wholly different critter. You can compute physical quantities, but not phenomenal qualities.
As Dennett might put it, a mechanical calculator is an example of "competence without comprehension". The human brain/body performing a formulaic process is occasionally the same or similar, but sometimes more. The latter due to being able to perceptually and behaviorally add a set of two empirical objects with another set of such, so that there is an experiential "understanding" of what abstract symbol manipulation can signify in the actual world. But OTOH, the average person won't have a mathematician's grasp of a formal proof of 2+2=4, that might cover several pages and remain solely within a non-concrete context. https://www.nature.com/articles/542030a EXCERPT: The book's backbone is Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. That replaced the idea of top-down intelligent design with a mindless, mechanical, bottom-up process that guides organisms along evolutionary trajectories into ever more complex regions of design space. Dennett also draws heavily on the idea of 'competence without comprehension', best illustrated by mathematician Alan Turing's proof that a mechanical device could do anything computational. Natural selection has created, through genetic evolution, a world rich in competence without comprehension — the bacteria, trees and termites that make up so much of Earth's biomass. Yet, as Dennett and others argue, genetic evolution is not enough to explain the skills, power and versatility of the human mind...._
It is so good to read constructive responses to less-than-expert inquiries. And when I queried; is "competence without comprehension the same as computing?", this popped up. If brains are computers, what kind of computers are they? (Dennett transcript) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fuG...re-computers-what-kind-of-computers-are-they# p.s. In regard to Intelligent Design: Can there be such a thing as an original l state of "irreducible complexity", i.e. an Intelligent Designer/Inventor? And if so, would that designer be a computer or a computer operator?
Question: If an AI declares that it is sentient, is it lying ? Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness, according to Blaise Agüera y Arcas The Google engineer explains why ... And that would agree with Anil Seth's proposal that brains are biological "prediction" machines. https://www.economist.com/by-invita...sciousness-according-to-blaise-aguera-y-arcas
