Comment by strbean

> Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms.

This article seems really hung up on the distinction between digital and analog. It's an important distinction, but glosses over the fact that digital computers are a subset of analog computers. Electrical signals are inherently analog.

This maps somewhat neatly to human cognition. I can take a stream of bits, perform math on it, and output a transformed stream of bits. That is a digital operation. The underlying biological processes involved are a pile of complex probabilistic+analog signaling, true. But in a computer, the underlying processes are also probabilistic and analog. We have designed our electronics to shove those parts down to the lowest possible level so they can be abstracted away, and so the degree to which they influence computation is certainly lower than in the human brain. But I think an effective argument that brains are not computers is going to have to dive in to why that gap matters.

That is an article by a psychologist, with no expertise in neuroscience, claiming without evidence that the "dominant cognitive neuroscience" is wrong. He offers no alternative explanation on how memories are stored and retrieved, but argues that large numbers of neurons across the brain are involved and he implies that neuroscientists think otherwise.

This is odd because the dominant view in neuroscience is that memories are stored by altering synaptic connection strength in a large number of neurons. So it's not clear what his disagreement is, and he just seems to be misrepresenting neuroscientists.

Interestingly, this is also how LLMs store memory during training: by altering the strength of connections between many artificial neurons.

It is pretty clear the author of that article has no idea what he's talking about.

You should look into the physical church turning thesis. If it's false (all known tested physics suggests it's true) then well we're probably living in a dualist universe. This means something outside of material reality (souls? hypercomputation via quantum gravity? weird physics? magic?) somehow influences our cognition.

> Turning complete does not apply to the brain

As far as we know, any physically realizable process can be simulated by a turing machine. And FYI brains do not exist outside of physical reality.. as far as we know. If you have issue with this formulation, go ahead and disprove the physical church turning thesis.

ive gotta say this article was not convincing at all.

A human is effectively turning complete if you give the person paper and pen and the ruleset, and a brain clearly stores information and processes it to some extent, so this is pretty unconvincing. The article is nonsense and badly written.

> 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.

Really? Humans don't ever develop memories? Humans don't gain information?

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