The Brain Is Not a Computer (2016)

57 点作者 cjauvin大约 6 年前

24 条评论

baddox大约 6 年前

Oh dear. This isn’t my field at all, and maybe I’m just doing a bad job of understanding their point, but this sounds completely bogus.Really...the brain doesn’t create representations of visual stimuli or store memories? Under what possible definitions of those words can this statement be sensical?Surely the author believes that visual stimuli cause measurable changes in brain state, and that people can indeed remember past visual stimuli. Then how is it true that brains don’t create representations of visual stimuli and store and retrieve them? I’m at a loss here.Perhaps the author means that the brain doesn’t do these things in the same way as digital electronic computers we’re familiar with. That’s certainly the case at the most basic level.

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leftyted大约 6 年前

The dollar bill thing seems silly. The fact you can draw anything without looking at a dollar bill means something is being stored, right? That means the brain stores information. There's no way out of that. And that fact that you can draw the dollar bill on cue means something is being retrieved. No way around that either. It doesn't matter how the information is represented. The brain as a computer analogy doesn't specify that "neurons are bits" or whatever.I don't expect the brain to work like any computer we've ever built (which seems to be the point of view this writer is attacking), but I do expect that it has the capacity to store, retrieve, and process information and so the computer analogy seems useful.

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mannykannot大约 6 年前

It is trivially true that the brain is not a digital electronic computer. You cannot, however, use that simple fact to show that the brain is not some sort of information-processing device, and as for the notion that brains do not store information, I wonder what he thinks memories are.The author concludes by asking "Given this reality, why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?" He offers no support for the proposition that this view is common, and I suspect he is often taking, as literal, speech that was intended to be metaphorical.

seiferteric大约 6 年前

The author seems to have far to narrow an idea of what a computer is.

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presscast大约 6 年前

In a former life I was a cognitive neuroscience researcher.This reads like a piece written by someone who heard a neuroscientist take issue with the "brain as computer" metaphor, but didn't quite grasp what it was all about.The "brain is not a computer" meme has to do with the fact that the brain does not process information in the same way as a digital computer. It is not saying that the brain is not a symbol-processing/computational system.

charleshmorse大约 6 年前

I think us commenters are all on the same page here :)The author is almost making it seem like models are reality and that people think that. They're not and I don't think anyone has ever thought they were...Further and like other comments already mentioned, the brain is thought of and treated as a turing machine, not a digital computer. It's done this way, because the brain can be mapped to the definition of a turing machine.And I have to defend Von Neumann. In his book, he explored turing equivalencies between the brain and computer concepts at the time used to implement the digital turing machine, he didn't actually think that the brain was a one-to-one mapping to a digital computer... He knew the difference between models and reality.Even for the history of models the author mentions (hydraulics, automata, etc.), these all contain some turing equivalencies if implemented correctly and they were simply using the language and examples at the time to express this.The author also continues to mangle any and all ideas of modeling, abstraction, and equivalence throughout the whole article. With regard to his 'uniqueness problem', I mean 'information loss' is modeled digitally for a reason.. just because humans are lossy, doesn't mean we can't model them that way. Think of a compressed image file.I don't think there's a single researcher worth their salt that thinks the 'IP Metaphor' is gospel. That is just a grossly unscientific idea to assume.We're all free to choose any model or collection of models we wish to approximate reality, but some of them work better than others and the brain is a complicated thing to model.The author is trying to dramatize a triviality.

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cuspy大约 6 年前

Models are not equivalent to the phenomena they describe.Computational models are not an exception to this.There is not even a single "part" or "function" of the brain that we fully, exhaustively understand through a computational explanation. All claims of certainty are premature.What's really fascinating and really needs the attention of historians and anthropologists is why in this current historical moment so many STEM educated people who are otherwise very bright end up confused about this. Maybe the answer is obvious though.

your-nanny大约 6 年前

The author's notion of computer does not serve him well. It is too grounded in his experience of digital computing devices rather than an understanding of computing as a kind of process. Furthermore, the field of computational neuroscience is doing quite well, thank you. Tempral difference learning is both an algorithm and instantiated in brains in some form.

warent大约 6 年前

Isn't this directly contradicted by the grid cells? <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell</a>It sounds like because the author doesn't understand how neurons create a representation of reality, they're splitting hairs and saying it doesn't.

8bitsrule大约 6 年前

The author mentions Beethoven. Consider what a virtuoso pianist must go through to create a performance of a 40-minute-long sonata. Yes, the performance includes her personal interpretation of what's written on a piece of paper. It is almost certainly influenced by performances others have created.But when it comes to the individual notes, their sequence had damn well better be literally correct for the entire performance. If not, someone in the audience will certainly notice that one flubbed note.So in learning the work, "she was changed in some way" all right. As some members of the audience had been ... identically. And that 'some way' certainly resembles pulling bytes out of 'storage'.

0_gravitas大约 6 年前

I've been meaning to write an essay for a long time now about how our personal abstractions of things and how they are defined/work can make nuanced discussions about certain ideas difficult; I believe this post is a victim of that.

aresant大约 6 年前

“The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary.”I actually like this as an idea that our tools for understanding brain functions are still too primitive and the traditional comment base compute models are lacking.

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hyperion2010大约 6 年前

The author seems to be hung up on a distinction between two representations and trying to argue that they cannot be the same thing, despite the fact that we have abundant evidence that both are readily interconvertible. Now, I would agree that a neural net that converges to a grammar might not be a grammar, but at that point we would seem to be missing the forest for the trees.

ozy大约 6 年前

Imagine a database that stores strings using a common prefix method, one could make the same claim: this database does not store or retrieve strings. And yet it does.The model of what something does is implemented by an underlying mechanism. But for many reasons the mechanism doesn't have to be, and often isn't, a naive translation of the model.

radarsat1大约 6 年前

> Those changes, whatever they are, are built on the unique neural structure that already exists, each structure having developed over a lifetime of unique experiences.What does he mean by "neural structure" here and how is it different from "memory" and "representations" which supposedly we don't have?

jacobmoe大约 6 年前

Funny that "computer" was originally a metaphor applied to the machine from the human occupation.

boazbarak大约 6 年前

Might be an interesting experiment to train a neural network to distinguish between different currencies, and then visualize the features that correspond to the “one dollar neuron”. It might turn out not that far from the drawings of the author’s students.

age_bronze大约 6 年前

Dunning Kruger effect going on with the author of the article. He's too ignorant of the subject he's writing about, to understand the difference between the low-level way computers works and the high level sophistication algorithms can exhibit.Quite ironically, I think his line of thought shows precisely why the brain is probably quit like a computer. The algorithm going on in his brain was probably like this:1. Assuming I'm like a computer leads to negative emotions (because lack of free will and reduction in self-esteem it implies). 2. Therefore give high weights to facts contradicting this, and low weights to facts supporting this. 3. For a range of subjects regarding the behavior of the brain, do: 3.1. If the subject feels like it's logically supporting my view on the subject, add it to the article. 3.1.1. Anything I know the brain does and I have no clue on how can a computer do, will automatically feel like it supports my conclusion. Since I'm pretty clueless as to how computers work in general, most things are actually going to seem like something a computer can't do. 3.2. Otherwise, ignore this and keep going on to the next example.

ilaksh大约 6 年前

This article would have been more relevant several decades ago when AI research started. But now I think it's mainly a strawman argument because the models are more realistic and different from what he is talking about.

zzzeek大约 6 年前

The author smugly assumes we all lack imagination in how the human mind might work, when in reality, it is he who lacks imagination in how computers or algorithms might someday work.

ThomPete大约 6 年前

Neither is a computer a brain.But the brain and the computer are both pattern recognizing feedback loop one just isn't as developed yet.The computer doesn't see the image but neither do I. We simulate it.

dang大约 6 年前

Discussed at the time: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729499" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729499</a>

gus_massa大约 6 年前

The article has so many errors that it is hard to write a reply. Let's pick one:> The information first has to be encoded into a format computers can use, which means patterns of ones and zeroes (‘bits’) organised into small chunks (‘bytes’)The author should have read <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer</a>

bkdbkd大约 6 年前

Meta question: Since this article is a repost and the comments from 2016 and 2019 say the article is largely incorrect, by what process did it make it to the front page. - tl;dr: this is a repost, and panned article, how's it here?