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Have some fun and google the following: technological analogies for the human brain in history For the last 30 or 40 years, the brain has been "a compute

Have some fun and google the following: technological analogies for the human brain in history For the last 30 or 40 years, the brain has been "a computer." Prior to that, it was: (insert latest and greatest technology). I'm sure we're on to something, but I think it best we take it all with a grain of salt.

andrewla 10y ago
The difference between then and now is that we have the Church-Turing Thesis, and the less precise Universal Church-Turing Thesis. A violation of the UCTT would be a Big Deal. Because of this, we now know that previous models of the human brain (as a hydraulic system, as a mechanical system of differential gears, as a weaving machine) are, in fact, also capable of expressing all computable functions (and we can even add Minesweeper and Conway's Game of Life). I don't think anyone is saying that the brain is directly analogous to a computer (in the sense that it has a CPU and volatile memory or anything) so much as the fact that a computer, sufficiently powerful, could compute the same things that our brain is capable of computing, because of Church-Turing.
- visarga 10y ago
  The only question remains - does it feel like something to be a computer? If the computer has the ability to sense like us, to reason like us, to form concepts, to imagine and to judge and act according to its goals, is this enough to consider it conscious?
  - tbabb 10y ago
    Yes.