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I'm not sure I agree with that professor's claim - who was this, what kind of professor? Look at the claim itself. For instance, who is this "we" that is "alway

I'm not sure I agree with that professor's claim - who was this, what kind of professor? Look at the claim itself. For instance, who is this "we" that is "always assuming"? Is it biologists at large? Because they do not tend towards unified, reductionist explanations of neuroscience based on computer science. Theories of mind have been going back thousands of years from before the time computers were dreamed of. This idea of a technological paradigm of neuroscience falls apart quite easily when you consider the far longer exploration into human consciousness and neurophysiological function, both fields of inquiry are far older than computer science. Never mind the fact, those that study neuroscience, they speak of neurochemical signaling pathways, of pre- and post-synapatic chemical reaction, or of the functional imaging of the brain's different regions. There is a great deal of genetic analysis, of pharmaceutical interest, and of genuine biological mysteries. I'm sorry but I just don't agree that neuroscientists are couching their field in terms of computers.

jedberg 8y ago
Computer science: https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/feldman.html https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/feldman.htm... The we refers to computer scientists. And even before computers, we still had technology. But we didn't really have an understanding of brain physiology thousands of years ago, so the statement really only applies to theories on how we get from brain physiology to computing, not theory of mind.
- eli_gottlieb 8y ago
  >The we refers to computer scientists. Well of course computer scientists compare the brain to whatever the most advanced AI is. That's how they pitch grant applications! Hell, I'm doing it right now in this application I've got on Overleaf in another tab, though I guess in reverse: I describe what we know functionally about the brain, then propose to build computational models to study it.

jedberg 8y ago

Computer science: https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/feldman.html https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/feldman.htm... The we refers to computer scientists. And even before computers, we still had technology. But we didn't really have an understanding of brain physiology thousands of years ago, so the statement really only applies to theories on how we get from brain physiology to computing, not theory of mind.

eli_gottlieb 8y ago
>The we refers to computer scientists. Well of course computer scientists compare the brain to whatever the most advanced AI is. That's how they pitch grant applications! Hell, I'm doing it right now in this application I've got on Overleaf in another tab, though I guess in reverse: I describe what we know functionally about the brain, then propose to build computational models to study it.