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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 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.

sykic 8y ago
How can the brain be mapped to the definition of a Turning machine? It doesn’t have an equivalent to an infinite tape and it doens’t work accoriding to anything like the table of rules for a Turning machine. Can you point me to a reference for this claim? Most of the comments I’ve read don’t like the article but almost all of the commenters I’ve read don’t seem to have studied this issue. It gives me the impression that these are visceral reactions. The article is not an article for experts. It’s expository in nature. One thing that stood out for me was this quote: 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. If true this seems to me (very much a non-expert) to give serious doubt to the notion that the brain is a computer.
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  > If true this seems to me (very much a non-expert) to give serious doubt to the notion that the brain is a computer. Yeah. It also puts Quantum Mechanics into serious doubt... So, I'll wait for better evidence than some random person on the internet thinking it feels right.
  - sykic 8y ago
    If I’m the random person you are referring to then you should not rely on evidence from me. My conclusion was based on what was written by the author of the article. I quoted from the article. You may want to rely on what the author says or on another expert. I did state that my opinion was a non expert one. The quote I made said that even if one had a snapshot of the current state of a person’s brain that would be meaningless without the full history of that brain’s owner. That’s a pretty damning fact if one wants to think of a brain as a computer. I see from another comment that you disagree with the author. I’m guessing you aren’t an expert in this area either. Do you have more than visceral reasons to doubt the author’s conclusion? The author’s credentials seem to imply that he has thought about these issues far more that you or I. He presumably knows much more about how the brain works than you do. Why do you think your few minutes of thought on this article are enough to discount what he says and his conclusions? Isn’t that a bit arrogant?
    - marcosdumay 8y ago
      Well, your comments are both much more reasonable and deserve much more confidence than the article. But no, not your comments, not the article, and not the quoted neurologist even assuming the article's author understood him correctly (what would be an exception) are enough. That kind of claim requires a clear and reproducible effect, and confirmation of many people that they looked and found the it. That's the kind of claim that if I did an experiment and got the result myself, I wouldn't still trust it.
      - sykic 8y ago
        I understand your position better now. Thank you. The quote I made certainly goes against my intuition. But I’ve not studied the issue and don’t know enough about it to trust my intuition. Apparently though there are people who have studied this at the level of an expert and they believe it. At the very least this indicates that possibly my intuition is wrong and that I shouldn’t be so ready to discount the article.
cuspy 8y ago
I think you're very wrong if you think all professional neuroscientists are disinterested witnesses or that they all give adequate philosophical distance to the IP metaphor. Its assumptions constrain or at least impact the landscape of valuation of all academic neuroscience research. Academic science isn't an apolitical, free space. We are not all free to choose any model, and what it means for a model to "work better" comes down to evaluative criteria that are almost always baked into a particular set of theoretical assumptions.
barberousse 8y ago
>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... The author is arguing that when there is a "monopoly" of models with respect to a given domain, like the brain, that inexorably tends to make the conceptual distinction between model/reality irrelevant. The author then goes on to cite examples of this, not only with respect to our current age's infatuation with the IP model, but _previous_ ages own repetition of this with respect to their own guiding technological framework (hydraulic engineering and the humors, etc)
tnzn 8y ago
>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... that's where you're wrong. Way too many people, many of them engineers, consider models to represent reality, and that's a real, big problem, because this is deeply linked to how they consider science.

sykic 8y ago

How can the brain be mapped to the definition of a Turning machine? It doesn’t have an equivalent to an infinite tape and it doens’t work accoriding to anything like the table of rules for a Turning machine. Can you point me to a reference for this claim? Most of the comments I’ve read don’t like the article but almost all of the commenters I’ve read don’t seem to have studied this issue. It gives me the impression that these are visceral reactions. The article is not an article for experts. It’s expository in nature. One thing that stood out for me was this quote: 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. If true this seems to me (very much a non-expert) to give serious doubt to the notion that the brain is a computer.

marcosdumay 8y ago
> If true this seems to me (very much a non-expert) to give serious doubt to the notion that the brain is a computer. Yeah. It also puts Quantum Mechanics into serious doubt... So, I'll wait for better evidence than some random person on the internet thinking it feels right.
- sykic 8y ago
  If I’m the random person you are referring to then you should not rely on evidence from me. My conclusion was based on what was written by the author of the article. I quoted from the article. You may want to rely on what the author says or on another expert. I did state that my opinion was a non expert one. The quote I made said that even if one had a snapshot of the current state of a person’s brain that would be meaningless without the full history of that brain’s owner. That’s a pretty damning fact if one wants to think of a brain as a computer. I see from another comment that you disagree with the author. I’m guessing you aren’t an expert in this area either. Do you have more than visceral reasons to doubt the author’s conclusion? The author’s credentials seem to imply that he has thought about these issues far more that you or I. He presumably knows much more about how the brain works than you do. Why do you think your few minutes of thought on this article are enough to discount what he says and his conclusions? Isn’t that a bit arrogant?
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    Well, your comments are both much more reasonable and deserve much more confidence than the article. But no, not your comments, not the article, and not the quoted neurologist even assuming the article's author understood him correctly (what would be an exception) are enough. That kind of claim requires a clear and reproducible effect, and confirmation of many people that they looked and found the it. That's the kind of claim that if I did an experiment and got the result myself, I wouldn't still trust it.
    - sykic 8y ago
      I understand your position better now. Thank you. The quote I made certainly goes against my intuition. But I’ve not studied the issue and don’t know enough about it to trust my intuition. Apparently though there are people who have studied this at the level of an expert and they believe it. At the very least this indicates that possibly my intuition is wrong and that I shouldn’t be so ready to discount the article.

cuspy 8y ago

I think you're very wrong if you think all professional neuroscientists are disinterested witnesses or that they all give adequate philosophical distance to the IP metaphor. Its assumptions constrain or at least impact the landscape of valuation of all academic neuroscience research. Academic science isn't an apolitical, free space. We are not all free to choose any model, and what it means for a model to "work better" comes down to evaluative criteria that are almost always baked into a particular set of theoretical assumptions.

barberousse 8y ago

>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... The author is arguing that when there is a "monopoly" of models with respect to a given domain, like the brain, that inexorably tends to make the conceptual distinction between model/reality irrelevant. The author then goes on to cite examples of this, not only with respect to our current age's infatuation with the IP model, but _previous_ ages own repetition of this with respect to their own guiding technological framework (hydraulic engineering and the humors, etc)

tnzn 8y ago

>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... that's where you're wrong. Way too many people, many of them engineers, consider models to represent reality, and that's a real, big problem, because this is deeply linked to how they consider science.