4 ms·

Your brain is not a computer

• ci5er 7y ago
  And yet both of them start to degrade when I spill alcohol on them.
• jeremyjh 7y ago
  Perhaps you are unaware that the term "computer" originally referred to a person who performed scientific calculations by hand (using their brain). https://www.amazon.com/When-Computers-Human-David-Grier/dp/0691133824/ref=la_B001H6PYJI_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381948241&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.com/When-Computers-Human-David-Grier/dp/0...
• sgt101 7y ago
  We have no scientific evidence of any process in and brain or mind which isn't computable in the sense of Church/Turing. On the other hand I personally feel that I experience episodes that couldn't be computed, but I struggle to articulate the smallest parts of these. One is the small creative epiphany of writing, the structures of with can be created computationally, but the turns of sense and narrative don't seem to me to be the outcome of functional transformations. I know that others will hold to the idea that they are and could be, but to me that renders us as zombies, and that isn't satisfactory in the sense that while a zombie that acts like a real person would be evolutionary fit, I see no reason why the zombie should believe it has free will, or could, and yet I do.
  • keldaris 7y ago
    The zombie could believe it has free will the same way it holds any other belief - whether it happens to be a delusion is immaterial to whether it's able to hold the belief and there's nothing particularly unique about this particular belief. It's also far from implausible that belief in free will could have some evolutionary utility (or, more likely, be a concomitant of some other property that has evolutionary utility). None of this proves you wrong, of course, I just don't see why we should imbue our common sense intuitions in this one area with such authority when they have failed us in so many others.