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It seems we like to put mental models of things we easily understand and can control on our complex human body which we don't understand. The brain like a compu
by toshk 6y ago
It seems we like to put mental models of things we easily understand and can control on our complex human body which we don't understand. The brain like a computer, the body has a budget. If only biology was so simple, or well maybe it's better, it seems a lot more robust and dynamic then our straightforward human creations. Anyway moral of the story if you are tired or stressed take some rest.
- skohan 6y agoI think the brain-as-computer metaphor is actually a really poor one. Our conscious, linguistic mind is a lot like a single-threaded computer, but the brain as a whole has a lot of fundamentally different properties, and the metaphor often leads us to misleading conclusions.
- prox 6y agoAbsolutely. Our body works with lots of gradients, that’s what I know. I once talked to a human movement specialist, and he told me you could study the nervous system all your life and still not know everything. Same for a lot of other systems in your body.
- sfvisser 6y agoIf you’re comparing hardware you’re probably right. Our big blob of neurons has a completely different mode of operation compared with the silicon circuits in the computers we know. However, if you go higher up the ladder of abstraction the story changes I think. Thinking in terms on software design and architecture you can start using a similar vocabulary. We can talk about systems and sub-systems, foreground and background jobs, interfaces and telemetry, sequential and parallel processing, latency, efficiency versus accuracy, overfitting, etc. The underlying implementation might be completely different there are similarities and thinking about them can be useful.
- FeepingCreature 6y agoYeah, approximately nobody thinks that the brain is literally a CPU.
- saiya-jin 6y agoyou would be surprised
- skohan 6y ago> Thinking in terms on software design and architecture you can start using a similar vocabulary. But I think that's exactly the example of where the metaphor starts to give us bad information. The biggest difference between the brain and a computer is that the brain is fundamentally parallel. Not more threads in a GPU parallel, but rather the processing the brain does is the manifestation of the parallel actions of a mass of information processing units interacting with one another. To give an example of where using the computer metaphor gives rise to very misleading assumptions because of this: in many cases with a computer, more data equals more cost. If you need to iterate through a million data points to get a result vs. a thousand, it's going to take a lot more time to reach the answer. But with the brain it's precisely the opposite. More data points means a denser network of interconnections which can give a better answer sooner.
- datameta 6y agoWhile as of late I try to avoid drawing this metaphor - what your last sentence describes is the act of using a deeper neural network model trained on a larger/cleaner/more representative dataset.
- skohan 6y agoANN's are a better metaphore (well they should be, they are biologically inspired) but are still woefully inadequate as analogies for what the brain is actually doing.
- dTal 6y agoDo you have a better one? It's as well to remember the brain isn't a Turing machine, but the brain is an information processor, and it makes to sense to use the language and concepts of information processing to talk about what it does.
- skohan 6y agoI think a better analogy would be a like a flock of birds self-organizing into a cohesive whole, or a river finding the most efficient way to carve itself through a landscape
- Kim_Bruning 6y agoAt the very least, Alan Turing's brain was Turing complete in 2 different senses. ;-)
- carapace 6y agoFWIW, I think (no pun intended) that the unconscious mind (whatever it is) operates in many ways like a (massively parallel) computer. It's precise, highly reliable, and it doesn't seem to have the same "personhood" as the conscious, linguistic mind. (Although I think it would be wrong to consider it an "it", without any personhood. You don't want to go around offending your unconscious mind, eh?) One of the fascinating and useful ideas I was exposed to early on was the concept of self-programming the mind, using hypnosis and various techniques. In a sense, reading an article like the OP is priming the brain for higher-order functioning, by self-reference.
- hliyan 6y agoAll models are imperfect, but most models are useful. It's counterproductive to criticize an imperfect model unless you have a better one at hand or you can demonstrate a critical flaw. "That's an overly simplistic view" is a low effort statement unless you have an alternative to present.
- pengstrom 6y agoNot necessarily. We make big decisions based on our flawed models of the world, where the difference have real effects. Sometimes people forget the difference and need to be reminded.
- throwaway56034 6y agoThat's how humans think, we often can't fathom abstract ideas directly at all. Consider the idea of "time". We only think of time as movement in space, with either us moving or the time moving. I left that experience behind me. Looking ahead to the future. She has a great future in front of her.
- gruez 6y agoIs it? There are non-spatial terms for time, eg. "the day after tomorrow" or "earlier today"