George Zarkadaki: In Our Own Image (2015) describes six metaphors people have used to explain human intelligence in the last two millennia. At first it was the

George Zarkadaki: In Our Own Image (2015) describes six metaphors people have used to explain human intelligence in the last two millennia. At first it was the gods infusing us with spirit. After that it's always been engineering: after the first water clocks and the qanat hydraulics seemed a good explanation of everything. The flow of different fluids in the body, the "humors" explained physical and mental function. Later it was mechanical engineering. Some of the greatest thinkers of the 1500s and 1600s -- including Descartes and Hobbes -- assured us it was tiny machines, tiny mechanical motions. In the 1800s Hermann von Helmholtz compared the brain to the telegraph. So of course after the invention of computers came the metaphor of the brain as a computer. This became absolutely pervasive and we have a very hard time describing our thinking without falling back to this metaphor. But, of course, it's just a metaphor and much as our brain is not a tiny machine made out of gear it's also not "prima facie digital" despite that's what John von Neumann claimed in 1958. It is, indeed, quite astonishing how everyone without any shred of evidence just believes this. It's not like John von Neumann gained some sudden insight into the actual workings of the brain. Much as his forefathers he saw semblance in the perceived workings of the brain and the latest in engineering and so he stated immediately that's what it is. Our everyday lives should make it evident how much the working of our brain doesn't resemble that of our computers. Our experiences change our brains somehow but exactly how we don't have the faintest idea about and we can re-live these experiences somewhat which creates a memory but the mechanism is by no means perfect. There's the Mandela Effect https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36219739/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36219739/ and of course "tip of my tongue" where we almost remember a word and then perhaps minutes or hours later it just bursts into our consciousness. If it's a computer why is learning so hard? Read something and bam, it's written in your memory, right? Right? Instead, there's something incredibly complex going on, in 2016 an fMRI study was made among the survivors of a plane crash and large swaths of the brain lit up upon recall. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27158567/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27158567/ Our current best guess is somehow its the connections among neurons which change and some of these connections together form a memory. There are 100 trillion connections in there so we certainly have our task cut. And so we are here where people believe they can copy human intelligence when they do not even know what they are trying to copy falling for the latest metaphor of the workings of the human brain believing it to be more than a metaphor.