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Comment by Freaky | Hacker News Reader

> Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories.

Next up, an ornithologist tries to argue that birds don't fly, because they have muscles instead of engines and nobody can pinpoint the ailerons or control stick.

What else could a brain possibly be doing? What do you think a brain responding to stimulus and changing as a result of it is, if not a form of information processing and storage? And why would that be fundamentally non-computational just because it didn't look much like how we might hand-write software to do it?

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The day before this article appeared, I participated to a talk about consciousness, and the presented dismissed the functional approaches to explaining consciousness. That is, if consciousness processes information, it is not a information processor LIKE the computer is. You can not define a thing by what it does, but only what it is. The electron is not something that moves through space, but something that has mass, charge, and so on. That is, you define it by its intrinsic properties. Otherwise, you could say consciousness is what made possible this comment here. That'd tell you absolutely nothing.

But there was a biologist that basically said what you're saying: what is then 'walking', don't you define it by a 'is doing'? And this objection misses the mark because 'walking' is an action, not an entity. On the other hand, the brain, presumed to be responsible for consciousness is not (not equal to) 'talking', 'walking', 'imagination', 'recognition'. These are faculties, but not the underling physical/ontological support that make these faculties possible.

The whole project of explaining consciousness must reveal the underlying substance, be it matter or something else, that make it possible, and the mechanism by which all faculties associated with consciousness arise.

And one more thing: the main conundrum of explaining consciousness is 'qualia', that which is experienced by being conscious, that which is it like to be conscious.

If walking is not an entity then how is consciousness an entity? Further, the mass, charge, etc that we define an electron by are shorthands for describing the way it behaves which is all we can glean based on observation. You cannot observe the property of mass directly

This triggered a thought in my head, that homo sapiens are basically "better" consciousness machines where as a chimpanzee or dolphin a slightly less powerful conscious machine, and so on down to a cockroach which is a tiny pre-programmed micro-controller.

This would imply some of us are less conscious than others to some degree. However, I now see the crux of the issue you've discussed by asking, "How do I measure consciousness?" Is it binary or is it a gradient (a multi-dimensional gradient)?

I would say a person who rarely stops to think about what it all means, what it's for, any kind of existential question, is not as conscious as somebody who reflects daily on wether or not they've done a good job at not becoming a little bit more insane today.

I'd even argue that people who never ever ponder their existence aren't conscious at all. They simply execute their DNA, nothing more, nothing less. On the other side are the few whose DNA and upbringing have enabled them to act on themselves. I see this as the main difference between conscious and unconscious people: the former take in their surroundings and the voices in their head to draw certain conclusions based on which they set certain actions on said voices, whereas the latter is happy with the reward and punishment system nature has laid out in our brains.

Then of course, there's everything in between, mixed-and-matched wildly, leading to the gradient that is consciousness (quite literally a gradient, slipping off is very easy, climbing back onboard can be damn near impossible).

"You can not define a thing by what it does, but only what it is. The electron is not something that moves through space, but something that has mass, charge, and so on." Actually you know, mass and charge only signify that an electron does certain things in certain circumstances and are thus very much statements about what an electron does. I've thought in the past that what an object does is frankly the only informative description of what said object is, quite in disagreement with the sentiment you've expressed.

Birds don't store flights, they fly. Human brains don't store memories, they remember: they reimagine internal mental states and tell stories.

And you're suggesting they do this without storing information?

Hmm.

The author and several of his sources argue that they do this without internal mental representations of objects.

Which is a distinction without a difference.

"Information" has a precise meaning. It is easy to design an experiment that proves information is being stored within yourself somewhere.

What form it takes hardly matters at all, if we can put bits in and get them back out later, information is being stored, and that is memory.

It's obvious that your immune system also stores information. Nobody would really question that -- it's a necessary precondition for vaccines to work. These are information-theoretic memories too. They are all that's required to show that the body computes.

There are pieces of data that I store in some manner (and that would be easier stored in a computer). I'm thinking about phone numbers, addresses, and such. The fact that I can accurately reproduce those pieces of information on demand has to mean that I'm storing them in some way. Are there literally a string of neurons with numbers stamped into them? Certainly not. Is there a cloud of neurons that (along with other, connected information), connects to the clouds representing "me", the concept of a "phone", image and tactile checksum-like data allowing me to recognize my current mobile phone, and a ton of other information? Absolutely. And somewhere in that mess, there's a strong link to a numerical sequence that "feels right" when I access those other neural clouds of concepts.

There's something in the physical structure of my brain that encodes various data in a probabilistic, fuzzy, emotionally-connected way, and in a way that will be virtually impossible to identify and understand. The information's still stored.

Comment below you makes powerful counter that there's storage that allows faithful reproduction of stored data. To add to it, I lost most of my memory to a brain injury that destroyed physical elements and reduced interconnections. Result is no recall on all sorts of things. Implies those memories were stored in those connections and physical spaces.

The brain has storage for data. It just works differently, is lossy, and connects with other data for compression or reinforcement. This is still storage.

Is that supposed to be evidence for not being a computer? Perhaps someone should introduce the author to Anchor Modeling[1]. Every table with its own attribute, so you don't have an internal representation of objects, just the base attributes and relations, but you can retrieve a representation on the fly.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchor_modeling

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