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Comment by karmajunkie | Hacker News Reader

I find it somewhat amusing that all of the top comments on a story about how the human brain is not a computer seek to analogize the computer to the brain in order to prove that the brain is in fact a computer, while actual experts on the brain have gone into detail on exactly why that isn't the case. Dunning-Kruger much?

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I'm just reminded of Kuhn: "To the extent that two scientific schools disagree about what is a problem and what a solution, they will inevitably talk through each other when debating the relative merits of their respective paradigms. ...Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other. That is why a law that cannot even be demonstrated to one group of scientists may occasionally seem intuitively obvious to another."

I think the issue is that in our everyday lives, we see people doing things that appear to require collection, storage, retrieval, and processing of information. Honestly, I'd want to see an explanation for how I can do something like drive from home to work without doing some combination of those four things. The article doesn't do that, and in many cases, the examples of human behavior seem to specifically contradict the author's claims.

Do you have sources on this? Because from what I've learned in my cognitive psychology / neuroscience classes and talks, the brain works very much like a processing machine. Incredibly different than the electronic deterministic ones we use day to day, but it's still a processing machine.

Did they ever compare it to an analog computer? Do they even know what one is? Because analog experts have and there's so many similarities. See my main comment to OP for links.

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