Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer

> What is the problem? Don’t we have a ‘representation’ of the dollar bill ‘stored’ in a ‘memory register’ in our brains? Can’t we just ‘retrieve’ it and use it to make our drawing?

We can have a representation of a dollar bill, and you can see that the student retrieved that representation: he drew a picture.

Sure, the representation is not exact, and some details have been omitted, but this is true of all representations, even computerized ones. Uber does not store an exact representation of every car; they cannot tell me that there is a dent on the back side of the car picking me up. Yet, my phone relays that a "silver Honda with plates XXXX" is picking me up — a representation of the car, and one good enough to get the job done.

> no image of the dollar bill has in any sense been ‘stored’ in Jinny’s brain.

And how not? The student was, again, able to draw a dollar bill. It wasn't perfect, but neither is a JPEG photo.

> McBeath and his colleagues gave a simpler account: to catch the ball, the player simply needs to keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationship with respect to home plate and the surrounding scenery (technically, in a ‘linear optical trajectory’).

Perhaps this is how stuff functions, approximately, but it doesn't mean that it is the only means by which the brain could accomplish the task. I can throw and catch objects without looking at them — without a "constant visual relationship with respect to […] the surrounding scenery" — so, how can I do this?

...states the author without evidence.

The author seems unfamiliar with the concept of levels of abstraction, and concludes that information presented in a way other than its rawest, most un-abstracted form isn't really information.

This reminds me of a great snippet from one of Raymond Smulyan's books ("This Book Needs No Title") that I think best captures the implied and unfounded fear behind these sort of articles. Here's the quote in full:

“Recently I was with a group of mathematicians and philosophers. One philosopher asked me whether I believed man was a machine. I replied, ‘Do you really think it makes any difference?’ He most earnestly replied, ‘Of course! To me it is the most important question in philosophy.’ I had the following afterthoughts: I imagine that if my friend had finally come to the conclusion that he were a machine, he would be infinitely crestfallen. I think he would think: ‘My God! How horrible! I am only a machine!’ But if I should find out I were a machine, my attitude would be totally different. I would say: ‘How amazing! I never before realized that machines could be so marvelous!’”

Adding my own thoughts to this, I think what generates these sort of articles is an intuitive and well justified resistance to the belief is "life is just a complex machine" but by using completely mistaken arguments.

The essence of life, existence and consciousness can never be reduced to any mechanical or even logical processes (although some would like to believe otherwise), but the fact that it can bloom into amazing creations like the human mind or possibly in the distant future ti some human-made artificial mind doesn't detract from it's magic.

This is one of the worst straw man arguments I have ever seen. The author makes broad generalizations with no attempt at understanding, and then goes on to make completely ridiculous claims. Honestly made me sick to my stomach to read.

This essay seems to ignore the concept of "neural networks" (NN), both biological and artificial.

Now, that doesn't mean that our current artificial representations of neural networks are anywhere close to how biological neural networks work (for instance, as far as I know, we have yet to find anything like "backpropagation" in biological NNs - but if anyone knows differently, I'd be most interested in learning).

But artificial NNs are the closest we've gotten to something that seems to work how brains (biological NNs) work, and how they are structured. We have a multitude (and seemingly ever growing) of models, but there is something lacking - something almost seemingly fundamental.

For instance, we have all of these different models, but none of them are "general" in the sense that there is a single one that can be used for different tasks. Not only that, but there are also a multitude of means for simulating the stimulus/activity/firing of the neurons in the network; for a while the "activation function" was a sigmoid filter, but today best results are found with RELU - then there's the whole concept of "spiking" networks which don't work like such (they seem somewhat "time dependent" from my understanding). There are tons more where those came from.

Now - in this field I don't have much knowledge; I'm no where near an expert, and I am certain it shows. At the same time, based on what I do know, I have this feeling in the back of my head that while what we have built does seem to work ok on certain classes of problems, it isn't the answer.

I think what we've built is overly complex; I think there is an answer out there much simpler. It may be something that needs new hardware. I don't think it will involve GPUs or any other linear algebra methodology (hardware or software). It might likely be one of those "forehead slappers" when we do discover it, whatever it may be.

It's a nagging feeling I have - maybe completely wrong. It just feels like we are in a certain manner trying to build an airplane that flaps its wings to fly, when the answer is ultimately much simpler. Maybe my feelings are false.

Interesting perspective that denies the whole field of cognitive psychology (despite the author being a renowned psychologist himself, albeit in the field of behavioral psychology). But I wonder, if information is going in and information going out, what is it in between if not information processing, aka computing?

> What is the problem? Don’t we have a ‘representation’ of the dollar bill ‘stored’ in a ‘memory register’ in our brains? Can’t we just ‘retrieve’ it and use it to make our drawing?

This article makes some silly points. Why didn't the student draw a minotaur, or some other thing, when they were asked to draw a dollar bill? There is a clear correspondence between the drawing and the actual dollar bill.

What seems the most likely is that, effectively, memory is like very lossy, probabilistic compression spread with redundancy across a billion analog storage nodes, similar in some ways to a Bloom filter. It’s not binary though, it’s analog. After all, there’s no value in perfectly “unlearning” or destroying a specific memory, just “free” it up by gradual deemphasis of its parts and perhaps it may effectively go away.

Also, the interplay between short-term and long-term memory formation in order to make some approximation of the short-term memory (also an approximation) somewhat permanent.

Granted, recall is imperfect and different every each time.

What a disgenius article.

The human brain is not a digital computer, but it does process information and store memories.

I enjoyed the article, and always thought it was strange that the people think there is any resemblance between the brain (something beyond comprehension) and some simple man-made tool following basic 1+1=2. I think people are unable to come to terms with their ignorance , indeed, eternal ignorance.