Hacker News Reader

Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

It is always funny to see brain metaphors morph to resemble our current stage of technological development, as the years go by. First it was anima, or hydraulic analogies of spirits and fluid moving through the body. Then it was clocks, the mechanistic processes of the brain. And so on and so on until today we metaphorize the brain to be like computer hardware. In vogue as well is comparing it to neural networks, due to the influence of machine learning and AI today. I wonder what metaphors we will come up with next.

http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/teaching/w12/philneuro/metaphorsan...

View on HN

I always liken this process of reality being a fractal boundary of mandelbrot and our attempts to understand it through language and metaphors as a way to approximate and fit that boundary. Consider the successive colored stripes like a updated and accurate metaphors in the following video

https://youtu.be/u_P83LcI8Oc?si=ObkNyUfCCSUCb0Vt

The next metaphor would be quantum computers.

There are a few that have started suggesting quantum mechanics playing a large role in cognition, but very few take them seriously (obviously it has an effect, but likely much can be understood more classically, etc).

The fact that few are moving toward that style of thinking seems to give a bit more credibility to NNs being closer to the correct model. If spiking NNs take off more, we'll probably see more arguments around that, and if Blue Brain's full in-silico modeling takes off we may see the succinct description given by those studies used to describe ideas. However, to first approximation, NNs and spiking NNs aren't really a bad way to reason about large descriptions of brain dynamics, in many circumstances.

There’s zero evidence that there’s anything more quantum mechanical about the brain than a brick. IE: Physical and chemical interactions that emerge from quantum behavior, but can be modeled just fine without QM.

Instead people seem to just equate two different complex things they don’t understand with each other.

Your comment has a feel to it of a rebuttal; but I hope it's clear that the original comment has effectively this same stancen as this.

I didn’t disagree with the what you said, but I think some people may have misinterpreted it.

Though it's not like we're flitting from one bad analogy to another. Hydraulics are a great metaphor for understanding how computers work, for example.

Some 50 year old cartoons about said topic... https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/crunchly

I always thought neural networks were an example of the analogy working the other direction. Instead of modeling our brain on the technology of the time, we chose to model the next technology on how we think our brains work?

I wonder if each iteration gets closer as we go

Heh not sure if you're aware, but our brain seems to have a special treatment or logic for contextualizing "high technology", as indicated by one well-documented failure modes: the "influencing machine" is a feature of schizophrenia which features a delusion that contemporary high technology (magnets, pneumatics, gears, mind-control drugs, satellites, prob AI now, etc) is being used by mysterious attackers to control the sufferers body and mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_the_%22Infl...

Though not mentioned in the post, schizophrenia (oddly enough) is also tied to cerebellar dysfunction: https://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/jnp.12.2.193#...

But air looms are real: https://www.theairloom.org/

In all honesty, I believe the reverse is true. Our technology seems modeled after humans and the environment we inhabit. Airplanes being glorified birds, wheels being glorified feet, computers being glorified brains or neural networks...well.

It's hard to imagine two objects in the vehicle-ground-interface conceptual space much farther away from one another than feet and wheels.

Try to spend more time imagining and entertaining that thought. They both have the same function but execute it differently.

I did. They still don't have anything in common other than being means to locomotion across the ground. Unlike, f.e. cameras that are directly inspired by the eye, airplane wings being directly inspired by bird wings. Wheels are not directly inspired by anything biological, they are probably invented from log-bearings for easier dragging of heavy things across ground.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com