https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...
This article seems really hung up on the distinction between digital and analog. It's an important distinction, but glosses over the fact that digital computers are a subset of analog computers. Electrical signals are inherently analog.
This maps somewhat neatly to human cognition. I can take a stream of bits, perform math on it, and output a transformed stream of bits. That is a digital operation. The underlying biological processes involved are a pile of complex probabilistic+analog signaling, true. But in a computer, the underlying processes are also probabilistic and analog. We have designed our electronics to shove those parts down to the lowest possible level so they can be abstracted away, and so the degree to which they influence computation is certainly lower than in the human brain. But I think an effective argument that brains are not computers is going to have to dive in to why that gap matters.
You should look into the physical church turning thesis. If it's false (all known tested physics suggests it's true) then well we're probably living in a dualist universe. This means something outside of material reality (souls? hypercomputation via quantum gravity? weird physics? magic?) somehow influences our cognition.
> Turning complete does not apply to the brain
As far as we know, any physically realizable process can be simulated by a turing machine. And FYI brains do not exist outside of physical reality.. as far as we know. If you have issue with this formulation, go ahead and disprove the physical church turning thesis.
This is odd because the dominant view in neuroscience is that memories are stored by altering synaptic connection strength in a large number of neurons. So it's not clear what his disagreement is, and he just seems to be misrepresenting neuroscientists.
Interestingly, this is also how LLMs store memory during training: by altering the strength of connections between many artificial neurons.
> But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever.
Really? Humans don't ever develop memories? Humans don't gain information?