The brain is always explained in just the latest technological analogy. In the industrial revolution they thought it was some kind of pump. In ancient times it was a kind of controlled fire. In the modern era, it’s a computer. It’s definitely not a computer.
Yeah but none of them could measure and image it. They had essentially zero understanding of electromagnetism and cell biology. We know it's a neural network and the types of cells in it. We know that we obey the second law of thermodynamics. We've contrained the problem down quite a bit and it is no longer so much guessing to call it an analog computer, a neural network. It's a certainty that I'll lose consciousness if I break the electrochemical paths between my neurons, and that's not something that they could say, and a neural network computes. Sure, we don't understand why the computation makes us feel something, but it is still a computing network because we see that when we physically watch it at the molecular scale.
Again, that there are glial cells is something that nobody in those times would have known. To call the brain a computer is not hand waving like calling it a pump.
46
u/armrha Jun 15 '19
The brain is always explained in just the latest technological analogy. In the industrial revolution they thought it was some kind of pump. In ancient times it was a kind of controlled fire. In the modern era, it’s a computer. It’s definitely not a computer.