I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms.
Humans, on the other hand, do not never did, never will. Given this reality, why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?
In his book In Our Own Image (2015), the artificial intelligence expert George Zarkadakis describes six different metaphors people have employed over the past 2,000 years to try to explain human intelligence. In the earliest one, eventually preserved in the Bible, humans were formed from clay or dirt, which an intelligent god then infused with its spirit. That spirit explained our intelligence grammatically, at least.
The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body the humours accounted for both our physical and mental functioning. The hydraulic metaphor persisted for more than 1,600 years, handicapping medical practice all the while.
By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as Ren Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence again, largely metaphorical in nature. In the mid-1800s, inspired by recent advances in communications, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared the brain to a telegraph.
Each metaphor reflected the most advanced thinking of the era that spawned it. Predictably, just a few years after the dawn of computer technology in the 1940s, the brain was said to operate like a computer, with the role of physical hardware played by the brain itself and our thoughts serving as software. The landmark event that launched what is now broadly called cognitive science was the publication of Language and Communication (1951) by the psychologist George Miller. Miller proposed that the mental world could be studied rigorously using concepts from information theory, computation and linguistics.
This kind of thinking was taken to its ultimate expression in the short book The Computer and the Brain (1958), in which the mathematician John von Neumann stated flatly that the function of the human nervous system is prima facie digital. Although he acknowledged that little was actually known about the role the brain played in human reasoning and memory, he drew parallel after parallel between the components of the computing machines of the day and the components of the human brain.
Propelled by subsequent advances in both computer technology and brain research, an ambitious multidisciplinary effort to understand human intelligence gradually developed, firmly rooted in the idea that humans are, like computers, information processors. This effort now involves thousands of researchers, consumes billions of dollars in funding, and has generated a vast literature consisting of both technical and mainstream articles and books. Ray Kurzweils book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (2013), exemplifies this perspective, speculating about the algorithms of the brain, how the brain processes data, and even how it superficially resembles integrated circuits in its structure.
The information processing (IP) metaphor of human intelligence now dominates human thinking, both on the street and in the sciences. There is virtually no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour that proceeds without employing this metaphor, just as no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour could proceed in certain eras and cultures without reference to a spirit or deity. The validity of the IP metaphor in todays world is generally assumed without question.
But the IP metaphor is, after all, just another metaphor a story we tell to make sense of something we dont actually understand. And like all the metaphors that preceded it, it will certainly be cast aside at some point either replaced by another metaphor or, in the end, replaced by actual knowledge.
Just over a year ago, on a visit to one of the worlds most prestigious research institutes, I challenged researchers there to account for intelligent human behaviour without reference to any aspect of the IP metaphor. They couldnt do it, and when I politely raised the issue in subsequent email communications, they still had nothing to offer months later. They saw the problem. They didnt dismiss the challenge as trivial. But they couldnt offer an alternative. In other words, the IP metaphor is sticky. It encumbers our thinking with language and ideas that are so powerful we have trouble thinking around them.
The faulty logic of the IP metaphor is easy enough to state. It is based on a faulty syllogism one with two reasonable premises and a faulty conclusion. Reasonable premise #1: all computers are capable of behaving intelligently. Reasonable premise #2: all computers are information processors. Faulty conclusion: all entities that are capable of behaving intelligently are information processors.
Setting aside the formal language, the idea that humans must be information processors just because computers are information processors is just plain silly, and when, some day, the IP metaphor is finally abandoned, it will almost certainly be seen that way by historians, just as we now view the hydraulic and mechanical metaphors to be silly.
The article goes into more detail about the problems with the brain-computer comparison and I highly recommend you give this a read. Whether you accept or reject the ideas I think it's super fascinating and the author is well spoken. This topic interests me in particular because I had a high school class about the history of human relations with animals where one topic was Descartes' asserted difference between human and animal machines, which was basically that human machines also had a non-tangible soul element inside them (wow great theory dude).
might want to check that your humors are balanced, bro
Dude argues that because people don't reproduce a drawing of a dollar bill perfectly that there is no such thing as memory. Nothing he talks about in that article actually follows. But people like continuing to mystify the brain, which is why this type of argument appeals.
It's similar conceptually to how people often think of the current period of time as the most important in human history, but assuming humans don't go extinct soon, there's almost 0 chance that it's true.
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No more shall man have wings to bear him to paradise. Henceforth, he shall walk.