| > Everybody in the history of humans has said the latest technology is the best model for how a brain works. There used to be a piston model for the brain. Is this the same mistake as in "The Relativity of Wrong" [1]? > people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proven to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about out modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. > [...] > My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." Modelling the brain as a bunch of pistons or as a complicated machine or clockwork thing is a lot better than as a magical clay golem or opaque soul. Modelling it as a computer is even better than that. Not a computer in the sense of an x86 desktop exactly, of course, but the concept of computation is clearly fundamental to understanding the system. Similarly, the brain is not ResNet but concepts like backpropagation are probably useful. So, sure, maybe people have been using the latest fad to explain the brain forever. But that's only bad to the extent that the latest fad is getting further away instead of closer. 1: http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html |
Ancients used to think that thinking happened in the gut and recently the microbiome pathway for describing thought has re-emerged. Both the gut pathway and the computational stream could be wrong.
The outcome of seeing the brain as a computational device will run out of juice like revelation has.