The Brain & The Computer
I recently ran across an excellent article linked by Jon Mitchell entitled ‘The Empty Brain’. This piece, by Robert Epstein, declares that the metaphor of the brain as a computer is, well, bad. The author gives an example that, though slightly flawed, succinctly displays the difference between the mind and the machine. As a simple experiment, Epstein asked a subject to draw a dollar bill from memory. That person found they were only to draw the most rudimentary version of the object (a long rectangle with a portrait in the middle, “In God we trust” underneath, and 1’s on each corner), where a computer would obviously have been capable of recalling every single detail.
The author gives his reasoning for this:
What is the problem? Don’t we have a ‘representation’ of the dollar bill ‘stored’ in a ‘memory register’ in our brains? Can’t we just ‘retrieve’ it and use it to make our drawing?
Obviously not, and a thousand years of neuroscience will never locate a representation of a dollar bill stored inside the human brain for the simple reason that it is not there to be found.
Interestingly enough, this means that again, as a hard drive could be ‘cloned’, a brain’s information would likely be totally useless:
Worse still, even if we had the ability to take a snapshot of all of the brain’s 86 billion neurons and then to simulate the state of those neurons in a computer, that vast pattern would mean nothing outside the body of the brain that produced it. This is perhaps the most egregious way in which the IP metaphor has distorted our thinking about human functioning. Whereas computers do store exact copies of data — copies that can persist unchanged for long periods of time, even if the power has been turned off — the brain maintains our intellect only as long as it remains alive. There is no on-off switch. Either the brain keeps functioning, or we disappear. What’s more, as the neurobiologist Steven Rose pointed out in The Future of the Brain (2005), a snapshot of the brain’s current state might also be meaningless unless we knew the entire life history of that brain’s owner — perhaps even about the social context in which he or she was raised.
Intriguing!
Though the brain-as-a-computer analogy makes sense in the most simplistic of terms, I believe that it’s not only inadequate because, but in fact fails to represent one of the very best parts of our minds. As Pablo Picasso famously quipped, “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”
Indeed, I am happy to have a mind that, though it cannot serve back some moment perfectly captured, can come up with dreamscapes on its own. A mind that can explore the nuance of a thought or a word or a concept, and allows me to write this very article. Computers are not capable of this process (at least, not yet), and that’s a distinction very much worth remembering.
