In
Aeon magazine recently there is an
essay by psychologist Robert Epstein with the provocative title
The Empty Brain. Below the title is an equally provocative essay
synopsis:
Your
brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store
memories. In short: your brain is not a computer.
The
idea that Epstein is attacking is the doctrine of computationalism,
the doctrine that the mind or brain is like a computer, and that the
outputs of the mind and brain are like computations. I think Epstein
is right to attack this doctrine. But the type of attack Epstein
makes on computationalism isn't a terribly skillful one. Some of
the points Epstein makes are rather dubious, and he neglects to make
some of the best points that can be made against computationalism.
Epstein
argues as follows:
A small part of this reasoning could be argued through a certain line of reasoning, but not one that Epstein attempts. It can be argued that our memories are not actually stored physically in our brains, that somehow memory involves some larger unknown, on the grounds that we have no understanding of how neurons can store memories. Some of the other claims, however, seem rather dubious. Humans operate using words, and words are “symbolic representations of the world.” When we memorize facts and then recall those facts (as a student will do when studying for a test), that is a process that can reasonably be described as storing and retrieving, even though we have no idea of exactly how or where those facts are stored, and can't even be sure that they are being stored in the brain itself.
Epstein
then argues at some length that humans are not information
processors. This line of reasoning seems strange. Imagine you get a
phone call from your friend, who tells you he is is stuck downtown
because he ran out of money and doesn't have bus fare to return home.
You get in your car to meet him downtown to drive him home. The
phone call can surely be considered information, and your act of
driving downtown as a result of that call can be considered
processing the information. So why should we not think that humans
are information processors? Similarly, when we simply memorize a
fact, that can be considered processing a piece of information.
The
best way to attack computationalism is a way that Epstein seems to
overlook: look for important aspects or outputs of the human mind
that are completely unlike anything produced by computers. The way
to refute the “your mind is just a computer” thinkers is not to
argue “the mind never computes” but to argue “the mind does so
much more than just compute.” So let us ask: what outputs does the
human mind have that are not produced to any extent at all by
computers?
The
first output I can think of is understanding. Humans have this, but
computers do not. The most expensive supercomputer ever produced has
never had the slightest understanding of anything. Given certain
prompts, a computer can retrieve relevant information. But it
understands nothing.
Let
us imagine American foreign-exchange students working at a big
library in China, Americans who cannot understand spoken or written
Chinese. Let us suppose that people come to an information desk of
the library, with questions and information requests written in Chinese on slips
of paper. Imagine that the American library workers cannot
understand any of the questions, but have worked out a system by
which certain information sheets or books (all in Chinese) will be
given to those who have certain Chinese words (or series of words) on
their information request slips. This is rather how a computer
works. When you do a Google search for “United States,” some
computer server at Google may be able to figure out that certain information items are
to be sent back to you in response to this request. But that computer
has not the slightest understanding of any of these information
items, nor does it have the slightest understanding of what the
United States is.
And
so it basically is for all computer processing. Every single time you
ask a computer for information, it is completely lacking in
understanding of what you asked and what the outputs are that it gave
back to you. When you ask your computer what was the birth date of
President Abraham Lincoln, it may very quickly respond: February 12,
1809. But your computer has not the slightest understanding of what a
president is, what a birth date is, what any date is, who Abraham
Lincoln was, or what a person is. What you see in this case is a
correlation between a fact and the computer response. But we should
not confuse a correlation with cognition.
So
because it provides understanding and life-flow (also called
experience), the human mind is something vastly more than just a
computer (which has no such things as its output). Calling the human
mind or brain a computer is like calling your smartphone a camera.
Your smartphone includes a not-very-good camera, but it has vastly
more (also allowing you to call people, run apps, play games, and
browse the internet). Similarly it's rather as if the human mind has
a not-very-good computer inside it, but its main outputs are things
(understanding and life-flow) that are totally different from
computer outputs.
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