11Authorities Seem to Realize That "Your Brain Is a Computer" Is a Junk Metaphor

Biologists have long been guilty of passing off dubious metaphors. For example:

(1) Observing the wonders of biology, and having no explanation other than a survival-of-the-fittest effect, biologists have made claims such as "natural selection is an engineer" or "natural selection is a tinker." An engineer is a human who conceives complex ideas about designs that can be implemented. A tinker is usually a person who willfully attempts to improve an existing design by experimental trial and error. A blind natural process having no will, mind, goal or motivation cannot accurately be compared to either an engineer or a tinker; and since such a process does not involve actual selection or choice, it is misleading to describe it with the phrase "natural selection." 

(2) Observing DNA molecules that are mere repositories of low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up particular protein molecules, quite a few biologists have used misleading metaphors in which DNA is compared to a blueprint or a recipe for making an organism.  Because it does not specify the anatomical structure of an organism or any of its organs or any of its cells, the "DNA as blueprint" metaphor is profoundly misleading.  How a speck-sized ovum is able to progress to become a full-sized human baby is a wonder of origination far beyond the understanding of today's scientists. 

(3) Observing brains that lack some of the main characteristics of computers (such as software, an operating system, and any known facilities for reading and writing new learned information), biologists have repeatedly claimed that the brain is like a computer. Very strangely, this metaphor is offered to try to explain how humans have minds, as if those advancing the metaphor failed to realize the gigantic shortcoming that computers don't have minds, don't have selves, and don't have consciousness.  How can anyone think you can explain a mind and a self and a consciousness by using some metaphor refererring to something (a computer) that is mindless and selfless, without any consciousness? 

Recently at the physics paper server we have a book-length paper by 11 authorities, one entitled "In search for an alternative to the computer metaphor of the mind and brain." The paper consists of different experts expounding on how  "your brain is a computer" fails as a metaphor.  A series of experts is asked four questions:

(1) What do we understand by the computer metaphor of the mind and brain?

(2)  What are some of the limitations of this computer metaphor?

(3) What metaphor should replace the computational metaphor?

(4) What metaphor should replace the computational metaphor?

After a section by Madhur Mangalaml and Damian G. Kelty-Stephen in which they state that "attempts to explain human intelligence by referring to an anatomical organ as an entity that 'computes' is likely a case of circular reasoning,"  we have a section in which the same authors advocate a replacement metaphor of a cascade, making the strange claim that "a hierarchical configuration of events nesting at multiple scales achieves adaptive, context-sensitive behavior through a balance of noise and order." Then we have Paul Cisek offer a replacement metaphor of the brain as a "control system." Then we have Benjamin De Bari and James Dixon giving us a silly classification scheme in which organisms are classified as examples of "dissipative systems." It's more shrink-speaking reductionism in which humans are described like they were some mere physics process. 

Then we have Luis H. Favela who makes this assessment of the lack of very notable progress in the heavily-funded Human Brain Project:

"At eight years in, HBP leadership published a list of the project’s six most impressive achievements (Sahakian et al., 2021). These include a human brain atlas visual data tool, touch-based telerobot hand, neuro-inspired computer, and being cited in 1,497 peer-reviewed journal articles. There should be no doubt that much of this research is impressive, particularly when put into various contexts, such as the potential for advancing robotic limbs to improve the lives of people who have had amputations. However, it is far from clear whether any of these achievements have illuminated our understanding of brains and minds in a significant way." 

The high point comes in the discussion by Fred Hasselman in Section 6.2 (page 69). Hasselman refers us to these neuroscience case histories:

"When MRI scans of the brain show a large black hole inside the skull of a patient, indicative of a liquid occupying 50 –75% of the volume that typically contains vast amounts of interconnected neurons, anyone would be surprised to learn the patient is an otherwise healthy 44-years-old French civil servant, married, with children (Feuillet et al., 2007). In China, a 24-year-old woman, married with a daughter, went to a hospital because of persisting nausea and was found to be the 9th recorded case of Cerebellar agenesis: her cerebellum was missing completely (Yu et al., 2015). Due to Rasmussen syndrome, a  3-years-old Dutch girl underwent surgery to remove her language dominant hemisphere. This chronic focal encephalitis had caused a severe regression of language skills, but at age seven, except for slight spasticity of the left arm and leg, she is living an everyday life and is fully bilingual in Turkish and Dutch (Borgstein and Grootendorst, 2002)."

A table from the paper

Hasselman gives a reference to a paper by Marek Majorek, which cites a page from The Lancet of 9 February 2002. We see a picture of a girl lacking almost half of her brain. The picture caption (from The Lancet) reads this:

"This 7-year-old girl had a hemispherectomy at the age of 3 for Rasmussen syndrome (chronic focal encephalitis). Incurable epilepsy had already led to right-sided hemiplegia and severe regression of language skills. Though the dominant hemisphere was removed, with its language centres and the motor centers for the left side of her body, the child is fully bilingual in Turkish and Dutch, while even her hemiplegia has partially recovered is only noticeable by a slight spasticity of her left arm and leg. She leads an otherwise normal life."

Referring to operations removing half of a brain to treat very severe recurrent seizures, Hasselman then states this: "Vining et al.(1997) studied the burden of illness in 58 children who had undergone hemispherectomy due to various kinds of debilitating afflictions of the brain and, remarkably, found that most children were better off with half a brain: 'We are awed by the apparent retention of memory after removal of half of the brain, either half, and by the retention of the child’s personality and sense of humor.' " Hasselman mentions appeals to "youthful brain plasticity" as an explanation for such retention, something which makes no sense. If memories are stored in the brain, you should lose half of those memories if half of the brain is removed, and no conceivable amount of "plasticity" or "adaptability" could explain the retention of such memories. Hasselman states this:

"Consider the case of E.C., a 47-year-old right-handed, right-eyed patient who had his left (language) dominant cerebral cortex removed (Smith, 1966). E.C. had a pre-operative performance I.Q. (WAIS) of 108. Seven months after his dominant hemisphere was removed, his performance I.Q. was 104. He scored 85 out of 112 items correct on a verbal comprehension test. One would expect that removing a hemisphere storing many decades of unique traces of experienced events would scale to a much larger effect on I.Q. and cognitive ability."

Hasselman proposes a hypothesis of "Radical Embodied Cognition" in which "a massively redundant reality exists that is composed of many nested spatial and temporal scales on which physical processes interact by exchanging energy, matter and information." Later we have a writer who lectures us about resonances in the brain, and an expert who argues the obscure idea that the brain is a "fractal antenna." 

All in all, the paper gives us a further basis for drawing this conclusion: claims that your brain is a computer are futile and fallacious. Such claims are fallacious partially because the brain has nothing like seven things that a computer uses to store and retrieve information (as discussed here). 

To the contrary, there are the strongest reasons for thinking that brains cannot possibly be the cause of lightning-fast human thinking and memory recall. They include the following:

• The fact that no one has the slightest idea of how any arrangement of neurons could ever cause the arising of abstract ideas. 
• The fact that severe slowing factors (involving things such as cumulative synaptic delays) and many types of severe signal noise should make it impossible for brains to produce the instant accurate recall routinely occurring in humans and the lightning fast accurate thinking that occurs in people such as math savants who can produce very complex calculations with astonishing speed. 
• The fact that unreliable synaptic transmission (occurring with less than 50% reliability in a chemical synapse) should make accurate memory recall and very accurate thinking impossible, contrary to the reality that humans such as Hamlet actors can recall large bodies of text with perfect accuracy, and other humans can do very complex mental calculations "in their head" with perfect accuracy.
• The fact that not the slightest sign can be found of human learned information by microscopically examining brain tissue, and the fact no one even has a workable detailed theory of how human learned information (such as facts learned in school) could be translated into neural states or synapse states. 

Trying to prove the brain is a computer is a futile, because if you were to prove such a thing, you would not explain consciousness and self-hood. Computers don't have selves, and are no more conscious than a stone. 

Although they all still seem to prefer the idea that the brain is the source of the mind, the 11 paper authors have mentioned many observations that undermine such a claim and conflict with it. Had the authors been willing to touch upon the abundant evidence for observations of the paranormal (such as evidence for out-of-body experiences during cardiac arrest when the brain has shut down), they could have mentioned many additional observational facts that undermine claims that the brain is the source of the human mind. 

I will end with a quote from one of the papers cited by the paper I have discussed, a paper by Marek Majorek. He states this:

"It appears that the theory that electrical impulses recorded in the brain are traces of ‘information processing’ taking place within individual neurons and/or in neuronal assemblies, and ultimately leading to the emergence of consciousness in its varied and rich facets, is a fairy tale. There was a time, not very long ago, when serious scientists of the period adhered to the doctrine of abiogenesis, i.e. were convinced that life can arise spontaneously from inorganic matter. Not only did the great, but from today’s perspective rather ancient, Aristotle think that it was a ‘readily observable truth’ that aphids arise from the dew which falls on plants, fleas from putrid matter, mice from dirty hay, crocodiles from rotting logs at the bottom of bodies of water, and so on (cf. Lennox, 2001), but still in the seventeenth century Alexander Ross wrote: ‘To question [spontaneous generation] is to question reason, sense and experience. If he doubts of this let him go to Egypt, and there he will find the fields swarming with mice, begot of the mud of Nylus, to the great calamity of the inhabitants’ (Ross, 1652). We know better today, of course. It seems justified to claim that currently widespread beliefs attempting to interpret consciousness as a form of emergent property of purely physical systems are just as deeply mistaken about their subject matter as the beliefs of abiogenists concerning the origin of living organisms were about theirs. Just as mice cannot arise of the mud of the Nile, so consciousness and other more complex mental phenomena cannot arise from the ‘mud’of the firings of neurons in the brain. Thus the question, ‘Where can it arise from?’ imposes itself on us with renewed urgency."