At a neuroscience web site with many a misleading article (www.thetransmitter.org), I see an interview with a neuroscientist who boasts that he will correct our misconceptions about the brain. But the neuroscientist starts making false statements immediately.
Neuroscientist Romaine Brette goes wrong immediately by claiming "Neurons are not components; they are living units, and this is how they should be treated." Neurons are actually components. The dictionary defines a component as "a part or element of a larger whole." Neurons are components of the brain and components of the human body.
Brette then soon commits another serious error by stating, "If you look inside a neuron, you will never find some stuff called information." That is dead wrong. Neurons do not have any memory information that anyone has been able to discover. The microscopic examination of brains has never yielded a single speck of information that anyone ever learned -- not a single word or even a single letter or number. But a neuron does have a very large body of information: the genetic information stored in DNA. Such DNA absolutely does have information, specifically information about which amino acids make up particular proteins used by your body.
It is true that all kinds of false claims have been made about what is in DNA, such as the false claims that DNA stores a recipe, program or blueprint for building a human body But such false claims should not make us go to the erring extreme of denying that the DNA in cells has information. DNA emphatically does have very much information: low-level chemical information.
Most absurdly, Brette claims that it is "impossible" that a neuron could contain information, which is as erroneous as claiming that it is impossible that a book could store information.
An interviewer named Paul Middlebrooks then gives us the suggestion that we are being seriously misled by neuroscientists calling the brain a prediction machine. Middlebrooks says this:
"Brains encode information in representations that perform computations to make predictions, right? No, no, no, no, and no. That's what Romain Brette says. That's his response to those ill-conceived notions that neuroscience relies on to try to explain how cognition works."
Later on in the interview, Brette makes this extremely false claim: "Nothing can contain information."
But Brette does make some good points. He says that comparisons between computers and brains are invalid, for various reasons. For example, he says this:
"If you just look at a voltage trace of a neuron, it's fluctuating. It is not stable. People then talk about firing rates because they want to have stable quantities, but it's a cheat. Of course, if you measure anything, you get a number, but whatever it refers to is actually fluctuating. The next second, you get a different number. Intrinsically, it's a fluctuating system. It's not like a bit that you can write and then later on read several times."
Later Brette criticizes the talk of neuroscientists who confuse cognition with computation. He says this:
"Logical propositions are coded in the activity of the neuron. That was the assumption that, deep down, it's computation with smaller operations, small logical operations, and every kind of behavior is something like that. It's a theory, right? It just didn't turn out to be correct. It is basically a theory that cognition is made of computation."
Brette is referring here to the theory of computationalism, debunked in my four posts here. The theory commits two huge errors. The first is describing the brain as if it was something like a computer. The brain lacks almost all of the characteristics of a computer, as shown in the diagram below. The second error of computationalism is conflating computation with cognition. Cognition requires an understanding and conscious mind, and no computer is a mind.
Later Brette makes this statement, which seems to complain of misleading language by his neuroscientist colleagues:
"It's kind of a mashup of different ideas that you find in the neuroscience literature. You have a mashup of classical computationalism when you say that you have mental representations that the brain computes and so on. You have connectionism where, in fact, not everything is symbols. Are there neural representations? Yes, sometimes, but sometimes they are not. I don't know. It's intermediate variables which don't necessarily represent something in particular. Then, you also have dynamical talk in neuroscience, but that is referred to in terms of computation. It's completely confusing."
The interview is promoting Brette's new book "The Brain, in Theory." Looking that book up on Amazon, I read this in the description of the book: "He [Brette] proposes understanding the brain as a self-organized, developing community of living entities rather than an optimized assembly of machine components." The brain as a community? That sounds as misguided as "the brain as a computer."
If you look up the book on Amazon, you can read its beginning. I did that, and I was not very impressed by its first pages. Brette starts out (pages 2-3) by arguing that the brain cannot be like a computer, because computers are engineering, and Darwin said that organisms are just products of unguided natural processes, not results of deliberate purpose. How silly to be starting out your book on brains by saying that we must follow Darwin rather than starting out by appealing to the relevant physical facts about brains. You can debunk "the brain is a computer" idea easily enough without appealing to authority, by discussing the lack of similarity between brains and computers.
Brette has a blog, and on that blog he states this: "A striking fact about mainstream theories of the brain is that they take their inspiration mostly from theoretical computer science and engineering theory ('codes', 'computation', 'algorithms', 'information' (in bits), etc.), while being largely ignorant of theoretical biology (e.g. theories of life, organisms and evolution), and even dismissive of biology (just 'implementation')." It seems that those outside of the neuroscience field are not the only ones saying much is amiss with neuroscientist theories of the brain.
On the page here of his blog, Brette addresses the issue of reproduction, one which biologists have failed to credibly explain. Brette states this:
"One fundamental question is: how can a system produce a copy of itself? This question was famously addressed by von Neumann, who argued that the system must build a new copy from instructions, i.e., the genome is a representation of the organism. I have shown that this does not apply to living organisms and proposed an alternative (11). The alternative is that the parent system simply produces a new system that depends on the parent’s structure, but not necessarily a copy. Production becomes self-reproduction as iterated systems converge to a fixed point, in the absence of building instructions. The genome then acts as a transmissible constraint shaping development, not building instructions. In other words, biological reproduction is an emergent property."
Brette seems to realize that genomes have no instructions for building a body. Correct -- genomes do not even have instructions for how to build a cell or any of its organelles or any instructions on how to build protein complexes. This is a gigantic clue about the fundamental nature of reality, one of two reasons why the origin of every human is a miracle beyond the explanation of today's science. Scientists cannot explain morphogenesis because DNA lacks any specification for how to build a body or any of its organs or cells. So scientists lack a credible account of how you physically arose. And they also lack an explanation for how you mentally arose, because of endless reasons (discussed at length at this site) why brains fail to explain minds and memory.
A materialist does not escape that problem by making the nonsensical claim that "biological reproduction is an emergent property." A property is a simple characteristic of something, such as height, weight, mass, volume and so forth. For humans, biological reproduction is a nine-month process of the most enormous complexity. Calling that a "property" is as absurd as calling your life a property.
In one post of his blog, the neuroscientist Brette confesses that "there is currently no convincing theory of consciousness."
I watched on television recently a four-part series on the meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. The story of Chernobyl is a story of how overconfidence in experts led to massive numbers of people being poisoned by radioactivity. The Soviet Union haughtily thought of its nuclear scientists as being the greatest in the world. But the Chernobyl reactor had a terrible design flaw. Because of the flaw, when someone pressed a button that was supposed to shut down the reactor for a test, this caused the opposite result: a runaway increase in the nuclear reactions, causing a meltdown.
Largely because of overconfidence in technoscientific experts, very many got poisoned by the meltdown at Chernobyl. And largely because of overconfidence in biology experts, the thinking of very many got poisoned, when they uncritically accepted unbelievable dogmas being peddled by brain specialists whose bungling has been as bad as those who designed the reactors of Chernobyl. We have a strong reason for suspecting that another case of bungling by technoscientific experts in Eurasia caused a disaster worse than Chernobyl. But amazingly, people keep bending their knees to authorities, and keep following the bad speech customs fostered by neuroscientists. And so, rather than making unobjectionable and indisputable claims such as "I had trouble remembering" or "I was thinking a little slowly," people make silly dogma-dripping statements such as "my brain had trouble remembering" and "my brain was thinking slowly."
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