Why Your Brain Is Not Like a Computer

 Here are the definitions of the word "compute" given by the Cambridge Dictionary:

• to calculate an answer or amount by using a machine:
• to calculate something using mathematics or a calculator 
• to calculate something 

Scientists are fond of making the senseless claim that the brain is like a computer. The comparison involves the  extremely misguided strategy of trying to compare human mental experiences to computing. Humans can compute by doing mental arithmetic in their minds. But such mathematical computing is only the tiniest fraction of what goes on in the human mind. 99% of the time that the average person is awake, he is not computing anything. The strategy of those claiming the brain is a computer involves using misleading language in which human mental experiences are all called "computing."  Such language is deceptive. You are not computing when you are talking, reading,  imagining, enjoying some music or lusting after some sexually attractive person. 

The "your brain is a computer" thinkers are guilty of this type of nonsense:

(1) First, they try to claim that all human mental experiences are "computing," ignoring the fact that 99% of what goes on in the human mind is not any such thing as computing, according to regular definitions of computing. 

(2) Then, such thinkers claim that we can explain such mental activity because the brain is like a computer, ignoring the facts that physically the brain has almost no resemblance to a computer. 

The "your brain is a computer" thinker is someone speaking as foolishly as someone claiming that your hand is an interplanetary spaceship. The table below illustrates why it is nonsensical to claim that your brain is like a computer. 

	COMPUTER	BRAIN
Made of metal?	Yes	No
Has an operating system?	Yes	No
Has application programs?	Yes	No
Has a known system for writing information to itself?	Yes	No
Has a known system for reading non-genetic information from itself?	Yes	No
Has addresses, indexes or a position notation system?	Yes	No
Great effects or disabling if you remove small parts?	Yes	No
All components stable?	Yes	No
Reliably transmits information?	Yes	No
Digital?	Yes	No
Has known encoding systems for storing images and language?	Yes	No
Very fast signal transmission throughout system?	Yes	No
Images or text found in removed parts?	Yes	No
Has no effect on consciousness?	Yes	No

The image below has the same table, using "check box" graphics:

I can justify some of the claims above:

• An operating system is a software framework providing low-level services that are needed for application software programs to work. Examples include UNIX, Linux, MS-DOS, the various versions of Windows, and the various versions of the Apple operating system. Creating an operating system requires man-years of intentional programming work by programmers. The brain has nothing like an operating system. 
• Application programs are software programs created by software developers using programming languages such as Java, C, Python and C++. The brain has nothing like application programs. Genes are mere lists of amino acids, and are not application programs. A key feature of application programs is abundant use of "if/then" logic, something not found in genes, proteins or DNA. 
• No one has ever shown that a brain has any system or capability for writing learned information. Claims that information is written by "synapse strengthening" or "LTP" are examples of groundless hand-waving. No one has ever shown how even the simplest phrase such as "my dog has fleas" could be written by either synapse strengthening or LTP. 
• Like all parts of the body, the brain is capable of reading genetic information from DNA. No one has ever shown that the brain has any such thing as a system or capability for reading non-genetic information such as information learned in school. We know that humans can recall school-learned information, but do not know that brains can do that. 
• While neurons are stable components, the synapses and dendritic spines of the brain are unstable components. The average lifetime of the proteins in synapses is less that two weeks. Imaging of dendritic spines show they are unstable components that do not last for years. It is estimated that the average synapse does not last for years. 
• The average speed of signal transmission in the brain is not very fast. While some components such as myelinated axons can transmit information very quickly, the brain is full of chemical synapses that transmit signals relatively slowly, because of the delays caused by chemical transmission across synaptic gaps. Also, signals travel relatively slowly through dendrites. 
• The great majority of synapses in the brain are chemical synapses, and signals do not reliably transmit across chemical synapses. Tests have shown that signals transmit across the gaps in such synapses with a transmission likelihood of only about 10% to 50%. A scientific states, "Several recent studies have documented the unreliability of central nervous system synapses: typically, a postsynaptic response is produced less than half of the time when a presynaptic nerve impulse arrives at a synapse." Another scientific paper says, "In the cortex, individual synapses seem to be extremely unreliable: the probability of transmitter release in response to a single action potential can be as low as 0.1 or lower." The failure of synapses to reliably transmit information is a major reason for thinking that recall and thinking does not come from the brain. Recall of very large amounts of memorized text can occur with 100% accuracy, and humans can do complex math calculations in their minds with 100% accuracy. But it would seem such feats should be impossible if achieved by brains that transmit signals so unreliably.  
• A computer engineer can detach the hard drive of a computer, and retrieve very many images and a great deal of written text from such a detached component.  No one has ever found by microscopic examination of brain tissue any such thing as something someone saw or something someone read or experienced.  Not a single word anyone ever read has ever been found through microscopic examination of brain tissue. This failure is a major reason for rejecting the claim that brains store memories. 
• No one has ever discovered any system by which a brain could encode learned information so that it could be stored in brain states or synapse states, nor has anyone ever even advanced a detailed credible theory of how such a thing could be done. 
• Computers can be made unusable (or all-but-unusable) by removing small parts such as the CPU. Brains, on the other hand, can operate well even when large parts of them have been removed. See my posts here and here for examples of people who suffered relatively little cognitive damage after very large parts of their brains were lost due to disease or surgery. 

 By claiming over and over again that the brain is a computer,  neuroscientists have been guilty of a deception as bad as if they were to claim that your bath towel is a flying carpet that can transport you from city to city.  The human brain is not a computer and is not at all like a computer. And even if the brain were a computer, that would not explain human minds, because computers do not have experiences,  are not persons, and do not have selves. 

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."

Just Call Them "Machine-Metaphor-Misguided"

A recent interview on the website www.vox.com inadvertently gives us a portrait of the scrambled thinking of modern neuroscientists, whose thinking about the brain is senselessly guided not by the low-level characteristics of the brain discovered by neuroscientists, but by silly mechanical metaphors in which the non-mechanical brain is constantly compared to machines invented by men.  The article containing the interview begins with the statement, "It’s difficult to talk about the human brain without inadvertently talking about computers."  No, that isn't true. 

The interview is with a zoologist named Matthew Cobb, who has written about the history of ideas about the brain.  Cobb had some insightful and intelligent-sounding things to say about the improbability of eukaryotic cells evolving, which I quoted in a 2017 post.  But in this interview his answers are empty-sounding. 

Cobb makes it sound like scientists have a history of comparing the brain to whatever is the most impressive communications technology available in a particular time. So when the telegraph was the latest and greatest in communication technology (around 1850), the brain was compared to a telegraph; and when telephone technology was the latest and greatest in communication technology (in the early twentieth century), the brain was compared to a telephone switchboard; and when computers and Internet-capable devices were the latest and greatest in communications technology, the brain was compared to a computer. 

None of these metaphors ever made sense. Telegraph systems, telephone systems and computer systems all are based on the signal transmission in copper wires that transmit signals with near-100% reliability.  The chemical synapses in the brain that are by far the most common type of synapses have no such reliability. Tests have shown that in a chemical synapse the probability of successful transmission is less than 50%. 

In an interview, an expert on neuron noise states the following:

"There is, for example, unreliable synaptic transmission. This is something that an engineer would not normally build into a system. When one neuron is active, and a signal runs down the axon, that signal is not guaranteed to actually reach the next neuron. It makes it across the synapse with a probability like one half, or even less. This introduces a lot of noise into the system."

So according to this expert, synapses (the supposed storage place of human memories) transmit signals with a probability of less than 50 percent. That's very heavy noise – the kind of noise you would have if half of the characters in your text messages got scrambled by your cell phone carrier.  A scientific paper tells us the same thing. It states, "Several recent studies have documented the unreliability of central nervous system synapses: typically, a postsynaptic response is produced less than half of the time when a presynaptic nerve impulse arrives at a synapse." Another scientific paper says, "In the cortex, individual synapses seem to be extremely unreliable: the probability of transmitter release in response to a single action potential can be as low as 0.1 or lower."

Another reason it never made sense to compare the brain to a telegraph system is that telegraph systems are based on a particular signal transmission code (the Morse Code) invented by Samuel Morse; but no one has ever discovered any evidence of any code system in the brain by which complex learned information can be reliably transmitted or stored or retrieved.  No one has ever discovered a "brain code" or a "neuron code" analagous to the Morse Code.  

It also never made any sense to compare the brain to a telephone switchboard. In an old-fashioned telephone switchboard, a caller would be routed exclusively to one particular telephone number.  For example, a switchboard operator (after getting a request) might cause the caller with the number 342-2352 to be exclusively routed so that one and one phone number would ring: the number 342-4252.   But the brain does not work like that. Most neurons are connected to very many other neurons.  A scientific paper tells us, "Each neuron may be connected to up to 10,000 other neurons, passing signals to each other via as many as 1,000 trillion synapses."

This is actually an extremely strong reason for rejecting all claims that memory recall occurs in brains or that memories are stored in brains or that brains produce thinking.  In my long post here I discuss this point at great length.  I'll give just a short summary of my reasoning: reliable signal transmission only occurs when there is an exclusive or near-exclusive relation between a receiver and a transmission source. That's why TV sets never receive ten channels at the same time. When a receiver is bombarded by signals from very many sources at the same time, it would be like a TV that is simultaneously getting broadcasts from very many TV channels. The result would be an unintelligible jumble kind of like the mess shown in the visual below:

A jumble rather like the one above is something we should expect from a brain in which each neuron is always getting signals from very many other neurons, except that the jumble and unintelligibilty would be far worse; for most neurons receive signals from very many other neurons. 

But what about the modern-day "brain as computer" metaphor? It never made any sense. To understand why, just read my post entitled "The Brain Has Nothing Like 7 Things a Computer Uses to Store and Retrieve Information." Below are the things I mentioned, things that are crucial components of computers, but have no counterpart in the brain:

• An Operating System
• An Application to Store and Retrieve Data
• The ASCII Code for Encoding Information
• A Decimal to Binary Conversion Table or Utility
• A Medium That Allows a Permanent, Stable Storage of Information
• A Storage Location System by Which the Exact Position of a Data Item Can be Specified, Allowing Fast Retrieval from an Exact Location
• Read/Write Functionality Allowing Data to Be Written to a Specific Location and Also Read From the Same Location

Asked about when scientists first started assuming that thinking comes from the brain, we get a very revealing answer from Cobb, an answer that inadvertently reveals the lack of any sound foundation for such an idea.  The answer is a minor classic of empty  insubstantiality. Here is Cobb's answer about when scientists first started assuming that thinking comes from the brain:

"Not in one moment. You mustn’t get the idea that somebody suddenly did an experiment and said, 'Aha!' Instead, there’s this slow accumulation of certainty. First, there’s anatomical demonstration that the 'viscera' like the heart have other functions. The heart is a pump, which was demonstrated at the beginning of the 17th century — so it doesn’t have the wherewithal to do the mysterious business associated with perception and thinking and so on. On the other hand, the brain, as anatomical studies showed, has got all these neurons, and it’s connected by the neurons to all the sense organs and everything else. So gradually, in the course of the 17th century in particular, people became increasingly confident that it was the brain that was doing thinking. How it did it, they weren’t quite sure."

Cobb confesses that there was never any experiment that caused scientists to assume that brains think.  He suggests that showing that hearts probably don't think was some reason for thinking that brains think, which makes no sense at all. You do not show that one organ does something by showing that some other organ does not do that thing.  The fact that neurons are connected to sense organs does nothing to show that brains cause thinking.  The phrase "slow accumulation of certainty" is very misleading. There has never been any certainty that brains think, nor any sound basis for believing that they do think.  

To the contrary, there are the strongest reasons for thinking that brains cannot possibly be the cause of lightning-fast human thinking. 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. Cobb's claim that neuroscientists aren't quite sure of how a brain could think is misleading. The truth is they haven't the slightest credible idea of how such a thing could occur.  
• The fact that severe slowing factors should make it impossible for brains to produce the lightning fast thinking that occurs in people such as math savants who can produce very complex calculations with astonishing speed. 
• The fact that unreliable synaptic transmission (discussed above) 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.

An extremely important point about human thinking is that some people are capable of doing very complex thinking with blazing speed and perfect accuracy.  The natural limitations of the brain (very heavy signal noise, many internal slowing factors, and unreliable synapse transmission) rule out the brain as a source of such phenomena. An example of such a person is Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash, called "the world's fastest calculator." He can do things such as accurately multiply 869,463,853 times 73 in just 20 seconds. This is despite the fact that he had a very bad brain injury in a motorcycle crash, an injury to the front of his head so bad it required 85 stitches, multiple operations and a medically induced coma to treat.  He still has a prominent scar on his forehead as a reminder of the accident. 

Later in the interview discussed above, Cobb makes this very misleading statement comparing brain wiring to undersea transatlantic cables:

"They looked, for example, at the structure of undersea cables that were carrying telegraph messages across the Atlantic, and they could see that there was a central core of copper and then around it was insulation. And then they looked at neurons, at nerves, and they said, 'Well, this is exactly the same.' " 

Many readers probably read that statement and thought: "Gee, I didn't know there are copper wires inside the brain." There are no such things. There are what are called myelinated axons in the brain that transmit signals quickly. But in the grey matter cortex of the brain the great majority of axons are not well myelinated. A scientific text co-written by a Yale scientist says this:

"The axons of grey matter are not heavily myelinated, unlike white matter, which contains a high concentration of myelin. The grey matter contains the majority of neuron somas, making it appear tan with circulation but grey when prepared for examination outside of the body. These somas are circular structures that house the nucleus of the cells."

Besides the lack of myelination in the grey matter of the brain, there's a crucial reason why the "transatlantic cable" analogy is profoundly misleading. The 1866 transatlantic cable was capable of transmitting eight words per minute across the Atlantic ocean, because of a lack of any "speed bumps" that would slow down the signal. In the cortex there are "speed bumps" all over the place.  They include the following:

(1) The speed of transmission through dendrites, which can be 200 or more times slower than the "100 meters per second" estimate based on transmission through well-myelinated axons. According to one expert, dendrites make up 90% of neural tissue. 
(2) Synaptic delays, each about .5 millisecond, which end up being a huge slowing factor because so very many synapses must be traversed to pass through a decent amount of cortex tissue.
(3) Synaptic unreliability or noise, the fact that a signal across a synapse is typically transmitted with only between 10% to 50% likelihood, a factor that is typically ignored but which has a huge impact on effective speed.
(4) Synaptic fatigue, the fact that a synapse will so often need a rest period after firing, a period that can be more than a minute.
(5) Tortuosity, the fact that nerve signals must travel through sinuous paths that are not straight lines.
(6) Folding of cortex tissue, a further slowing factor. 

(7) Low myelination in the cortex, where the gray matter has little myelination. 

Every one of these factors is ignored by 95% of discussions of brain signal speed in the popular press. Altogether these factors should cause us to conclude that the brain cannot possibly be the source of very fast recall and very fast thinking in people such as mathematical savants. 

After discussing how brains were first compared to telegraph systems and then compared to telephone systems, Cobb is asked "what came after the telephone?" He describes the latest silly machine metaphor, whose silliness he fails to perceive:

"Well, the dominant metaphor is that the brain is something like a computer. It’s carrying out some kind of calculations. And that idea, which came into being in the 1940s and early 1950s, still dominates over 70 years on." 

To see why this metaphor makes no sense, read my post entitled "The Brain Has Nothing Like 7 Things a Computer Uses to Store and Retrieve Information."  Among the reasons why it is senseless to claim that brains make minds and brains are like computers, some additional reasons are:

• Minds are conscious, and computers are not.
• Minds can have novel abstract ideas, and computers cannot. 
• Minds can have curiosity and morality, but computers cannot. 
• Minds have experience and feelings, and computers do not. 
• Minds can be interested in things, but computers cannot. 
• Minds can experience pleasure and pain, but computers cannot.

A very general question that we should be asking again and again to scientists is: "What forced you to believe that?" When there is a good evidence basis for thinking something, scientists will be able to discuss some evidence that forced them to believe some particular thing, regardless of whether they wanted to.  There is nothing at all that forced scientists to believe that brains produce thinking. They simply adopted such a belief because they didn't want to believe in souls or because they wanted to say they had an answer to a deep question they did not understand.  The lack of any good evidence  basis for believing that brains produce thinking is suggested by the very wobbly "not in one moment" answer given by Cobb quoted above. 

Neuroscientists should not be asking, "What machine created by humans should we compare the brain to?" Instead, neuroscientists should be asking, "What low-level facts that we have learned about the brain should cause us to reduce and limit our ideas about what the brain could be capable of?" Above I have listed many such facts, senselessly ignored by neuroscientists.  There are many other such facts mentioned in other posts on this blog. 

The Brain Has Nothing Like 7 Things a Computer Uses to Store and Retrieve Information

Our neuroscientists like to claim that our memories are stored in our brain. There is a way to test this claim. I will review each of the things that a computer uses to store and retrieve data, and in each case I will ask: is there something like that in the brain? I will use pretty much the simplest example of data storage and retrieval I can think of: the storage of a small file containing a few words of text. Below are the things that a computer uses to store and retrieve such information.

Item # 1: An Operating System

Besides applications that do specific things, a computer has what is called an operating system that does various low-level tasks. Bill Gates originally made his fortune by selling the MS-DOS operating system that was the first high-selling operating system used by personal computers. Nowadays if you have a desktop computer you may be using some Windows operating system such as Windows 10, or some Apple operating system. An operating system is a highly complex and coordinated base of code that serves as a kind of foundation for applications that are built to leverage that operating system.

As far as we know, the brain has no such thing as an operating system. There are particular genes that list the amino acid constituents of particular brain proteins, but those structural proteins are like hardware, rather than the software that is an operating system.

Item # 2: An Application to Store and Retrieve Data

While it is possible to store a small amount of data on a computer merely using a nerdy command-line string of characters, almost no one does that to store text data. Instead, 99% of the time someone will use an application to store data. An application is a program that does some specific type of work, typically by leveraging the functionality in the operating system. A person using a Windows operating system might use an application program such as Notepad, Wordpad, or Microsoft Word to store text data.

As far as we know, the brain has no such thing as application programs. No one has ever given a coherent description of how storing information to the brain would involve making use of “how to” instructions stored elsewhere in the brain, some set of instructions that could be compared to an application program.

Item # 3: The ASCII Code for Encoding Information

Text is never directly written to a file stored on your computer's hard drive or a zip-drive. If, for example, you were to break apart your computer's hard drive (or break apart a small zip drive), and look at its contents in a high-magnification microscope, you would never see little tiny “a,” “b,” and “c” characters. What actually happens when your text data is stored is this: (1) the ASCII code is used to convert each of your text characters into a number; (b) those numbers are then converted from decimal into binary; (c) the binary information is then stored on your computer's hard drive or a zip drive. The ASCII code consists of a table in which each character is represented by a number.

Does the brain have anything like this? As far as we know, it does not. The ASCII code is an example of an encoding protocol, and no one has ever been able to discover any encoding protocol used by the brain to store information.

Item # 4: A Decimal to Binary Conversion Table or Utility

The ASCII code merely converts letter to decimal numbers, numbers that use the Base 10 system. But computers store information using binary code, and when binary is used, numbers are stored using the Base 2 system. So rather than directly writing text represented in the ASCII code, an application must convert from decimal to binary.

This is another encoding protocol that does not correspond to any functionality known to exist in the brain.

Item # 5: A Medium That Allows a Permanent, Stable Storage of Information

When a computer has all the bits needed to write, it must have a stable medium to write to. Some of the earliest stable media to write to were clay (used in writing cuneiform), parchment, and paper. Nowadays computers use a stable medium such as magnetic disks.

Does the brain have anything like this – some medium allowing a permanent, stable storage of information? It would seem not, at least nothing that could be used by the brain to store memories that last for years. The main assumption during the past decades has been that memories are stored in synapses. But synapses are an unstable “shifting sands” type of medium subject to high molecular turnover and structural turnover. As discussed earlier, rapid molecular turnover in synapses should make them unsuitable for storing memories that last longer than a year. But humans are able to remember many memories for 50 years or longer. As a scientific paper puts it:

Experience-dependent behavioral memories can last a lifetime, whereas even a long-lived protein or mRNA molecule has a half-life of around 24 hrs. Thus, the constituent molecules that subserve the maintenance of a memory will have completely turned over, i.e. have been broken down and resynthesized, over the course of about 1 week.

The DNA inside neurons is a stable medium for permanent information storage, but it doesn't seem to be used for storing our memories. Our DNA has been exhaustively studied by projects such as the Human Genome Project and the Encode project. No one has discovered the memories of any particular human in that human's DNA.

Shockingly, there seems to be no plausible candidate for a particular component in the brain where the brain could be storing memories that last for decades. Neither synapses nor DNA is such a plausible candidate.

Item # 6: A Storage Location System by Which the Exact Position of a Data Item Can be Specified, Allowing Fast Retrieval from an Exact Location

When a computer stores data on a hard drive or zip file, it's not similar to adding to a heap, something similar to pouring another cup of water in a swimming pool full of water. It's always rather like putting some new papers in a particular file of a filing cabinet. This is so that information can be retrieved rapidly. You can get papers from a file in a file cabinet quickly, but it would take you way too long to get that information if you just had some giant heap of papers in the middle of your office.

So whenever your computer stores data, it has some idea of a specific location where this data will be saved. For example, you may store your little text data in a file called SaturdayNote.txt in a folder or directory called MyTextFiles. That gives the computer a way to retrieve this information quickly, by first going to that particular folder or directory, and then searching for the file named SaturdayNote.txt file in that particular folder or directory.

Does the brain have any type of similar system for storing information in specific named locations? As far as we know, it does not. It's hard to conceive of how such a thing could possibly exist in the brain. The brain is more like a tower-sized ball of tangled spaghetti than some city with labeled streets. There seems to be no way in which a brain could ever know exactly where some data was that it was storing. Neurons don't have any coordinate system allowing anything to tell a precise location in the brain. If your brain somehow wrote some information to a brain position of X=2345, Y=24342, Z=73252, there would be no way for the brain to record that exact position in a way that would allow that exact location to be quickly accessed. Writing some information to the brain would seem to be like writing on some index card, and throwing it into the middle of an Olympic-sized swimming pool full to the brim with index cards. Under such a setup, instantaneous retrieval of some precise information should be impossible.

Item 7: Read/Write Functionality Allowing Data to Be Written to a Specific Location and Also Read From the Same Location

The discussion under Item #6 above was purely a discussion of an organizational system in which some data can be given a location for it to be stored. A separate requirement is that data can be written to a storage medium, and also read from that storage medium. The reading and the writing must occur in a very consistent way, so that the data read is exactly the same as the data written.

Your computer has one or more systems capable of such read/write functionality. For example, a hard disk in a computer is a read-write device. There is complicated hardware involved. There is a read-write arm which can move back and forth in a particular line, and also a spinning disk underneath that arm. At the end of the read-write arm is a read-write head that can read data when it is above some particular location. With the combination of these two things, the system can read and write from any desired location on the disk.

A read-write head of a hard drive

Does the brain have any such read-write functionality? Some think that what is called long-term potentiation acts like a write system for storing memories. But the term long-term potentiation is very misleading. Long-term potentiation (LTP) is actually a very short-lived effect, almost always lasting less than a few weeks. The brain may have some kind of system for writing something that will last a short time, rather comparable to someone writing in the wet beach sand with his fingers. But there is no known write mechanism by which the brain could permanently store data.

When it comes to read functionality, we know of no mechanism at all for such a thing. There seems to be absolutely nothing in the brain similar to the read-write head of a hard disk, something that might allow the brain to “zoom in” and read from one particular location. A system has to be organized in a very specific way for read-write functionality to be possible, and the brain seems to be organized in no such way.

Our neuroscientists tend to dogmatically speak as if our memories are all stored in brains, but this is more of an ossified dogma rather than a truth determined by observations. Neuroscience itself undermines such a doctrine, by indicating that there is no stable component that the brain could be using to store memories lasting decades. Comparing the brain to a computer, we find that the brain has nothing like any of the 7 main things that the computer uses to store and retrieve data. But our minds recall obscure information instantly, and a single phrase may get you to instantly recall some old tune you have not heard in 50 years (as recently happened to me).

The discussion above should be very discouraging to anyone who hopes to explain how brains could achieve the memory capabilities of human minds. To such a person I must merely say: you're barking up the wrong tree. The feats of our minds cannot be explained solely in terms of the brain. We must postulate some psychic or spiritual component to account for the feats of our minds, something beyond the brain. Such a thing is needed to account for the wonders of psychic phenomena, and is also needed to account for the ordinary marvels of the human mind such as the instantaneous recall of childhood memories.

We may imagine the following conversation between a curious young boy and a distracted mother walking on the street.

Boy: Mommy, who made the clothes I wear? And who made the TV shows I watch? And who made the cars I see? And who made the street lights?

Mother: The answers are simple, my son. They are: Santa Claus, Santa Claus, Santa Claus, and Santa Claus.

We can also imagine a similar conversation between a philosopher and a neuroscientist.

Philosopher: From whence comes that hint of the transcendent we feel when we look at a sky ablaze with stars? From where do our loftiest ethical principles arise? Why do we lie awake and ponder the weightiest riddles of existence? How do we ever grasp the most abstract notions such as the idea of the universe and the eternal laws of nature?

Neuroscientist: The answers are simple. They are: neurons, neurons, neurons, and neurons.

Such simplistic answers are convenient, but should we not suspect such complex questions have equally complex answers?