{"id":8315,"date":"2016-06-01T08:35:55","date_gmt":"2016-06-01T07:35:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/?p=8315"},"modified":"2016-06-01T11:56:26","modified_gmt":"2016-06-01T10:56:26","slug":"the-brain-is-not-a-computer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/sciencesurf\/2016\/06\/the-brain-is-not-a-computer\/","title":{"rendered":"The brain is not a computer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer\">aeon.co\/essays<\/a> has a a long and convincing plea<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer &#8230; we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images &#8230;<br \/>\ncomputers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms&#8230;<br \/>\nThe idea that memories are stored in individual neurons is preposterous: how and where is the memory stored in the cell?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Indeed, all NMR studies tell us, that many brain areas are being involved in simple tasks. I just wonder why all the current research money goes into <a href=\"http:\/\/www.humanbrainmapping.org\/i4a\/pages\/index.cfm?pageid=1\">human brain mapping<\/a> projects? We know, it doesn&#8217;t work and it is not just a matter of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/why-the-human-brain-project-went-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it\/\">poor organization<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I particular liked the objection of aeon.co that\u00a0human consciousness acts\u00a0like computer software. Just bits and bytes\u00a0get immoral as shown in the movie Transcendence (2014) with disastrous results for humanity. Or\u00a0like with the <a href=\"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2016\/03\/24\/microsoft-silences-its-new-a-i-bot-tay-after-twitter-users-teach-it-racism\/\">Twitter bot Tay<\/a> that had to be shut down due to its inability to recognize when it was making offensive or racist statements.<\/p>\n\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"bottom-note\">\n  <span class=\"mod1\">CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 10.04.2026<\/span>\n <\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>aeon.co\/essays has a a long and convincing plea Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/sciencesurf\/2016\/06\/the-brain-is-not-a-computer\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The brain is not a computer<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8315"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8320,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8315\/revisions\/8320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}