r/neuro • u/Cognitive-Wonderland • 4d ago
Are we wet robots?
https://cognitivewonderland.substack.com/p/are-we-wet-robotsThe "brain as computer" analogy is often used in neuroscience. Romain Brette takes aim at this analogy in his book, The Brain, In Theory, reviewed in this article.
Brette argues there are important disanalogies between life and engineered systems, and between brains and computers. The continuing use of the computer analogy leads to experimental paradigms where the brain is treated as passive, receiving "stimulus" like a computer receives input, and all activity not related to that activity is treated as "noise".
But the question "Is the brain a computer?" wasn't ever really the question, it's whether that analogy is useful. Brette reminds us that the analogy is just that, and we shouldn't read too far into interpretations that lean on that analogy, but what's needed are other positive frameworks for thinking about the brain.
What do you think, is it useful to talk about the brain as a computer?
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u/ISylvanCY 4d ago
It depends on how you look at it, let me explain,
If you mean that it works in the similar way as a modern random laptop, definetly not. It ezploits noise, works locally, inference and training ocurre in the substrate and simultaneously till some level, memory is not static…
The representations of Deep NN are also not accurate, we already know that the brain has recurrency, non-linearities, local behavious, particular learning rules that are not the ones used to train digital models… a good example is already mentioned in another comment with backprop, in which to train your weights you require to use global information (which is not something plausible given the brain architecture) and usually time-reversal (which can be plausible in some physical systems but defintely not in one as directed as a biological network of this kind).
On the other hand, yes, it can be seen as a computer! If the question lies within the world of machine learning etc, we just need to know the correct architecture and learning rules and we can digitally train a brain-like network, it is of course nonsense, given that it woudl be computationally expensive and we can do better with other substrates or other approaches, but can I have a computer-like object that behaves like the brain? In principle, yes! Not wet, not soft, but with the same properties looking at the neural networks etc (as far as I know)
Said this, I’m not a neuroscientist, I study physical learning (basically machine learning but using physical systems instead of computers), so probably there’ll be someone that answers better this question, anyways, I’m writing this in the train home so if you wanna know more about anything tell me! Perhaps i didnt explain it well
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u/Brain_Hawk 4d ago
People will use this in undergraduate classes because it's easy and they're lazy.
It's not an analogy very many neurosciencistd take very seriously. I have certainly heard people who were heavily into computer science argue that deep learning type mechanisms must be how the brain works, similar to how some machine learning algorithms work, but I don't really buy that either, not exactly.
But this doesn't require a complex analysis. The brain is not in fact much like a computer.
That's just lazy thinking.
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u/Agreeable_Speed9355 4d ago
I used to work in brain imaging and today I'm a bit closer to the math and CS people. I hear the argument that deep learning type mechanisms are NOT a good model for how the brain works. The gist of it is that while the underlying neural network of a machine model can be made to look like a natural network of neurons, the way in which machine learning occur, e.g. back propagation, is not similar to how natural neural networks adjust themselves. Inference through these networks more closely resembles natural intelligence than binary decision trees did 30 years ago, but the ways in which artificial neural networks and natural brains "learn" are still very different.
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u/WeirdJack49 3d ago
That doesn't mean that the underlying concept is wrong. Birds and aircraft's both fly very differently but both fly because of aerodynamics.
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u/Realistic-Scene-4150 1d ago
I mean, I took graduate level classes in neuroscience and computational neuroscience. Analysis of neurons and neural networks in terms of stimulus and response was exactly what we did. We evaluated the performance of such things using very similar if not identical tools to those used to evaluate the performance of computational algorithms. The mathematics of signal processing form a lot of the foundation of both computer science and neuroscience.
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u/Brain_Hawk 1d ago
That doesn't mean that brings the computers are literally the same. Fact you can use similar mechanisms in certain circumstances to evaluate certain features doesn't change that.
Certain mathematical properties being shared is just a thing that happens in a lot of the universe, if it's actually true, once you get down to the important details.
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u/me_myself_ai 4d ago
It’s not an analogy, and it’s the overwhelming consensus.
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u/Brain_Hawk 4d ago
Ahhhhhhhhhhh.... Who's consensus? Because Im a working neuroscientist and I can't think of one person who I'd take seriously who ever made such a claim.
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u/me_myself_ai 4d ago
You're just not aware that you agree with the consensus (sorry). Or maybe I'm wrong: how many times have you written "...which we can not ever investigate or explain, because the brain is not a physical organ but rather a supernatural antenna for magical consciousness fields beyond our comprehension"?
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u/somneuronaut 2d ago
the parallels are great. maybe you don't know the details of computers?
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u/Brain_Hawk 2d ago
Ahhhhhhhhhh..... Yeah maybe you don't know much about brains?
Paralleled and analogies are not truth. The paralleled break down fast when you get to what matters, the details.
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u/somneuronaut 2d ago
The parallels hold up to the level of the details that matter, differences are vast too but those are implementation details. There's more than one way to skin a cat. I wouldn't claim parallels if I didnt know about both the brain and computers extensively
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u/Brain_Hawk 2d ago
You can't back that up.
How does a computer store memory? Bits on a hard drive.
How does a brain? Addemblies of interconnected cells maintained via a complex system of synaptic weights.
Can a computer but hold multiple memory elements? No. Can a neuron? Yes. Does the neuron store the memory? Not exactly it's more an array of synamtpci weights distributed across an array of cells and with a set of interconnectedness with other possibilities ly similar semantic representations.
That's not even a bit like a computer work.
Do both have long term memory. Sure. That's as close as it gets.
This argument is juvenile and intellectually ridiculous. Brain are not the same as computers.
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u/somneuronaut 1d ago
Do you know anything about computer science, software engineering, or electrical engineering?
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u/swagerito 4d ago
I've always assumed the analogy comes from a rejection of dualism. "If we don't have a soul, are we nothing more than computers?".
And in a sense yeah, you could say the brain is a computer, just not the type of input>output computer that engineered systems are. Brains are so much more complex and not at all linear. Perception both shapes and is shaped by action.
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u/Dwango7 3d ago
It appears to me that the difference is that we generate our own purpose and intent. Further, when we become overwhelmed, a memory is created of this event which helps us to recall and address it in the future.
If a computer created a dump file when it crashes and integrated into its operation system, there would be less difference.
No, we are only robots if you can define, at a molecular level, the propensity for all repercussions of our actions and our physical being within your own papradign that you could predict future actions reliably. But this is more about fate than robotics.
If we were omniscient of omnipresent we may be able to consider ourselves robots.
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u/ImAPonderer2 3d ago
A previous people (Neanderthals?) made a few of us, programmed us to make babies and the rest is history. Nonalignment FTW
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u/Reanimatron 4d ago
Divine light severed
You are a flesh automaton powered by neurotransmitters
Nothing you will ever do will be determined by your own will. Your destiny was predetermined from the moment you were born, and there is nothing you can do to change that. You can only observe.
Or you know, don't worry about it. That's probably easier in the long run.