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guy recently linked this essay, its old, but i don't think its significantly wrong (despite gpt evangelists) also read weizenbaum, libs, for the other side of the coin
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this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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chapotraphouse
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Meh, this is basically just someone being Big Mad about the popular choice of metaphor for neurology. Like, yes, the human brain doesn't have RAM or store bits in an array to represent numbers, but one could describe short term memory with that metaphor and be largely correct.
Biological cognition is poorly understood primarily because the medium it is expressed on is incomprehensibly complex. Mapping out the neurons in a single cubic millimeter of a human brain takes literal petabytes of storage, and that's just a static snapshot. But ultimately it is something that occurs in the material world under the same rules as everything else, and does not have some metaphysical component that somehow makes it impossible to simulate using software in much the same way we'd model a star's life cycle or galaxy formations, just unimaginable using current technology.
I could describe it as gold hunter with those sluice thingies, throwing water out and keeping gold, there I described short term memory.
I don’t disagree it’s a material process, I just think we find most complex analogy we have at the time and take it (as author mentions), but then start taking metaphor too far
Yeah but we, if "we" is people who have a basic understanding of neuroscience, aren't taking it to far. The author is yelling at a straw man, or at lay people which is equally pointless. Neuroscientists don't think of the mind or the brain it runs on as being a literal digital computer. They have their own completely incomprehensible jargon for discussing the brain and the mind, and if this article is taken at face value the author either doesn't know that or is talking to someone other than people who do actual cognitive research.
I'ma be honest, i think there might be some academic infighting here. Psychology is a field with little meanginful rigor and poor explanatory power, while neuroscience is on much firmer ground and has largely upended the theories arising from Epstein's heyday. I think he might be feeling the icy hand of mortality in his chest and is upset the world has moved past him and his ideas.
Also, the gold miner isn't a good metaphor. In that metaphor information only goes one way and is sifted out of chaos. There's no place in the metaphor for a process of encoding, retrieving, or modifying information. It does not resemble the action of the mind and cannot be used as a rough and ready metaphor for discussing the mind.
I work in neuroscience and I don't agree that it is on much firmer ground that psychology. In fact, as some people in the community have noted, the neuroscience mainstream is probably still in the pre-paradigmitic stage (using Kuhn). And believe it or not, a lot of neuroscientists naively do believe that the brain is like a computer (maybe not exactly one, but very close).