Post #1770308

2026-04-19 13:29 UTC

Edit: I found it - it&#39;s worth a read https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer A couple of months ago, I read an article about the metaphor of the human mind as a computer. It was outlining the problems with this metaphor, and exploring how we might understand human cognition without resorting to the idea of computation. I *think* it may have been a review of a book on the same topic, or possibly have been an outline by the author of such a book. Of course, I can no longer find any trace of it. Any ideas?

Replies (4)

@benjamingeer@piaille.fr 2026-04-19 13:35

@linguacelta@toot.wales Was it this? https://www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-neuroscience/the-brain-in-theory-an-excerpt/

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@smolwaffle@union.place 2026-04-19 14:09

@linguacelta@toot.wales Any idea what the publication venue might have been? Magazine, journal, blog, newspaper? Was it recently written as well?

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@fishidwardrobe@mastodon.me.uk 2026-04-19 14:31

@linguacelta@toot.wales i remember being mildly annoyed at this article. our brains *do* process information. computers do not: they process DATA. semantics perhaps, but knowing the difference between information (that is me in that picture) and data (here are all the pixels in that picture) is kind of central to the topic at hand?

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@LupinoArts@mstdn.social 2026-04-20 07:43

@linguacelta@toot.wales terrible article. First, the author builds a strawman argument and claims it to be "mainstream" (i mean, who seriously claims that brains work *exactly* like a computer?! It is a model, an abstraction...) and secondly, even his view of the human brain can easily paraphrased using terms from computation. In the end, even stimuli-response-interaction is just another way of information processing...

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