Comments on: The brain is a computer, not.

By: Lauri

Lauri — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 09:00:26 +0000

This is a bit beside the point but I’ll mention it anyway. The clock – steam computer – electronic computer progression reminds me of a vignette from the history of economics: Harry Collins mentions (in The Golem, or The Golem at Large, I forget which one) that sometime in the late forties an economist at LSE (I think it was) tried to construct a model of the British national economy that was a huge network of tubes, pumps and vessels containing some kind of fluid. You could adjust the flow at various points to find the optimal settings, like adjusting the central heating system of a block of flats. An analogue computer, that is. It didn’t quite work.

@ T.P. Perhaps not a poor machine, considered as a whole – I suppose in this regard the human animal would be a pretty decent general purpose machine. After all, you can use a barrel with a hole in it to keep time, even though it was made for storing and dispensing beer, for example. It’s not a good clock but usable in some circumstances. Likewise, as you said yourself, a clock kan keep better time than a human being: this means a human being can keep time too (pretty well in fact).

And of course, anything any computer can do (in the formal sense) can be done by a human being drawing with her finger in the sand.

Unfortunately, she will pretty soon get bored and find something more worthy of her limited time on earth. This makes her a poor computer, and she will need to be replaced, as some people are planning to do, in the name of the intellectual adventure that awaits us beyond the limits of wetware.

The essence of machines may not be non-human but rather inhuman.

By: Tuomas Pylkkö

Tuomas Pylkkö — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:11:28 +0000

Here is something to think about:

Is it not true that when men inveted these tools and items – the clock, the steam engine and the computer – they did so precisely because these tools can operate functions that humans cannot? A clock can keep time better than even a network of people. It is also more practical and economic to operate.

If this is true, then shouldn’t we rather state that the essence of machines is non-human? We can argue over the philosophical points of whether or not a human is amechanistic or not, but I believe that nobody disputes the fact that the raison d’être of machines stems from then having superhuman qualities in the first place.

What is L’Homme-machine then? If it is not a contradiction in terms, is it merely a poor machine? If so, who cares about it?

By: makislav

makislav — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:26:13 +0000

I think that by following Kant we can distinquish epistemological and ontological “levels”: When we research the brains it is solely from a human standpoint. Objects in space and time are human perspectives, not ‘things in themselves’. I think this would perhaps clarify the obvious problem of free will: Though we would know the function of the brains precicely, atom by atom, we would still have the question: what about our free will?

We still have this antinomy between free will and determinism, which can not be solved; any attemp to solve it would be a metaphysical hypothesis. We would have to have an absolut perspective on things.

This wasn’t perhaps anything remarkable for an experienced cognition scientist. This just came in to my mind when reading your thesis: ‘The only “proof” is a metaphysical assumption that everything in the universe is a machine’ which I agreed with.