The brain is not a computer

I don't see it. - The brain is more fuzzy, but it still stores the link between the smell of roses and the look of roses. Just as a probability, like a Bayes network. And you will fall for Illusions, just like a Bayes network can be wrong ("for a second I thought this was..." and than more information from the senses falsifies/corrects the probabilities). - The brain is imperfect in reading from memory, but it still does. It just…

Oh dear. This isn’t my field at all, and maybe I’m just doing a bad job of understanding their point, but this sounds completely bogus. Really...the brain doesn’t create representations of visual stimuli or store memories? Under what possible definitions of those words can this statement be sensical? Surely the author believes that visual stimuli cause measurable changes in brain state, and that people can indeed remember past visual stimuli. Then how is it true that brains don’t create representations…

> What is the problem? Don’t we have a ‘representation’ of the dollar bill ‘stored’ in a ‘memory register’ in our brains? Can’t we just ‘retrieve’ it and use it to make our drawing? We can have a representation of a dollar bill, and you can see that the student retrieved that representation: he drew a picture. Sure, the representation is not exact, and some details have been omitted, but this is true of all representations, even computerized ones. Uber…

It is quite amusing to read this essay 8 years after it has been published, now that we know about the similarities of how large language models (LLMs) and the human brain function. The average brain does indeed not copy processed information perfectly, as the author demonstrates. It generalizes and creates or strengthens connections between neurons that represents that information. Just like how LLMs increase or decrease their own weights.