Aeon har nyligen publicerat en spännande och läsvärd
essä av psykologen Robert Epstein, med titeln "The empty brain". I korthet argumenterar han för att de datormetaforer som ofta används i samband med försök att förstå hjärnan inte passar och egentligen bara förvirrar oss ännu mer.
No matter how hard
they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a
copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words,
pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli.
The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.
Our
shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the
invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more
than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and
other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human
brain works like a computer
...
[C]omputers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms.
Humans,
on the other hand, do not – never did, never will. Given this reality,
why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were
computers?
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