<story><title>The brain is not a computer</title><url>https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anotheryou</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t see it.&lt;p&gt;- 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 (&amp;quot;for a second I thought this was...&amp;quot; and than more information from the senses falsifies&amp;#x2F;corrects the probabilities).&lt;p&gt;- The brain is imperfect in reading from memory, but it still does. It just uses really good, lossy compression. It&amp;#x27;s loosing much detail, but often filling holes probabilistically. Besides neural nets, in computers this would be: defaults, recovery blocks etc. In part the good compression comes from an additional layer of abstraction, but computers can do this too. A very simple example are the the blurry color layers in jpg.&lt;p&gt;- We are better at recognizing than recalling, because a highly compressed memory is not enough to recreate the original, but has enough indicators to verify. This us very much like a checksum.&lt;p&gt;What there is, is the bias of the &amp;quot;hardware&amp;quot;. Our brains are not good at deterministic iterations, computers struggle with the complexity of forming wisdom and fuzziness and feedback does not come naturally to them either. But in principle, we are both turing complete or something :)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alexwebb2</author><text>Agreed. This article struck me as exceedingly pedantic.&lt;p&gt;Given the author&amp;#x27;s background, I&amp;#x27;d put money on the idea that this is the result of years of frustration at having his life&amp;#x27;s work dismissively reduced by casual observers to something like &amp;quot;yeah, it&amp;#x27;s basically a computer&amp;quot; and thinking they therefore understand all the intricacies of the human brain. I can see how that might grate on a person in his field and trigger a response like this.</text></comment>
<story><title>The brain is not a computer</title><url>https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anotheryou</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t see it.&lt;p&gt;- 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 (&amp;quot;for a second I thought this was...&amp;quot; and than more information from the senses falsifies&amp;#x2F;corrects the probabilities).&lt;p&gt;- The brain is imperfect in reading from memory, but it still does. It just uses really good, lossy compression. It&amp;#x27;s loosing much detail, but often filling holes probabilistically. Besides neural nets, in computers this would be: defaults, recovery blocks etc. In part the good compression comes from an additional layer of abstraction, but computers can do this too. A very simple example are the the blurry color layers in jpg.&lt;p&gt;- We are better at recognizing than recalling, because a highly compressed memory is not enough to recreate the original, but has enough indicators to verify. This us very much like a checksum.&lt;p&gt;What there is, is the bias of the &amp;quot;hardware&amp;quot;. Our brains are not good at deterministic iterations, computers struggle with the complexity of forming wisdom and fuzziness and feedback does not come naturally to them either. But in principle, we are both turing complete or something :)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>d99kris</author><text>To add on to the image compression theory, I read somewhere (maybe here on HN) that perhaps many image memories are stored as difference from a &amp;quot;nominal&amp;quot; representation. So one might not remember a complete face for example, but rather the features that stood out from a &amp;quot;normal face&amp;quot;.</text></comment>