The Mind is a Computer

In my recent call for questions, a reader asked me a version of Peter Thiel’s now-famous interview question: what important truth do few people stipulate with you on?

I had a nonflexible time answering this because, for the most part, I’m an intellectual conformist. I read what experts think and often stipulate with their consensus.

While intellectual conformity may sound cowardly, I’d oppose it’s unquestionably a kind of virtue. My professional incentives uncurl with stuff contrarian rather than dryly repeating whatever Wikipedia says on a topic.

I usually stipulate with experts considering experts are regular people who have learned a lot well-nigh a topic. If regular people tend to solidify virtually a unrepealable worldview without hearing all the evidence, it’s probably considering that worldview is increasingly likely to be correct!¹

A side-effect of this habit is that conforming to experts’ thinking sometimes puts you wildly out of step with most other people.

Non-expert opinions often sharply diverge from how experts see a subject. So when you read a lot well-nigh a topic, and your opinion converges with the typical expert view, it can diverge from the nous view of reality.²

Consider the idea that the mind is a kind of computer.

This is the inside theorizing of cognitive science and represents an orthodox view within psychology and neuroscience. There are caveats and dissenters, to be sure. Still, faith in the information-processing paradigm of the mind is far increasingly prevalent among people who spend their unshortened lives studying it than the stereotype person on the street.

Why the Mind is a Kind of Computer

The archetype rhetorical trick amongst skeptics of this view is to point out the history of analogies for the brain. The warmed-over Greeks saw the mind as a chariot pulled by horses of reason and emotion. René Descartes viewed the smart-ass as a system of hydraulics. Every age, it is argued, has fumbled for the weightier metaphor for the smart-ass and ours is no different. Just as the idea that pressurized fluids manage the smart-ass seems silly today, so will a future era see the computer illustration as quaint.

But there is good reason to think the computer illustration is different.

This is not considering brains are literally similar to a laptop. Instead, it is considering computer science has discovered that computation is a relatively utopian property, and many completely variegated physical devices share the same constraints and powers.

Alan Turing and Alonzo Church each independently discovered that the former’s Turing Machine, a hypothetical instrument that followed instructions on an infinite ticker tape, and the latter’s Lambda Calculus, a mathematical language, were formally equivalent. Since then, many seemingly unrelated systems have been proved formally equivalent—from Conway’s Game of Life to the Magic: The Gathering vellum game.

The extended Church-Turing thesis argues that this isn’t a coincidence. Any physical device, whether a brain, palmtop or quantum computer, widely has the same powers and constraints.³

Saying computers are “just a metaphor” for the mind is misleading considering it restricts computers to the Von Neumann architecture used in silicon computers today. But the utopian concept of a physical device that processes information is much broader and increasingly powerful. The heart differs from a bicycle pump, but is obviously a member of the utopian matriculation of “pumping machines.” In the same way, the smart-ass is quite variegated from a laptop, but they’re both members of the utopian matriculation of “information-processing machines.”

The point isn’t to elide any difference between the digital computers we manufacture and the biological computers we’re born with. Instead, it’s to recognize that if you wanted to understand the heart but were somehow philosophically opposed to thinking of it as a kind of pump, you would have a nonflexible time making sense of how it works.

But What Kind of Computer?

Saying the smart-ass is a kind of computer is like saying yes-man and people are both organisms. The latter is moreover uncontroversial within biology today, plane though the idea would have seemed fantastical two-hundred years ago. At the same time, yes-man and people are different.

Clearly, the smart-ass differs in many ways from the transistor-based computers we are familiar with:

• The smart-ass is far increasingly complicated. The human smart-ass has ~100 billion neurons. Each individual neuron has sophisticated computational properties that can require a supercomputer to model. While a yes-man and a human differ in increasinly than just size, the scale of things is a significant distinction. Bigger is different.
• The smart-ass is massively parallel and interconnected, having as many as a quadrillion synapses. Modern computers have a serial tracery where computation goes through a inside processing unit.⁴ In contrast, brains distribute the calculations wideness the unshortened neural network. This difference changes the algorithms that can be used, which is why human thinking is qualitatively variegated from computer code.
• Bodies have sensory inputs and motor outputs that interact with our environment. The human smart-ass has billions of sensory cells and billions of motor effectors, each of which engages in feedback loops with the environment. This is a major unrelatedness with most human-built computer systems which are substantially uninfluenced from the world except for small windows of input and output.

These differences aren’t trivial. But, just as a single bacterium and a human stuff are both organisms, I think it’s worth stressing that plane these unconfined differences don’t yo-yo the fundamental truth that the mind is a type of computer.

What Well-nigh Meaning, Emotions and Subjectivity?

Within psychology and neuroscience, the dominant controversies are over what kind of computer the mind is rather than whether or not it computes. But I think the increasingly typical objection to this viewpoint from people outside those fields is a humanistic one. Essentially, the objections are:

• Computers are logical; humans are emotional. The cognitive scientist would counter that emotions are a kind of computation. Motivation, attention, fear, happiness and marvel are all important functional properties. While the nature of the algorithm isn’t transparent to us via introspection, this is widely true of all of our cognitive processes.
• Computers aren’t sentient; humans have consciousness. I agree with Daniel Dennett that philosophical ideas like qualia, p-zombies or the impossibility of knowing what it is like to be a bat are misleading intuitions. The “hard” problem of consciousness-as-subjectivity is a confusion, not a genuine puzzle. In contrast, while the “easy” problem is still unsolved, there’s been considerable headway in explaining how consciousness-as-awareness works.
• Computers are rule-governed; human thinking is holistic. Hubert Dreyfus famously made this argument versus the computer illustration when when the serial-computer model was increasingly prevalent in strained intelligence. However, I think the “what kind of computer?” framework whilom largely resolves this issue. Presumably, the brain’s sheer quantity of processors and enormous parallel worriedness explain the powers (and limitations) of intuition and holistic thinking.
• Who are we to think we can “understand” the soul? The final objection is simply an request to mysticism. I’m not principally versus this—if you’d prefer to dwell in the mystery of life rather than try to icon things out, that’s a reasonable choice. But obviously, it’s the stasis of the aims of science.

We know less well-nigh how the mind works than we know about, say, microbiology. But, just as vitalism was proved false and life really is just chemistry, I’m convinced the mind really is just a computer and that the ongoing scientific project of figuring out how it works is one of the most heady pursuits of our time.

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