The Spike

I followed your links and ended up in this rather excellent essay: https://medium.com/the-spike/your-cortex-contains-17-billion-computers… One of the final points the author makes is that the brain might be a neural network made up of as many as 89 million neural networks. That's a staggering concept. If true, I wonder how anyone stays sane with that level of entropy in the system!

Yeah this pretty much sums it up: https://medium.com/the-spike/evolution-doesnt-give-a-damn-what-you-thi… Also, Pinker isn't a scientist of any sort, he's an accredited and institutionalized evangelist. You guys wouldn't take opinions of someone going to conferences and trying to convert you to use Go lang instead of something else as seriously as those of Guido Rossum would you? His whole thesis requires an idea of linear progress which is highly contested, and the metrics of happiness he uses also can be easily "Goodhart's Law"ed by him to show whatever he thinks is happening. I'm not even getting to his Epstein stuff, which some might cry foul about, but I grew up around regular people and not in Silicon Valley, so a liar and a cheat in one field is probably a liar and a cheat in another to me, sorry.

I don't particularly like that essay because the author seems focused on the idea that "your brain is a computer" is a metaphor rather than a theory (see [1] for a more nuanced discussion). The author correctly points out that past eras developed metaphors to explain how the mind might work based on the technological innovations they were familiar with, but I think there's a lot more nuance in the computational theory of the mind. Namely that the notion of computation is much more abstract, and potentially more portable across disciplines, than some of the historical examples that the author of that Aeon piece brings up. Anyway, obviously I don't have any real answers but for whatever reason the brain-as-a-computer theory rings pretty true for me and I've enjoyed reading essays and watching talks about the topic [2] [3]. [1] https://medium.com/the-spike/how-to-find-out-if-your-brain-is-a-comput… [2] https://medium.com/the-spike/yes-the-brain-is-a-computer-11f630cad736 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKQ0yaEJjok ^-- This is the first part in an ongoing series of lectures that Joscha Bach has been giving at the Chaos Communication Congress; if you watch it and find it interesting you should check out the proceeding installments.