Thread by @tyrell_turing

1/ I want to very briefly address this article that came out today by @matthewcobb in the Guardian:

theguardian.com/science/2020/f…

2/ I'm tempted to ignore it, but I think that would actually be a shame, because in many ways, it's a good article. Yet, it is also a confused article, and I worry about it confusing both scientists and the public more broadly. So, I'll just quickly address the confusion.

3/ The mistake is a classic mistake. @matthewcobb is not the first to make it, and I know he will not be the last. It's this: to think that Von Neumann machines (like our laptops) are the only type of computer, and that their properties define computation. That is false.

4/ If you study neurophysiology, it becomes very clear that our brains are nothing like our laptops, desktops or smart phones. They don't work the same way, period. @matthewcobb's article describes all this well enough, and on this he's dead right.

5/ But there can be many other types of computer. A computer is just a device that can compute many different computable functions. Our brain is one such device, so brains are literally computers. I've covered this previously:

medium.com/the-spike/yes-…

6/ You can tell when someone is confused about this right away when they talk about the "brain as computer metaphor", or start making reference to hydraulic pumps and older theories of the brain based on earlier SoTA tech to argue that we're making the same mistake now.

7/ What this tells you is that the writer/speaker thinks computers are equivalent to Von Neumann machines. So, on some level they're right, since brains aren't like Von Neumann machines.

8/ But, honestly, I don't know any neuroscientists who think the brain works like a laptop. As such, this is a straw-man. There may still be some people in other disciplines who think brains function like Von Neumann machines, but I suspect they are an ever shrinking demographic.

9/ So, to @matthewcobb or any other person who reads his article: take the good stuff, which is the discussions of all the ways in which understanding the brain is difficult and not helped by pat analogy to the sort of computers we use to do our office work on a daily basis.

10/ But, realise that the terminology is being abused here, and brains *are* computers, just a very different kind than our laptops. Neuroscientists are trying to understand how brains compute, and we all know it's not like our laptops, so you don't have to point that out to us.

Fin/ Neuroscience has a long way to go, but we're not so deeply off-track as this article implies. We know full well that brains don't operate like the device I'm typing these messages on right now. Please don't make our discipline seem more wrong-headed than it is.