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RE: the ip perspective on brains,

From my perspective, science is catching up on this - in pockets. It goes under a lot of different names, and to be honest it's be around in many forms for a long time. I highly, highly recommend catching up on Dr. Michael Levin and related work on this. There is still levels of speculation here, but there's hard science and empirical observation that broadly, the neuro story on memory synapses doesn't work. The alternative, that nearly every part of the body is both capable of independent problem solving and memory, puts actionable medical alternatives on the table.

The long story is that memory appears entirely to be opportunistic. Memory can and is stored in virtually everything that a body gets access to, internally AND externally. The brain's main function is to re-imagine and reinterpret memory, not to be dictated by it. A memory isn't a fact in a broad sense, it's a dynamic that acts on the body. This is different in many ways from the hard division we try to make in modern computer design (although I'd argue that even the difference between memory and instruction in von neuman design continues to fall apart over time).

That said, and i realize this is semantic linguistic issue, but I do believe brains are computers, but only in the broadest sense of what computation could be, not in the highly specific sense of them being digital von neuman devices. What's often missed in discussion about a computational world view is being clear to the reader that there is no privileged sort of computation. There's nothing at all special or privileged about what our digital von neuman machines are, other than in a sense them being metabolisms that are functionally different than us.

When I express that brains are computers, I like to add things like, "in the sense that dance is computation, or politics is economics, or matter is experience, or money is culture." Which is to say they can be different and yet the same, depending on entirely the perspective of what you mean by something "being" anything at all. (It's similar to why ontologies are both useful but always wrong).

The bitter truth though is that I don't think there is anything privileged about the human brain either -- but that doesn't come in the sense of there being no difference. I think quite the opposite, seeing many of /the other things/ as being capable, but being in its own sorts of attendance and meaning, provides much more rich questions of "why are we different, then?" Certainly more than presuming that it is capability of any particular thing that separates us from the other things.

Ultimately, I love artists because I want an ecosystem of art and artists and art admirers, and because I think respect should transcend form, not seek reductively the most commoditized realization of it.

In many ways... isn't this what indigenous cultures already more or less believed?

as everyone knows, the brain is very like a steam engine

So basically my body has experienced the LLM bubble and those experiences smeared across my brain so that when I later consider if brains are computers my little grey cells remember all the bad experiences and revolt and make me think about cat-boys instead. Whoa, the math checks out!

r.e the ip vs organism point. I gotta admit I'm struggling with seeing how anyone could think people are like computers in the first place when we're so obviously not. I had a bunch of jumbled thoughts written out, but they all really boiled down to this.

Like I understand that some people think computers and people are similar* but I don't. I don't understand it at all. Today computers are good at running electricity down wires really really fast to do stuff like execute x86_64 assembly language, while humans are way better at everything else **. And then there's stuff like encephalitis and gut brain connection which are very organic things which can influence thinking. And then and then like (handwaves) computers don't experience at all aahhhh

* There was that Google programmer who fell in love with LaMDA

** Arguably humans are also better at x86_64 assembly language than computers are, except for speed, given that: 1. we created it 2. if you gave us a block of assembly language with a bug somewhere in the middle we'd have a better chance of finding it. 3. We can edit it.

His main major piece of evidence for this is a basic experiment, where he has a student draw two images of dollar bills - one from memory, and one with a real dollar bill as reference - and compare the two.

Unsurprisingly, the image made with a reference blows the image from memory out of the water every time, which Epstein uses to argue against any notion of the image of a dollar bill (or anything else, for that matter) being stored in one’s brain like data in a hard drive.

To be frank, it feels like I'm being told that the Riemann hypothesis is incorrect on the basis that 1 + 1 = 2

Sure, maybe brains don't actually compute anything, but "Our memory is faulty" would be the first step in getting to the evidence, not the evidence itself, assuming "our memory is faulty" is even the direction we need to go.

It could easily be argued, with just as much evidence, that our brains prioritized efficiency over accuracy with its algorithms and that's why it's harder to recall an accurate image of a dollar bill.

Frankly this is a false dichotomy. The brain is necessarily and demonstrably doing computing tasks. However the complexity of those tasks is immense, and the neural ecosystem itself incomprehensibly complex as well. The brain is an organic computer, responding and changing in response to its environment.