Dr Keith Wilson đź’­
“Brains don’t merely run a program. They are a particular kind of physical process that performs computation by unfolding in time.” #PhilMind #consciousness https://neurosciencenews.com/consciousness-computing-ai-30068/
Consciousness May Require a New Kind of Computation - Neuroscience News

Neuroscience News provides research news for neuroscience, neurology, psychology, AI, brain science, mental health, robotics and cognitive sciences.

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Dec 24 at 10:48pmMastodon for iOS
Show threadPineDec 24

@keithwilson Yes, but the symbolic perspective has been debunked for a while, tho some of the old crowd (pre-neuroscience perspective e.g. Gary Marcus) still thinks that way.

“discrete neural events and continuous physical processes form a tightly coupled system that cannot be reduced to symbolic information processing”

Show threadPineDec 25

@keithwilson Sorry, I should have prefaced and clarified my comment. The article is great, and a much needed statement identifying factors that show how information processing in the brain is not like that in digital computers.

My comment that it has been debunked, instead, should have said, in the recent decade or so, cognitive neuro scientists have begun to debunk the digital computer analogy by showing factors that go beyond step-by-step, symbolic, algorithmic, digital style computation.

Show threadPineDec 25

@keithwilson The good parts of paper, main principles and discussion of them, are surrounded with some pretty questionable philosophical and theretiical concepts.

One major problem is that the author confuses cognition in general with consciousness. He need not bring the notion of consciousness into the argument at all. Puzzling why he makes that category error. (1/2)

Show threadPineDec 25
Similarly his notion of functionalism seems poorly discussed. He jumps to the conclusion that cognition must be biological because it seems too complex not to be. Weak argument in that regard. But he makes many good points in total. (2/2)