Comment by D-Machine
9 hours ago
"The brain is not a computer" != "Parts / aspects of the brain do computation".
"A computer" in the first statement is IMO obviously intended in the common usage sense of the term, i.e. the brain is not a desktop computer or smartphone, or Turing machine, or etc, and thinking of it like these things will cause more error than insights. Also, billions of interlinked mini bio quantum computers arguably produce something with emergent properties and behaviour much, much more complex than "a computer". I am with GP, the analogy to "a computer" is not super helpful here unless you highly restrict the meaning.
But yeah, the Shereshevsky case is a super interesting one, thanks for linking!
> "A computer" in the first statement is IMO obviously intended in the common usage sense of the term, i.e. the brain is not a desktop computer
No one has ever thought that a brain is a desktop computer, and that is not the common usage sense of the term in this context.
You are wrong, as I didn't limit the analogy specifically to desktop computers only, try reading the rest of what I wrote. The original analogy was obviously hedging against simplistic brain-computer analogies (GP could be read as: "the brain is not a simplistic computer"), so the response demanding to "live with that" citing computational aspects of the brain was misguided and arrogantly wrong.
Multiple other responses also point out the definition given leads to absurdities / triviality (the liver is a computer in this context), so the "correction" with citations is both inept and inapt.