Very interesting read, but I'm not convinced.
In a classroom exercise I have conducted many times over the years, I begin by recruiting a student to draw a detailed picture of a dollar bill....When the student has finished, I cover the drawing with a sheet of paper, remove a dollar bill from my wallet, tape it to the board, and ask the student to repeat the task. When he or she is done, I remove the cover from the first drawing, and the class comments on the differences.
Don’t we have a ‘representation’ of the dollar bill ‘stored’ in a ‘memory register’ in our brains? Can’t we just ‘retrieve’ it and use it to make our drawing? Obviously not, and a thousand years of neuroscience will never locate a representation of a dollar bill stored inside the human brain for the simple reason that it is not there to be found....
Specifically, her brain was changed in a way that allowed her to visualise a dollar bill – that is, to re-experience seeing a dollar bill, at least to some extent. Even in this case, though, no image of the dollar bill has in any sense been ‘stored’ in Jinny’s brain. She has simply become better prepared to draw it accurately, just as, through practice, a pianist becomes more skilled in playing a concerto without somehow inhaling a copy of the sheet music.
No one really has the slightest idea how the brain changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary.
I just don't find it credible that we are in some way "recreating" rather than "retrieving" each time. Obviously we can form detailed mental images, so what's the big deal about being able to memorise things ? People obviously do recall specific details, and they can be aware of when their memory may be faulty and confident when it's correct. Memory isn't perfect, but that seems a long way from saying that we don't have any. In any case, it's not clear to me what the major difference is between being able to remember how to do a thing, and just remembering the thing itself.
This is inspirational, I suppose, because it means that each of us is truly unique, not just in our genetic makeup, but even in the way our brains change over time. It is also depressing, because it makes the task of the neuroscientist daunting almost beyond imagination. Worse still, even if we had the ability to take a snapshot of all of the brain’s 86 billion neurons and then to simulate the state of those neurons in a computer, that vast pattern would mean nothing outside the body of the brain that produced it.
OK, but why ? What is so special about a brain that if you re-created it in exact detail down to the atomic level, complete with velocity information for each particle, both copies (if given the exact same stimuli) would not end up doing the same thing ? Is there even a single other example of another known system where that is the case ?
https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer
My brain is a pile of sand... thru the hourglass... "These are the Days of our Lives".
ReplyDelete"Your brain does not process information..."
ReplyDeleteMy teachers and bosses coulda told ya that.
It doesn't bother me at all that people sit and write stuff like that. My brain has stored a great deal of what I have read by Hofstadter, Pinker, Dennett, and others. I don't have to explain to people, who say I have not stored anything, why they are wrong. They can carry on being wrong.
ReplyDeleteThere was an impressive counterexample? or at least data point on 60 Minutes a few years back: a high-functioning autistic savant who, after a brief glance at London from the top of a tower, drew the entire scene - thousands of buildings - to near photographic accuracy, including even details that would have been difficult to notice after detailed inspection (like a person in a window a quarter-mile away).
ReplyDeleteHe didn't repeat it, and, at least from the timing perspective, it was short-term memory rather than long-term like the dollar-bill example, but it still seems like a strike against this guy's thesis.