Brains as Analog Computers. Brains might compute, but not… | by Corey J. Maley | The Spike | Medium

Here’s a good question: Is the brain a computer? One thing that makes this a good question is that it invites many further questions. Some people have taken the idea to be metaphorical: the brain is a computer in the same way that Juliet is the sun. That is just to say that it can be an illustrative way to think or talk about something, but not to be taken literally. However, many do take it literally. My favorite example comes from the first sentence of Christoph Koch’s book, Biophysics of Computation: “Brains compute!’’ So what does it mean if we take this idea literally, too? What could it mean? In what follows, I’ll briefly look at some previous ideas about how brains might compute, then explore the role of analog computation for making sense of neural computation. One idea, explored in a previous blog post in this very forum, is that the brain is a computer because what it does can be described in terms of algorithms. Unfortunately, this view has some problems. One big one is that

Here’s a good question: Is the brain a computer? One thing that makes this a good question is that it invites many further questions. Some people have taken the idea to be metaphorical: the brain is a computer in the same way that Juliet is the sun. That is just to say that it can be an illustrative way to think or talk about something, but not to be taken literally. However, many do take it literally. My favorite example comes from the first sentence of Christoph Koch’s book, Biophysics of Computation: “Brains compute!’’ So what does it mean if we take this idea literally, too? What could it