On biological and artificial consciousness: A case for biological computationalism - ScienceDirect

Fig. 1. The persistence of the digital-and-discrete computation metaphor in neuroscience. (a) Classical digital machines are organised around separable hardware components (memory, arithmetic–logic unit, control unit) linked via an instruction set architecture and compiler toolchain. (b) This architecture embodies the assumption that computation is defined over discrete-valued systems, an assumption that has carried over into neuroscience. (c) Neural processes are commonly framed through three arbitrarily separated scales (microscopic, mesoscopic, and macroscopic) whose constituent units are treated as functionally homogeneous. (d) The integrate-and-fire neuron exemplifies this inheritance: conceived as a device that converts discrete inputs into discrete outputs, it mirrors the abstraction of symbol manipulation in digital systems. This illustrates the tenacity of computational analogies that frame the brain in digital terms, i.e., an assumption this paper seeks to critically examine

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• Mackenzie Dion