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From: mmm@cup.portal.com (Mark Robert Thorson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,sci.bio,sci.psychology,alt.cyberpunk
Subject: Re: The Bandwidth of the Brain
Message-ID: <37220@cup.portal.com>
Date: 25 Dec 90 04:13:15 GMT
References: <1990Dec18.181935.23319@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
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> The brain is not a computer.  It is, however, the most complex and
> little understood thing that so many (but not all :-)) people have in 
> common.  In this respect, it is like a computer.
> But:
> Back in the days when a telephone switchboard (or even Thaddius Cahills 
> fabled Tellharmonium) was the most complicated, technologically
> advanced task machine, people compared that to a brain.
> Fact is, we've all just been fooling ourselves.
> Anyboby get what I'm saying?

I think the brain contains structures which resemble the
artifacts Man makes.  These include photo albums, calendars, address
books, dictionaries, etc.  The reason we make these objects is that
there are organs in our brains which require off-line mass storage,
so these organs somehow convince the brain to make external objects
which hold data in a compatible form.

Note that I'm not referring to objects such as telephone exchanges
whose structure is largely dictated by the needs of the application.

I'm mostly talking about objects whose structure is adapted to meet
the needs of the way the brain works.  There is one object which fits
this description most of all:  computers.  If you look at the architecture
of the early vacuum-tube computers, you see how closely the structure
is modeled on the way a child does math.  In ENIAC, numbers were handled
as individual decimal digits, and multiplication was handled one digit
at a time by looking it up in a multiplication table.

Our later computers have been somewhat optimized, but their design is still
to a large extent driven by the likes and dislikes of the people who
program them.  It is only with the advent of advanced compiler technology
that it has become possible to introduce human-unfriendly computer
architectures like RISC.

I'm not saying the whole brain is a computer, but parts of it do function
much like a computer in some ways.  Among these ways are processes which
are very central to consciousness, such as making plans (programming)
and following instructions (program execution).