On Brains and Computers

It's been a while since I've posted here, but perhaps the best impetus for doing so is when I have more to say on a subject than can reasonably be covered in a Facebook post.  I had recently shared this article by famous psychologist Robert Epstein, claiming that the brain is not a computer: that it does not process information, retrieve knowledge, or store memories.  This elicited a rather mocking response from Jeffrey Shallit, a computer scientist who teaches at the University of Waterloo.  I'm afraid my credentials pale in comparison to either of them.  My degree is in sociology and anthropology, not computer science, psychology, or philosophy.  My knowledge of computers and AI comes mostly second-hand from philosophers and scientists I've read on the subject.  I am simply a philosophy enthusiast with a keen interest in issues of the philosophy of mind.  Nonetheless, however limited my knowledge of computers or mathematics, I think I may be able to offer some insight on the situation at hand.

One of the central disagreements here seems to be the definition of "information."  I'm prepared to award the point to Mr. Shallit here, I think we should at least attempt to understand what Epstein is getting at.  Humans experience inputs just as computers do, but computers, as I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong here), take in data bit-by-bit, building their models and programs from the ground up.  The human mind, as Husserl astutely pointed out, encounters not merely the sense impressions of which Locke spoke, but objects.  There is a holistic quality to perception that moves from the general to the specific, not the other way around.  I have no qualms with continuing to call this "information," so long as we understand that we are talking about very different kinds of information.

The One and the Many

There is an increasing tendency among philosophers and other intellectuals to insist that everything is interconnected.  So consistently will they harp on the sickness and wrongheadedness of the tendency to divide the world up into discrete, autonomous entities, that one wonders who exactly they're arguing with.  The Cartesian worldview is dead, and Aristotelianism doesn't get much praise either.  So who is contesting this interconnectedness that all these intellectuals insist upon?

One person challenging this view is Graham Harman.  In his object-oriented approach, he critiques both the undermining of objects in which they are reduced to their component parts as well as the overmining of objects in which they are reduced to their relations.  He suggests instead that objects recede from their relations -- that they are always more than any of their properties or relations, and have hidden capacities to relate in other ways than they currently do.  In this sense, no object ever encounters another directly.  They only encounter a caricature of the other objects, experiencing only a small portion of the objects properties that are relevant to it within their particular relation.  Objects do not relate to each other directly, but only vicariously through a third object which constitutes the relation between them.  Thus, according to Harman, nothing is directly connected, and the connections that do exist have to be made by the objects, and are not all simply pre-existing.  He describes a reality that is "clunky" and not a smooth continuum like that described by someone like Alfred North Whitehead or David Bohm.