Computation and Human Experience (RRE)

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Fri Jun 16 12:31:34 PDT 2000


Gordon Fitch wrote:


> [CLIP]
>
> I remember that my name is Gordon and not Jim or Xenophon
> as a result of being able to recover some of the bits of the
> information that was sent to me, either by other persons
> (speech) or by my former self (encoded in the material of my
> body).

Gordon, you don't need to claim all of this (particularly the part about "retrieval" and "encoding") in order to maintain your position that memory is both spatial and temporal. Memory is *not* stored (and I don't think it is usefully spoken of as encoded or stored) but continuously *recreated* in the endless firing of neural circuits. Those circuits are both spatial and temporal (the neurons are spatially related, and there is a definite interval from the firing of one to the firing of the next one).

But it is correct to deny that the brain and computer are in any way models for each other. It makes sense to speak of a computer as storing information, while the brain contiuously recreates or invents memories rather than "storing" them. You can get a rough idea of this from Israel Rosenfield, *The Invention of Memory: A New View of the Brain* (New York: Basic Books, 1988). It is rather old now as neurological studies go, but from what I understand from others the conception of neural networks and of neuronal group selection still are part of ongoing research. The work contains a condensed history of attempts to understand memory and perception -- and a thoroughgoing critique of efforts to make computers models of the mind. The information in computers (their programs) can of course be transferred to other computers, but the exact knowledge of any person has no existence independently of his/her existence as a body/social history. The notion of the mind as the brain's software, the brain as the mind's hardware, is pretty silly.

I won't comment on Ted's arguments -- I simply cannot make sense of them. In so far as I can tell they are made up of equal parts of verbal trickery, ordinary vulgar idealism, and commonplaces from current neurological research. The latter gives them their linkage to actuality, the former two give them their profundity.

Carrol



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