Almost all of this is people assuming other people are taking the metaphor to far.

The mind is best understood, not as software, but rather as an emergent property of the physical brain.

No one who is worth talking to about this disagrees with this. Everyone is running on systems theory now, including the computer programmers trying to build artificial intelligence. All the plagiarism machines run on systems theory and emergence. The people they’re yelling at about reductive computer metaphors are doing the thing the author is saying they don’t do, and the plagiarism machines were only possible because people were using systems theory and emergent behaviors arising from software to build the worthless things!

. The brain is much more complicated than that, and is very likely simply not amenable to that kind of mathematical reductionism, any more than economic systems are.

This author just said that economics isn’t maths, that it’s spooky and mysterious and can’t be undersyood.

This is so frustrating. “You see, the brain isn’t like this extremely reductive model of computation, it’s actually” and then the author just lists every advance, invention, and field of inquiry in computation for the last several decades.

But looking at the workings of the brain in more detail reveal some more fundamental flaws with computational theory. For one thing, the brain itself isn’t structured like a Turing machine. It’s a parallel processing network of neural nodes - but not just any network. It’s a plastic neural network that can in some ways be actively changed through influences by will or environment. For example, so long as some crucial portions of the brain aren’t injured, it’s possible for the brain to compensate for injury by actively rewriting its own network. Or, as you might notice in your own life, its possible to improve your own cognition just by getting enough sleep and exercise.

“The brain isn’t a computer, it’s actually a different kind of computer! The brain compensates for injury the same way the internet that was in some ways designed after the brain compensates for injury! If you provide the discrete nodes of a distributed network with the inputs they need to function efficiently the performance of the entire network improves!”

This is just boggling, what argument do they think they’re making? Software does all these things specifically because scientists are investigating the functions of the brain and applying what they find to the construction of new computer systems. Our increasing understanding of the brain feeds back to novel computational models which generate new tools, data, and insight for understanding the brain!