The Brain is not a Computer.

How often do you hear someone say that the brain is a computer?  This statement is not literally true. The brain is certainly not like a desktop computer. Brains don’t look like computers; there’s no CPU in the head.  Neurons aren’t all wired together to an executive control center.  Human brains have a massively parallel architecture. Cognitive scientists who have carefully thought through this issue arrive at this same conclusion:  the brain does not really resemble a computer, certainly not any sort of computer in general use today.

The brain as computer is a seductive metaphor. According to Edwin Hutchins, “The last 30 years of cognitive science can be seen as attempts to remake the person in the image of the computer.” See Cognition in the Wild (1996).

Metaphors are models, however, and models are imperfect versions of the reality they portray.  Metaphors accentuate certain parts of reality while downplaying other parts. 

Unfortunately, many people “reify” the brain-as-computer metaphor: they accept this metaphor as literal truth, leading to various misunderstandings about human cognition.

Here’s another big difference between brains and computers: human cognition is fault-tolerant and robust.  In other words, our minds continue to function even when the information is incomplete (e.g., while we’re driving in the rain) or when our purposes or options are unclear (e.g., navigating a cocktail party).  Computers, on the other hand, are always one line of code away from freezing up. 

In Bright Air, Brilliant Fire:  On the Matter of the Mind (1992) Gerald M. …

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How We Really Think About Religion and Politics: The Power of Metaphors

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

The above is an excerpt from “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” a poem on which John Godfrey re-told an ancient Indian fable that serves as an allegory. The lesson is this: the lens through which we view reality accentuates some features while downplaying others.  It must be this way, because we are creatures of limited attentional capacities. 

Metaphors are the lenses through which we view our world.  In abstract fields like religion and politics, the use of metaphors isn’t just fanciful (although it can be fanciful); the use of metaphors is absolutely necessary to understand abstract concepts.  Further, research has shown that the use of conceptual metaphors is systematic, not ad hoc. 

Just as physics students understand the flow of electricity by reference to the flow of water, the rest of us use metaphors to understand our own abstract concepts (e.g., in the fields of religion and politics).  More important, without metaphors, we would have no meaningful understanding of most abstract concepts.  Therefore, whenever we discuss any abstract concept, we are compelled to relentlessly engage in the use of metaphors–there is no other way to talk or write about such things. 

Not convinced? What does this matter? Read on and consider the examples.  This was literally and truly a life-changing idea for me.

In Metaphors We …

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What’s it means to be a “Bright”?

I recently received the following, with regard to my endorsement of Brights (see the link at the bottom of the right column): "[I'm] not sure about being a Bright though...its not healthy to believe there's a clear answer to everything, or isn't one at all." Because this not the first…

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