Insistence that the brain just isn't a computer is extremely widespread among those who are experts in the brain and know little about computers. As someone in the opposite situation I must say that their observations about what's special about the brain fit most closely to what I understand about computers and bring me to exactly the opposite conclusion. If the brain is not a computer, it's frankly eerie how similar they are.
The trouble is domain expertise in what domain. The "Brains aren't computers" rants are predominantly from Psychologists who I agree have domain expertise when it comes to the brain but know very little about computers.
An example would be the problem of understanding. The Psychologists are confident we can't expect to fully understand our own minds. But, they are also confident we can expect to understand any possible Computer Program. And they're just wrong about that, that's the implication of Kurt Gödel's work, we definitely can't expect to understand arbitrary Computer Programs, we have instead chosen to mostly try to write programs from a narrow set we can understand, although not altogether successfully. Thus, the Psychologist thinks they've found an obvious difference, but I think they found an obvious similarity!
People ask this question like it's meaningful... is there any proof that we are? No. Then stop asking it as if it sheds light into the similarities between humans and machines... it doesn't and it's obfuscating to that extent.
Well my intuition is that the machines aren't performing comparable processes, and I'm totally open to information going the other way. I'm not open to baseless assertions otherwise.
State machines cannot change the semantics of themselves. We can. We are like state machines most of the time but we can switch into "developer mode" and deploy updates whenever we choose to :)
Even if something can change its semantics, you can still represent it as a state machine if you just make a copy of every state for every possible set of semantics. The semantic state can just be another part of the state machine's overall state.
Well, on the one hand it’s hard to prove a negative, but on the other hand we don’t know much so it seems questionable to assert a negative without knowledge.
