Posted by:
Henry Bemis
(
)
Date: April 05, 2020 09:55AM
The brain is "you".
The brain is a neural circuit.
COMMENT: In short, you are claiming that "You" are nothing more than the neural circuit(s) of the brain.
In order to subscribe to such a view, you have to be prepared to identify every human cognitive function, and at least in principle, explain such function by appeal to some correlative network or computational function. AI is generally considered to be the best place to look for such correlations.
Now, consider the following comments by Margaret Boden, an expert on AI:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_BodenAs related to human creativity, Boden noted:
"It follows that a satisfactory neuroscientific account of combinational creativity would identify the various mechanisms evolved for judging relevance. Given that this matter is a verbal/conceptual verison of the notorious frame problem . . . that is a tall order. With respect to the other two forms of creativity, there's more bad news: they are significantly less amendable to neuroscience. That's true in two ways. First, we rarely know all the contraints defining the conceptual spaces of art or science, still less the computational processes required to explore and/or to transform them. Historians of art and musicologists spend lifetimes in attempting to make stylistic constraints explicit, and succeeed only to a very limited degree. Sometimes, they even announce a given style to be unfathomable." (Boden, "Creativity as a Neuroscientific Mystery" in Vartanian et al. Eds. Neuroscience of Creativity (2013)).
Boden also said:
"Shakespeare, Bach, Picasso, Darwin, Babbage, Chanel, the Saatchis, Groucho Marx, the Beatles . . . take your pick. From poets and scientists to advertisers and fashion designers, creativty abounds. . . . How it happens is a puzzle. This need not imply any fundamental difficulty about explaining creativity in scientific terms: scientists take puzzles in their stride. Mysteries, however, are different. If a puzzle is an unanswered question, a mystery is a question that can barely be intelligently asked, never mind satisfactorily answered. Mysteries are beyond the reach of science.
Creativity itself is seemingly a mystery, for there is something paradoxical about it, something which makes it difficult to see how it is even possible. how it happens is indeed puzzling, but that it happens at all is deeply mysterious." (Boden, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (1991))
And this is just one example of the disconnect between human cognition and neuroscience. I could go on!
One thing we can notice on the Board is that it is very easy to announce a position, and declare it "scientific," but quite another to defend it. In short, your suggestion that a human being is nothing more than a complex brain is currently unsupportable by scientific evidence when considering many of the details of human cognition. It is a common assumption (Crick's hypothesis) that arguably should be abandoned.