14 min
AI and Neuro-Narratives: Moving Beyond Mechanistic Minds Interplace
-
- Samhällsvetenskap
Hello Interactors,
All the talk and evidence of AI, chips in the brain, and robotic overlords has created emotions ranging from hysteria to malaise to clinical depression. How much of this is caused or influenced by narratives spun by favored voices telling tall tales of proximal parables and are there other ways to think about our brain than just a processor?
Let’s find out…
THE MENTAL MYTHS OF SILICON AND SYNAPSES
Our brain is an energy intense organ. It consumes 20% of our energy but accounts for just 2% of our body weight. To manage this high demand for energy, the brain employs various strategies to simplify tasks and processes. One of those is to simplify how the world works. Like dividing it into discernable individual component parts.
In a world increasingly seduced by these crisp edges of in groups and out groups, there exists a tribe of techno-optimists, guardians of an old tale, who look to the brain as humanity's ultimate processor and a promise and desire for digital immortality. This romanticized notion of the “mind as computer” is facing competition as feats of AI reveal a seemingly superior capability to their own self-assuming super-intelligence. So, they want their outdated hardware upgraded. It's all positioned as cutting edge and futuristic but harks back to the clockwork dualistic and mechanistic universe of the Enlightenment.
We’ve been preached a digital gospel that suggests the warm wetware within our skulls operates like baked silicon chips, crunching data of daily existence with the cold precision of a CPU. Yet, simmering in the biochemistry that hosts these digital dreams are ripples of evidence captured and crunched by computers and displayed in the form of MRI’s, fMRI’s, PET scans, SPECT scans, NIRS, and MEG’s. These images lead some cognitive scientists, with the help of various forms of AI, to slowly dismantle the mechanistic metaphor of ‘the brain as CPU’, piece by intricate piece.
The metaphor of the brain functioning as a processor is as old as Alan Turing and the mid-20th century computational theories that birthed computer science. These ideas and experiments propagated as mass media proliferated and now serve as common conceptions of how the mind works. Other historical and cultural factors contribute to the persistence of this metaphor and perpetuated among teachers, scientists, and attention seeking tech moguls.
But it was centuries before, during the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, that a significant shift towards rationalist, determinist, and mechanistic views of nature were put forth by figures like René Descartes and Isaac Newton. The world and its phenomena, including human beings and human thought, began to be understood in terms of mechanical laws and principles, laying the groundwork for comparing the brain to a machine.
The advancements in machinery and technology during the Industrial Revolution further reinforced the mechanistic view of life processes, including human cognition, making it easier to draw parallels between the operations of machines and the functions of the human brain. I recently wrote about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a prime example from that period.
Fast forwarding a century later, to the 1970s, I remember watching the “Six Million Dollar Man” on TV as a kid. This show was based on a Martin Caidin novel called Cyborg depicting an astronaut who survives a plane crash and is brought to life by replacing body parts with robotics. The “Six Million Dollar Man” was soon joined by “The Bionic Woman” and episodes that featured the faces of human robots being ripped off to reveal a computer inside. Naturally, these two computer-powered bionic superpowers worked as secret agents in U.S. Office of…wait for it…“Scientific Intelligence.”
Source: YouTube
This was all occurring alongside emerging discoveries in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, further cementing the brain-CPU analogy. Like science f
Hello Interactors,
All the talk and evidence of AI, chips in the brain, and robotic overlords has created emotions ranging from hysteria to malaise to clinical depression. How much of this is caused or influenced by narratives spun by favored voices telling tall tales of proximal parables and are there other ways to think about our brain than just a processor?
Let’s find out…
THE MENTAL MYTHS OF SILICON AND SYNAPSES
Our brain is an energy intense organ. It consumes 20% of our energy but accounts for just 2% of our body weight. To manage this high demand for energy, the brain employs various strategies to simplify tasks and processes. One of those is to simplify how the world works. Like dividing it into discernable individual component parts.
In a world increasingly seduced by these crisp edges of in groups and out groups, there exists a tribe of techno-optimists, guardians of an old tale, who look to the brain as humanity's ultimate processor and a promise and desire for digital immortality. This romanticized notion of the “mind as computer” is facing competition as feats of AI reveal a seemingly superior capability to their own self-assuming super-intelligence. So, they want their outdated hardware upgraded. It's all positioned as cutting edge and futuristic but harks back to the clockwork dualistic and mechanistic universe of the Enlightenment.
We’ve been preached a digital gospel that suggests the warm wetware within our skulls operates like baked silicon chips, crunching data of daily existence with the cold precision of a CPU. Yet, simmering in the biochemistry that hosts these digital dreams are ripples of evidence captured and crunched by computers and displayed in the form of MRI’s, fMRI’s, PET scans, SPECT scans, NIRS, and MEG’s. These images lead some cognitive scientists, with the help of various forms of AI, to slowly dismantle the mechanistic metaphor of ‘the brain as CPU’, piece by intricate piece.
The metaphor of the brain functioning as a processor is as old as Alan Turing and the mid-20th century computational theories that birthed computer science. These ideas and experiments propagated as mass media proliferated and now serve as common conceptions of how the mind works. Other historical and cultural factors contribute to the persistence of this metaphor and perpetuated among teachers, scientists, and attention seeking tech moguls.
But it was centuries before, during the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, that a significant shift towards rationalist, determinist, and mechanistic views of nature were put forth by figures like René Descartes and Isaac Newton. The world and its phenomena, including human beings and human thought, began to be understood in terms of mechanical laws and principles, laying the groundwork for comparing the brain to a machine.
The advancements in machinery and technology during the Industrial Revolution further reinforced the mechanistic view of life processes, including human cognition, making it easier to draw parallels between the operations of machines and the functions of the human brain. I recently wrote about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a prime example from that period.
Fast forwarding a century later, to the 1970s, I remember watching the “Six Million Dollar Man” on TV as a kid. This show was based on a Martin Caidin novel called Cyborg depicting an astronaut who survives a plane crash and is brought to life by replacing body parts with robotics. The “Six Million Dollar Man” was soon joined by “The Bionic Woman” and episodes that featured the faces of human robots being ripped off to reveal a computer inside. Naturally, these two computer-powered bionic superpowers worked as secret agents in U.S. Office of…wait for it…“Scientific Intelligence.”
Source: YouTube
This was all occurring alongside emerging discoveries in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, further cementing the brain-CPU analogy. Like science f
14 min