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Notes -
Your link says
It then goes on to explain that, arguably, "everything is computer."
Perhaps the human mind is a computer in the sense that everything is, but there doesn't seem to be good evidence that it is a computer in the sense that the metaphor is helpful to understanding the human mind. The human brain does not create representations of stimuli, store them, manipulate them, and retrieve them later upon demand according to a series of algorithmic rules.
Perhaps the human mind can't perform any mathematical calculations that cannot be performed by a Turing machine, but that doesn't mean that saying it is a computer is a helpful analogy. A digital tape recorder can record any song that a record can, but it's not helpful to call a record player a computer either - the mode of operation is different.
While I am sure that "not everyone agrees" my understanding is that it seems pretty clear that the universe, itself, is not simulable.
That's the thing. People didn't decide a priori that "everything is a computer". People just went looking for things that can't be mapped into computers all over nature and never found one.
This is pretty much what the debate comes down to though, remember the original argument was about whether we should expect AIs to surpass humans in everything humans can do. People keep trying to claim that humans have some magical domains of competence that will remain out of reach of AIs. For this to be an useful argument against claims of AI doom, it needs to cash out as the human mind doing some sort of work that shows up as output in the world, like a symphony or a beautiful masterpiece on a canvas. The theory of computation is very different from actual computer engineering, and the Aeon magazine writer seems to not understand this. It doesn't say anything about bytes, files, subroutines, operating systems, databases, images or buffers, just that there is some finite-length (but probably very long) lawful process that generates the speech or movement that shows that the thinking happened, and that the process could be translated to be run by a Turing machine.
I'm not a theoretical physicist but I'm pretty willing to bet that a physics paper that appeals to Gödel's incompleteness theorem for wide-ranging claims about the ultimate nature of reality will not end up receiving wide scientific agreement. The Gödel argument is basically the same thing Roger Penrose goes on about, and it goes back to John Lucas in 1959. It's had plenty of time to convince people and as far as I understand it by and large hasn't done that.
Apparently a previous reply was eaten, my sincere apologies if this ends up a double-post.
The fact that "people" latch on to an easy metaphor does not necessarily indicate that the metaphor is good. The fact that the people most familiar with computers latch on to this metaphor also does not necessarily indicate that the metaphor is good.
This wasn't my claim, though.
The Aeon author did tackle the idea that the mind is an algorithm, which is, as I understand it, part of the theory of computation. We have good reasons to think the brain does not run on an algorithm; as the author of the piece I linked to points out, memory is extremely inexact, which is the opposite of what we would expect if the brain operated in an algorithmic manner.
But to take a step back, even if we wish to draw a distinction between "computer as hardware" and "computer as information processing device" the linguistic overlap invites us to confuse the two. And I don't think this is good; the analogy breaks down quickly in practice and invites us to forget the massive differences between the brain and electronic computers; it's true the brain uses electrical impulses but it also uses chemicals and is much slower than a computer. This metaphor, turned loose into the wild, has led to the popularization of what should be obviously implausible ideas, such as "mind uploading" or even that a computer could have emotions that we know in humans are substantially influenced by hormones.
In short, the idea that the mind is a computer is a sloppy one even if the motte is more defensible than the bailey by far precisely because the word "computer" makes it inherently a metaphor that yields a motte-and-bailey, even subconsciously.
I am not a theoretical physicist, or a mathematician, or a neurologist, but I am pretty sure you are wrong.
As I understand it, it works something like this. Gödel's incompleteness theorem says you can't algorithmically "solve" math (in the sense that there's not a super-algorithm that can do all mathematics). Penrose said "aha but humans can so we're BETTER THAN TURING MACHINES." The skepticism of Penrose isn't that Gödel is wrong, it's about whether or not humans can do that. If Gödel's incompleteness theorems suggest that our universe isn't a simulation, that's a different line of argument.
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