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Notes -
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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