Related papers: How (and Why) to Think that the Brain is Literally…

The brain-as-computer metaphor has anchored the professed computational nature of the mind, wresting it down from the intangible logic of Platonic philosophy to a material basis for empirical science. However, as with many long-lasting…

The brain is often called a computer and likened to a Turing machine, in part because the mind can manipulate discrete symbols such as numbers. But the brain is a dynamical system, more like a Watt governor than a Turing machine. Can a…

The Computational Metaphor, comparing the brain to the computer and vice versa, is the most prominent metaphor in neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI). Its appropriateness is highly debated in both fields, particularly with regards…

Computing is a high-level process of a physical system. Recent interest in non-standard computing systems, including quantum and biological computers, has brought this physical basis of computing to the forefront. There has been, however,…

With the great success in simulating many intelligent behaviors using computing devices, there has been an ongoing debate whether all conscious activities are computational processes. In this paper, the answer to this question is shown to…

This paper presents a novel information-theoretic proof demonstrating that the human brain as currently understood cannot function as a classical digital computer. Through systematic quantification of distinguishable conscious states and…

Building machines that learn and think like humans is essential not only for cognitive science, but also for computational neuroscience, whose ultimate goal is to understand how cognition is implemented in biological brains. A new cognitive…

There is no agreed definition of intelligence, so it is problematic to simply ask whether brains, swarms, computers, or other systems are intelligent or not. To compare the potential intelligence exhibited by different cognitive systems, I…

Can machines truly think? This question and its answer have many implications that depend, in large part, on any number of assumptions underlying how the issue has been addressed or considered previously. A crucial question, and one that is…

There are inherent limits in classical computation for it to serve as an adequate model of human cognition. In particular, non-commutativity, while ubiquitous in physics and psychology, cannot be sufficiently handled. We propose that we…

Artificial computing machinery transforms representations through an objective process, to be interpreted subjectively by humans, so the machine and the interpreter are different entities, but in the putative natural computing both…

Many real-world dynamic systems, both natural and artificial, are understood to be performing computations. For artificial dynamic systems, explicitly designed to perform computation - such as digital computers - by construction, we can…

What does it mean to claim that a physical or natural system computes? One answer, endorsed here, is that computing is about programming a system to behave in different ways. This paper offers an account of what it means for a physical…

Can computers overcome human capabilities? This is a paradoxical and controversial question, particularly because there are many hidden assumptions. This article focuses on that issue putting on evidence some misconception related with…

The history of computer science and brain sciences are intertwined. In his unfinished manuscript "The Computer and the Brain," von Neumann debates whether or not the brain can be thought of as a computing machine and identifies some of the…

To learn how cognition is implemented in the brain, we must build computational models that can perform cognitive tasks, and test such models with brain and behavioral experiments. Cognitive science has developed computational models of…

The machinery of the human brain -- analog, probabilistic, embodied -- can be characterized computationally, but what machinery confers what computational powers? Any such system can be abstractly cast in terms of two computational…

The increasing interest in understanding the behavior of the biological neural networks, and the increasing utilization of artificial neural networks in different fields and scales, both require a thorough understanding of how neuromorphic…

Physical processes are computations only when we use them to externalize thought. Computation is the performance of one or more fixed processes within a contingent environment. We reformulate the Church-Turing thesis so that it applies to…

MemComputing is a new model of computation that exploits the non-equilibrium property-we call 'memory'-of any physical system to respond to external perturbations by keeping track of how it has reacted at previous times. Its digital,…