Robert Epstein contends that the brain is not an information processor and is not a computer. He argues that organisms are born with senses, reflexes and powerful learning mechanisms - not with stored data, rules, representations, memory registers or algorithms - and that those computational design elements that enable digital machines to encode, store, copy and transform symbolic patterns simply do not exist in biological brains. Computers literally encode symbols as bits, move and copy those patterns, and execute explicit programs; brains, by contrast, adapt through embodied interactions, dynamic neural change and evolution-shaped capacities rather than by retrieving pre-stored images, words or rules. Epstein insists that commonplace talk of storage, retrieval and internal representations mischaracterizes what brains do.
He traces the prevalence of the information-processing metaphor through history, showing how successive eras have likened thinking to the dominant technology of the time and how mid-20th-century computing cemented the current metaphor. That metaphor survives despite lacking logical warrant: the claim that intelligent systems must be information processors follows from a faulty syllogism equating all intelligent behavior with the properties of computers. Epstein reports that even leading researchers struggle to explain intelligence without this framing and warns that the metaphor’s persistence has shaped - and limited - research agendas and public understanding.
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