Booting the Latest Brain = Computer Idea
August 23, 2006
LiveScience is reporting that neuroscientists have found that our brains boot “like a computer” as we rouse from sleep. While the article is sparse on details, I suspect brains require much more than “puffs of nitric oxide” to even begin our return to consciousness. No word on how the thalamus solves the bootstrapping paradox, either.
Technicalities aside, what strikes me here is that scientists are stretching the brain/computer simile to the breaking point. Granted, the brain has been compared throughout history to devices like clocks and pipe organs, which were the most advanced technologies of their day. Perhaps this is just another attempt to make neurology more accessible to the public. (This is brain science, after all!) Yet because of their complexity few people understand how computers work any better than they understand neuroscience, so this analogy isn’t particularly helpful.
What it does help to do, though, is encourage readers to take the brain-as-computer metaphor literally. Notice that this article depicts the thalamus as acting on its own, determining what sensory information to let in regardless of the person’s intentions. If the brain is merely an information processing unit (as some computer scientists have claimed) then this makes sense. The thalamus picks among sensory inputs so that my brain can understand its surroundings, not me. By shifting analogy to reality, we are led to believe that we’re only biological machines operating by the laws of physics; mind does not matter.
This trend is both disturbing and, at a fundamental level, dehumanizing. If I have no choice over what my brain does, “I” am not responsible for my actions, whether good or bad. From this viewpoint, how can “good” and “bad” have meaning at all? Science seeks to describe the natural world as simply as possible. Scientists overstep their bounds, though, when they try to simplify human imagination, morality, and intentionality to biochemistry in a paltry attempt to explain (away) everything. We would do well to jettison this nonsense of equating ourselves to computers, as it is only a small semantic step from making us all robots.
