Well, despite the flaw that one could always make that argument from a psychological point of view without addressing the content of the explanation, the bigger flaw in that criticism is that computers aren't just the current most advanced form of technology, they're universal simulators. No previous technology has that feature.
Computation is deeply connected with the laws of physics though the Turing principle. Any physical system can be simulated on a universal computer. It's not an analogy that brains are like computers. It's a deep principle of physics and computation which means that there isn't a different kind of machine that a brain could be.
Of course, knowledge is always conjectural, which means anything could be overturned someday. But what is one to do, in the absence of better explanations? One should take our best explanations seriously. Especially since denying the computable nature of the world breaks most other reasonable explanations we have.
Tura63 t1_ixzamwx wrote
Reply to comment by [deleted] in Scientists Have Found a Way To Manipulate Digital Data Stored in DNA by Sorin61
Well, despite the flaw that one could always make that argument from a psychological point of view without addressing the content of the explanation, the bigger flaw in that criticism is that computers aren't just the current most advanced form of technology, they're universal simulators. No previous technology has that feature.
Computation is deeply connected with the laws of physics though the Turing principle. Any physical system can be simulated on a universal computer. It's not an analogy that brains are like computers. It's a deep principle of physics and computation which means that there isn't a different kind of machine that a brain could be.
Of course, knowledge is always conjectural, which means anything could be overturned someday. But what is one to do, in the absence of better explanations? One should take our best explanations seriously. Especially since denying the computable nature of the world breaks most other reasonable explanations we have.