Page 94 - Artificial Intelligence in the Age of Neural Networks and Brain Computing

82 CHAPTER 4 The Brain-Mind-Computer Trichotomy: Hermeneutic Approach

FIGURE 4.2
Downward causation.

First, both elementary computing units and neurons were characterized as digital
input-output devices, suggesting an analogy at even the elementary hardware level.
Second, the (more or less) equivalence had been demonstrated between the
mathematical model of the “control box” of a computer as represented by the
state-transition rules for a Turing machine, and of the nervous system as represented
by the McCulloch-Pitts model. Binary vectors of “0” and “1” represented the state of
the computer and of the brain, and their temporal behavior was described by the
updating of these vectors. In his posthumously published book The Computer and
the Brain, John von Neumann [19] famously emphasized the particular character
of “neural mathematics”: “.The logics and mathematics in the central nervous
system, when viewed as languages, must structurally be essentially different from
those languages to which our common experience refers.”
Arguments for the computer-brain disanalogy were listed by Conrad [20]. Digital
computers are programmed from outside; are structurally programmable; have low