{"id":203260,"date":"2025-01-07T11:24:46","date_gmt":"2025-01-07T17:24:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/your-brain-is-like-a-computer-function-analogy-simplification"},"modified":"2025-01-07T11:24:46","modified_gmt":"2025-01-07T17:24:46","slug":"your-brain-is-like-a-computer-function-analogy-simplification","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/your-brain-is-like-a-computer-function-analogy-simplification","title":{"rendered":"Your Brain Is Like a Computer: Function, Analogy, Simplification"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/your-brain-is-like-a-computer-function-analogy-simplification.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The relationship between brain and computer is a perennial theme in theoretical neuroscience, but it has received relatively little attention in the philosophy of neuroscience. This paper argues that much of the popularity of the brain-computer comparison (e.g. circuit models of neurons and brain areas since McCulloch and Pitts, Bull Math Biophys 5: 115\u201333, 1943) can be explained by their utility as ways of simplifying the brain. More specifically, by justifying a sharp distinction between aspects of neural anatomy and physiology that serve information-processing, and those that are \u2018mere metabolic support,\u2019 the computational framework provides a means of abstracting away from the complexities of cellular neurobiology, as those details come to be classified as irrelevant to the (computational) functions of the system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The relationship between brain and computer is a perennial theme in theoretical neuroscience, but it has received relatively little attention in the philosophy of neuroscience. This paper argues that much of the popularity of the brain-computer comparison (e.g. circuit models of neurons and brain areas since McCulloch and Pitts, Bull Math Biophys 5: 115\u201333, 1943) [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,2229,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-mathematics","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}