My last post was about how the brain-as-Turing-Machine doesn’t help and in fact, can be said to lose the notion of any objective concept of the word objective itself.

Casting the brain as a Turing Machine ( TM ) helps us understand our processing a little more, but only if we think of the brain as not a Turing Machine, first. (In other words, we must think ourselves capable of determining non-trivial properties.) Otherwise, whether we are thinking what we think we are thinking would become problematical.

Think of what I’m saying here: Even were “thinking” a precise and quantifiable process , we would never compute the TM: ComputesThinking because we could not ever tell which TMs would halt on the problem. Now, add to that picture, our ignorance of what thinking, or what we would quantify as thinking.

So to observe the brain as TM, the observer must be free from the rules of TMs, to some degree. Otherwise, we assume a bunch of stuff that is not provable: for example, that the brain TM computes the predicate “x is objective”

Of course, we cannot think as concretely about the processing power of the brain without this model. And perhaps, without it, we would flounder in the muddy waters of philosophy’s “Consciousness”. So whether or not this model fits, we will examine the brain as an undesigned computer.

InfiniteMonkeys.com

The brain, unlike the computer, is a black box. Sure, the computer is a black box to some. And sure, Information Technology advances with the value of limited knowledge.

The “value of limited knowledge” may sound like a confusing phrase. So let me try to explain in the next couple of paragraphs. (Anybody with a good level of understanding of computers, may find the next few paragraphs boring.)

The electronic-circuit-to-bit transformation helps to illustrate this concept of the value of limited knowledge. At the base of all computers, are electrons and their near-random behavior. Yet somehow, through the magic of circuits, those inconsistencies are smoothed out and produce the abstraction known as a bit. That’s precisely the way the machine looks at the product: They are bits—nothing more. They are abstracted above their mere circumstances and taken as something of a different kind.

The application of electronic circuits has an input and an output. We start from circuit technology. What we require from these circuits is that the wiring for a bit stays in the state in which it was put. It needs to change when it is instructed and keep the state until it?s instructed to change it. That consistency creates the output concept bit. Just like that every layer of technology layered on top of the basic machine, takes in it’s wild and woolly nature, and hands to other layers a simplified interface of that level.

Thus, you do not need to be an expert atomic physicist to design a circuit. And you do not need the knowledge to design a circuit to design a machine. And you do not need need the knowledge of somebody who designs an instruction set to program in machine code. (See abstraction at Wikipedia.org.)

And so it goes all the way up to you. Because of all the work that was done up to now, we require you only to know your way around windows, and perhaps the URL for Google. With all that you can make your way around the net, feeding your brain its own process.

So the computer is a black box to many and relies on the concept of black box to limit complexity of each task in almost all phases. But somebody knows each part. It’s all written down in a manual somewhere. So you can learn about electrons, and how circuits are made, and how circuits are turned into the abstractions of processors and storage devices (which is about the lowest level most of us Software designers ever tend to think about). And after moving on, you could learn how instructions are designed from bits. How software is composed from higher and higher abstractions.

If you could spend the time, and had the brains and money for it, you could know the computer from the electron to the CSS stylesheet your browser is using to tell it how to display this page. Theoretically, you could know it all. But you don?t need to.