21st-century Christian Philosopher

Thoughts on Natural Origin:

Again, I tell you that many of those who would beat the Church over the head with the “Scientific fact” of Evolution, have little sense of it—moreso the advocates of Nature. To them, our evolution is our connection to our Mother (call her Gaia) and siblings, and everything else that lived.

Let’s look: once “we” were the slime. Once “we” crawled on our bellies. Once “we” were once no more than the beasts we eat and mistreat.

So, our “humble” beginnings help us to relate ourselves to it all. We are a part of it and it is a part of us.

But here’s where it is crucial to again remind people that evolution is about the death of species. This is how new ones are created. Old ones die. Die out. Lose the race. Completely.

Yet some Greens think that there needs to be a “respect” for “bio-diversity”, seeing every living thing as special. Yet Mom has something to say about that: “You’re all dispensible—whole species of you!“

Thanks, Mom.

In fact, even if Mom lets our species stay around, the Greens argue that she only needs about 1 billion kids of our species. You could be the one who could invent the next cure for Cancer, but if your number 1,000,000,001 son, you’re cramping her style. Not that she’d thank you for keeping more of us alive!

Do we even think of Mom’s Carrying Capacity before we start inviting people to stick around? Cancer, a natural expression of animal bodies (or where have all you Naturalists gone?), may be Mom’s way of saying “You’re cramping my style—somebody’s going to have to go!” We’re really kind of like thankless kids inviting friends to stay over for supper even though it means more work for Mom.

On another note: we’re often hear about all the miracle cures that are being wiped out in the South American jungles as whole species of plant dies. But it is kind of odd to be worried about dead plants, when the wisdom of Mother Nature is to “advance” (though “advancement” is part of our overvaluing ourselves) species by killing off the last species. Not to mention that a majority of all plant species are already dead, per our intimate connection to the Earth.

Besides that, we don’t want miracle cures. Miracles cures tend to kill members of a plant species to overburden the Earth with more of us humans for whom Mom cooked up a perfectly good death. They certainly don’t cure the plants!

The event is death. Death from one cause looks like death from another cause. Because death frees up niche and it removes weak genes—or weak combinations—from the pool. Or when your species ends, that’s just Mom’s way of telling you it’s the end of the line.

As clinically as possible, your species didn’t work out. Better luck…well—no other time. Sorry.

Scientific does not progress by “knowing that we’re all alone in the universe” or “learning that we’re not special after all.” (the “post-Copernican” view.) That’s somebody’s idea of a social “advancement”.

For the first part, you don’t know that you’re all alone in the universe. You may suspect. It may be reasonable to consider or concede–but you don’t know it.

Plus, you don’t know that you are nothing special. If you’re waiting for Science to tell you how special you are, then you’ll be waiting for Godot. Science is an art of grinding everything down into its most general case. We ignore what makes a instance unique so that we can see a collection of thermophysical bodies radiating and exchanging heat or a lump of mass exerting force upon a system of bodies. That’s you, to a scientist.

But to take another track, Science started its climb while men believed that God ruled creation. If start your climb while you think that God watches over you in Heaven, and continue your climb without a belief in God, you progressed with belief and without belief.

Imagine us climbing a mountain. At the bottom we pray and believe that God will guide our steps. But as we find the way rougher than we expected, we start to doubt that God is helping us–or even there. At half way we become doubtful, and by the time we are 3/4 from the top, we are sure he doesn’t exist. And what do we use to conclude that we are more right than we were at the bottom? Well, we’re higher.

In fact, we are higher on the mountain than we ever were when we believed. Conclusion: believing in God keeps you lower on the mountain. If you wanted to put a numerical gloss on it you could chart the belief-doubt spectrum with the values belief=1, doubt=2, disbelief=3 and find a 100% correspondence between the spectrum and the height on the mountain side at any one time.

Technology builds on technology. You need cannon-boring before you have an engine cylinder. You need to have gunpowder before you can have cannon. In somewhat the same way that you have to be 10 feet up the mountain before you are 100 feet up.

Think of it: when you find how to mix gunpowder, how much have you learned about your place in the universe? When you find a way to bore cannon, again what about your place in the universe? When you make a combustion engine, what is your place in the universe? You have more control, definitely.

But does God–assuming he existed–have less? Zeus might have less. He seemed to have an interest in keeping us down when he cursed Prometheus for giving us fire. So there is an argument there. But what about God?

By and large, the pre-Christian Westerner found the universe too chaotic and capricious. Looking into nature just might get you bit on the nose. The steam engine was a Greek and Roman parlor toy, a curiousity—but it wasn’t something that was going to help you “master nature”. After all didn’t Hera use Apollo’s arrows (the heat of the sun) to afflict Agamemnon and his men?

But the Lord of the Universe warred with no rival powers. Nature was his creation, his domain. To the post-Augustinian church, God was nothing if not reasonable. Besides, the storehouse of blessings that the Lord had in store for us, was available by boldly asking the Father in Heaven. Thus nature was a passable land by the grace of God. Post-Jesus, this is God’s central quality.

Regardless of how it began though, there was a time that Scientific advancement was concurrent with belief in God. That the two coincided, should be enough to suggest to many that where the Body of Christ does not censor the discussion of scientists, scientific understanding is independent to faith.

You could still maintain that faith has a negative effect on science. But you should maintain that as an opinion. It does not qualify with 90% of what I know that makes up “fact” . You even have a right to make silly arguments. I do. Everybody does. So you do have a right to say that if we get rid of something that had nothing to do with us advancing from the Dark Ages that we are going back to them. You have a right to make that silly argument.

You have a right to say that if we stop trying to provide a Scientific backdrop to the work we do in life, and keep the technological advancement that the technological advancement (which began without the backstory) will stop. You have a right to confuse two separable things and make salad out of them. You have a right to threaten people that our technology will somehow stop or stop coming if people do what you don’t agree with. You have a right to shake your fist and say that the Technology Gods will be angry, if we do not keep faithful with our tribute.

Of course, the idea behind democracy (or a representative republic) is that people vote the way they see fit. We don’t vote according to a definition of “rationality” that seems best to suit the side that advances that definition.

Of course the concept of a moral democracy is that we try not to vote according to our baser natures. But what happens when we disagree about what our baser natures are? We can have a dialog and I recommend that. But essentially, each person is responsible for his or her democratic contribution. They cast their vote.

The estrangement that progressives feel from we irrational religious is their own, yet Chomsky decries it as a natural result of fundamentalism. It creates an “inability to participate” (with them in their agenda, no doubt) that troubles Chomsky. Well come to think of it, it can be a natural outgrowth of somebody holding a different opinion that they appear bizarre to me if I make their opinion bizarre and I refuse to participate in their bizarre behavior.

It kind of helps to react to others as “irrational” and “dangerous” for making different choices. And when you add on top of it that they are all being manipulated and mind-controlled, you wonder why you cannot engage them in discussion?

You know, some people just get upset when you call them deluded and mind-controlled, you just can’t seem to have a civil discussion with them about their controlling delusion!! They seem to lose all interest in that discussion.

I wonder what is up with them!

In the page which is the subject of the last few posts (here), Chomsky decries that the religious people who live in a different state than he does want to do away with the fundamentals of physics and biology.

Even with the passing knowledge I have of science, I know that calling evolution the fundamentals of biology and the Big Bang the fundamentals of physics is laughable. Fundamental biology? How about starting out with that we’re all carbon complexes or that all living things have genes and chromosomes?

Physics? How about starting out with mass and motion calculations? How about dealing with gravity?

Fusion is not fundamental chemistry (however possible it may be), either. Peering into the most dimly lit crannies of a field simply because they provide a coherent worldview does not dredge up “fundamental understandings”. If that’s what Science has gotten to—that its chief use is to explain the world, then it needs reform.

Why? Because the Scientific establishment has never gotten what the world is right. Before Einstein, the Earth moved in a sea of Ether. After Einstein became accepted he played a hand in trying to discredit Bohr’s Quantum Mechanics. “God doesn’t play dice with the universe,” Uncle Al said.

Now you often hear how this is not a theist’s God. You hear how it was a representation of Nature as an orderer of things. Still turned out to be wrong. However removed it was from a Hallelujah, it was an expression of faith in Science’s current understanding of the universe. Einstein was simply saying the universe didn’t work that way because he couldn’t imagine the universe that he liked to think of as orderly acting that way.

See not having a story to link everything together in a nice tight bundle is not going to throw us back in the dark age. As longs as we keep plugging away at the patterns nature shows us (regardless of what we believe about those patterns) we have a chance to understand them and master them.

After all, it’s really not our failure to trace our ancestry back to australopithecines that made life rough in the Middle Ages. It was the lack of technology. It wasn’t in not pursuing the idea that “Hey maybe everything (or nothing) blew up and that’s how we’re here!” to get back to our back-breaking work as a serf.

I don’t really see even how just realizing that the sun did not rotate around the Earth could have saved anyone labor anywhere or opened up Europe to trade. Instead it was learning the best way to make clock gears and boring out cannon that set the world on its course. It was mastering what was visible and acted in a regular fashion before our eyes.

Tinkering and playing and creating mathematical abstractions. Building better ships, better navigation tools.

But of course all that has to be tainted in Chomsky’s view—if he’s consistent (which he is not). Better ships mean we can sail them over to other people’s lands. Boring cannon means that we can point them at other people and extract their compliance.

It’s always confusing to me that I see time after time secularists blowing these things out of proportion to what we understand about them (what is actual science). Time and time I see them talking about us “throwing it (advancement) all away.” when we are not talking about scrapping technology, just blunting the moral that some people would like to teach from the story they tell of Science.

This takes up where I left off before (and is still on target of Show So Far ), but this is going to take a weird turn:

Remember Ralphie? Remember him wanting a “Red Ryder BB gun with a compass in the stock and the thing that tells time”? (If you don’t check out A Christmas Story.) Caught in a struggle with parents who had a different idea than he did (at least apparently), it occurred to him in a flash, that with his school essay, he would educate his teacher. And her being persuaded by the superiority of his cause, would eventually bring pressure on his parents to agree.

Ralphie imagined that he could write so brilliantly and persuasively that she would see his point of view. It is the perfect ending to every story for your rival to come to you and say “You were right. I was wrong. Your way is much better than mine. I see how superior your point was than mine that I shudder that your light of brilliance should never have lit up my hovel of a mind.”

Of course it would only be proper to pat that person’s head and say “That’s okay. You could hardly help your ignorance. ” Of course if I’m to avoid controlling your mind here, I can really say that something is proper. After all, if your mind tells you that you should ask them to lick your boots, well that’s your mind.

This is the fantasy that lives on in many minds. Of course, you have the superior position. Of course it comes from your superior cunning, intellect or plain ol’ common sense. You either understand what “high falootin’ professors overcomplicate” or “understand the world with a nuance that a lesser educated man just could not fathom.” It doesn’t matter. All people need is to be shown the way you think. That would clear up everything!

Do I believe this? You bet I do. I blog. You wanna’ know about TMs? Come to me, I’ll tell you. Want to know how to consider Chomsky’s comments on religion—again me. And if you want to know why it is that people think that all other people need is an education, I’ll tell you that too.

…which is to say that that element is in me. I call it “the flesh”. But, I will at least warn you about it. I will at least put myself on the same level as the people I chide for thinking tha the world just needs to beat a path to your door, sit at your feet and learn. I also control the thoughts of that other me that would let that side of me go unchecked. I submit to the authority of society and the Church and God to regulate. I believe I have internalized these principles to some degree.

But that doesn’t matter to Chomsky. He deals with statistical correlations. The pattern by which people who associate with other people have ideas that resemble other individual’s.

You see you either believe in the healing power of education (and how much evidence do we have of it?) or you need to resign yourself to viewpoints that will not necessarily reconcile themselves with other viewpoints. Not only that but given a large enough statistical presence, you can’t really argue that that many people could be turned the other way (while still other people weren’t turned in the counter direction.) That people disagree with your viewpoint is a fact of life. You need to deal with that, and have the strength of courage to stand up and say “I believe”

A couple of random notes on Noam Chomsky’s curious views on religion. Somebody thought to collect enough of his observations together that they created a page that (I guess) makes sense to them.

But many of the various collected saying of Chomsky on religion here —that apparently somebody found “life-altering” .

Chomsky, I guess, is a nice guy. He says some nice things about religion. He says that the best and worst people come from that worldview. That’s cool with me. I didn’t come back to faith in Christ because somebody had convinced me that everyone who went under the name “Christian” was a righteous dude. Even Jesus decried righteousness that propped the self up as the model. How, with a decent grounding in the Bible, would a Christian not come to terms of the damage that can be caused by the self-righteous demanding that all remake themselves in their image.

So this is not really a wisdom that comes from a lack of faith, “seeing clearly”- the free-thinkers call it. So it’s neutral ground, really.

Now, Chomsky does really well on restraining himself, but still signs of a more visceral reaction peek out here and there. “I think irrational belief is a dangerous phenomenon,” says Noam. Well, so do I—I think. But he says that directly about “the spiritual dimension in terms of religion[sic].”

But here’s another thing: can we see “rational”, do we agree on what is “rational”? Is there a rough consensus on what it is? Again hearken back to No Value. If we don’t believe in rationality (#1) , we’re fine. Nobody has ever seen rationality (#3), the concept has been around long before Coepernicus (#4) and I’ve already said that we disagree—for there is hardly anything to disagree with more than the proposal that a vast other number of disagreements you have are dismissable prattle.

So what is Chomsky talking about? Well, if I am to be fair to him, he’s talking about what he’s talking about—he’s expressing himself. But is he really saying more than “Personally, I don’t fancy religion”? No, because he says it’s dangerous.

I think most of us can connect with the idea that when the robot flails his vacuum hose arms and repeats “Danger!”, that he’s trying to say a little something more than “Having my druthers, I would not stand here to meet what is coming our way.” I may be an un-frozen Christian Philosopher, but I know a few things.

By himself, Chomsky is harmless. But he’s a favorite storyteller of some. He likes to hem and hedge and juggle air and furrow his brow to make it look like he’s really beyond just spouting his preferences. But if we take the academic arguments that make God an anathema to intellect, and turn it back on some other words, “rationality” slips through our hands as well.

Take a look from Chomsky, he accuses it of no grievous uniform error—in fact when he speaks most reasonably, one could get the idea that it is entirely neutral, and perhaps is no more indicative of danger than is an airplane—unless people drive it into skyscrapers.

One thing I like about Chomsky is that he makes little attempt to equate a creed-independent fundamentalism as a single quality. In a recent blog he even wrote that “the US is perhaps the only fundamentalist country…All other uses are…highly subjective.” So Noam is an honorable man! (That’s that a joke, son.)

But there is something else: Chomsky trots out the “mind control&rduo; chestnut. Now he’ not one to fuss about it, mind you. But there is some dangerous mind control going on. Sorry I was 17 years old when i realized the compulsory cycle of thought in religion, but I was about 23 when I realized the cycle in mainstream atheism.

So while talking about mind control, Chomsky utters his dislike that some people are doing things that fit in with their worldview, but not his. He repeatedly casts as significant that we are not like all the other industrialized children on the playground. We do something other than what they do. Something strange and more like primitive society.

In fact, although you would normally find Chomsky dismissive of a false dichotomy between “advanced” and “primitive” societies, here he thinks it is significant. Does Chomsky even like industrialization? I mean, I can imagine that he likes an idealized industrialization that comes from open distribution of wealth—and nobody trying to win anything through political struggle. But he finds a curious telltale among industrialized societies as they are in the American overproportional reliance on religion. There are only real countries to compare. Perhaps some of these countries do not measure up to their siblings in another aspect.

Perhaps religious belief and technological advancement are separate axes. Perhaps the countries of Europe influence each other by their nearness. And so what you have in “industrialized countries” is a single multi-national society with one character and a separated land mass with another.

Well, wouldn’t Canada then be more like the US, then? Yes and no. Nobody said it was a hard, fast rule. Whether Canada threw in with the US is completely independent of whether Europe is a homogenized culture with many nations which could over represent one brand of industrial nation.

But what seems perplexing to Chomsky is that people would think unlike he does and not be a “child of the enlightenment” and then have the gall to identify themselves as such in a poll. Chomsky is having a hard time coming to grips with other people expressing opinions that are not his own, it seems.

Now he’s genteel about even this. And to some degree he even expresses that he doesn’t like what happened in Kansas. But is he suggesting that he wants people to act other than the way they act? How do you accomplish this, except by some form of “thought control” After all, you want them not to act as their nature and circumstance place them—if we leave aside all the subjugation of the masses theme.

People say “education”. What is “education” except saying that a group of people need to change what they think. I’m a big enough boy to deal with this ambiguity, but part of education is to tell somebody that their opinion is wrong and they need to learn another way.

How much education is needed? Isn’t it precisely the problem that we’ve had a way of educating people for a while, and some people now want to change the direction of education? Is it fair to say that one side can “educate” the other, but the other side better not try to educate anybody?

And imagine this, if education statistically changes the way a person thinks from beginning to end—in what way is this not statistically consistent with “mind control”?

Education is touted as a high-probability solution to change behavior. Mind control is implicated as a highly-effective strategy to change behavior. And it is clear that while talking about how “mind control” helps concentrate power by making people look the other way, he is suggesting that it does have a degree of effectiveness. But unless “education” has the same effectiveness, then you can forget about getting people on the same page to the extent that you can avoid cases like Kansas.

Why? Well suppose education doesn’t quite hold the answer that its boosters say it does. Then you are truly dealing with opposition that is “doing what it wants to do” and perhaps is no more a victim of anything but human nature and happenstance. Then to wish your opponents did something else, at some level, suggests a lack of understanding about give and take.

You can tell yourself that the other side just “didn’t learn”. But that’s your story. They might not look at it the same way. So which is it, should we value everybody’s opinion or shouldn’t we?

Where I am, where I am going—Digressions, digressions…

My reactions to Lumpy (in Future Progress and Visit), then and now, rather break up the flow from Black Box Brain (BBB₁ and BBB₂), which followed from No Value and What’s Going On Here? .

I concluded What’s Going On Here? with the note: “All I mean it to say is that some atheists are drastically naive about their own worldview.”. Black Box Brain (BBB) was supposed to be an amplify this comment and begin to explore the model of the brain as an evolved computer. BBB would get into the inherent limitations involved in computing whatever.

Still I think somethings I see in Lumpy’s comments really typical of the unexamined naturalist context. As I said in Future Progress, “…he seems to be unaware of the split in his worldview.” So comments on Lumpy’s post. (at my retired blog) are on topic, even if they are not in my intended flow.

There are certain circular elements to Lumpy’s answers to my mind. And that topic still attracts my interest.

But in case you’ve lost the thread worse than I, we’ll continue on with the idea of the brain as an evolved computer, after I explore some of these other concepts. (if you cared, that is.)

My last post was about a visitor to my old blog (which I am retiring.) who objected to my post about Turing Machines (TMs) and my thesis that we only create problems for ourselves when we equate them.

I find it odd that while he showed that he knew the subject, and held that the Halting Problem pertained to brains, he repeatedly put such faith in unfinished processes.

From his first comment:

True - the mind is so complex that we do not understand all of its workings. We do for computers. [My point.] But that does not entail that we cannot (given enough time and resources) completely understand the mind as well as we understand the workings of a computer. If you want to appeal to some quantum uncertainty in defense of the mind then the same applies to computers at a subatomic level.

Obviously our understanding of the mind increases manifold each year. It seems likely that we’ll have quite a good understanding of it in the next 100 years. After all - neuroscience is still in its infancy.

But as I said, he strongly backs the idea that brains are limited by TM-type problems:

If a TM is computing a partial function that is undefined for certain arguments, it will loop forever and not know that it will loop forever. Not only that, but a universal TM will not know either whether or not that TM will halt. Not only that (!), we will not know whether that TM will halt, just by looking at its machine table. The halting problem applies to minds just as much as it applies to machines.

Does anybody see what is wrong with this?

Saying the neuroscience is in its infancy, and therefore capable of finding a reasonable mapping between brains and TMs is like saying, “You say this problem is unsolvable, but wait, the Turing Machine has only just started computing.”

As I said, I did find Lumpy quite informed, and his overall tone could have been taken as helpful. But even though I found nothing in what he said factually wrong (somewhat disputable, perhaps) he lacked the mental agility to think about what he said in terms of what he said. As a result he seems to be unaware of the split in his worldview.

As I stated in the last post, any methodic task undertaken by brains and computers is an algorithm of such. When I say “I can have the answer to you by Thursday,” and by that I mean by Thursday I’ll have my answer back from my computer, this is delegation and encapsulation. Computers do this all the time:

Windows XP does not know how your monitor shows you pictures, so it walks up to the monitor interface (called a driver) and tells it to show you something a little “like this” the monitor did all the work in bringing the picture to life, but Windows can still put it’s stamp on the picture as if it had done anything. By representing the monitor’s work as its own, Windows encapsulates the work of the monitor. In fact, I doubt that you ever think of the thankless task your monitor performs while the big braggard Windows gets all the glory.

As I said, computers do this all the time.

If it is the case that I need to ask somebody by Thursday to get the information back to you, this is also a sort of delegation. So if cooperation of Man and Machine is only delegation and encapsulation, then what are we doing? And can we even know what it is that we are doing—if by knowing we mean that the algorithm has halted in our heads.

“…given enough time and resources…”

The specification of a TM is that it has unlimited resources (tape)—and we already know that it has all the time in the world.

The first time I posted Black Box Brain (BBB1) and Black Box Brain II (BBB2), on my old blog site (which I’ll retire soon.) A visitor named “Lumpy Pea Coat” took me to task on my treatment of Turing Machines (TMs). He thought that because I tried to explain it simply, I probably didn’t understand it. I wrote a long post explaining my goals as a writer: breaking complexity down to my people: the laymen.

Although my old blog contained a discussion with him and a much more detailed attempt at an answer—I will give a more summary review of his complaint and my reactions here.

But I do want to stress one thing: I value his comment as good feedback. When I read his original critique, I suspected that he could be as much as a graduate student in this field. I don’ seek to play “gotcha!”; no, my task is to consider his objection.

There. 1) my goal as a writer, 2) my role as layman, and 3) the value I put on feedback covers a good majority of my first general reply. They all have a lot to do with each other and form, in my mind, an organic whole. I also explain that sometimes I just prefer a more striking word to the academic one.

Now onto more substantive objections:

At first, he took me to task about the lack of precision I used to describe the Turing Machine (TM) and the Halting Problem.

I don’t know anybody who genuinely holds that the brain just is a Turing machine, or the instantiation of some Turing machine table… All that anyone to be taken seriously has claimed is that what is effectively computable (humanly computable) is likewise Turing computable….

As for the halting problem, all it shows is that there exists uncomputable functions…. We already knew this given the fact that there are uncountably many one-place number theoretic functions, let alone all functions, and only countably many TMs. Unless you can provide an example of an effective procedure for the halting function (or some other uncomputable function like the diagonal function), then the brain is no better than a universal TM as far as computation ability goes.

Thus the brain is not a TM, as it seems I may have implied. We just have a method to show that it is like one. The limits of the brain, as concerns the Halting Problem, didn’t spring from its being a TM. Instead, Halting (short for “The Halting Problem”) imposes a basic limit on every kind of computation, even human.

Here’s where my purpose comes in. I wrote my treatment based on the layman idea of computer. Among those laymen, there are a number of materialists who’ll tell you that the brain is a “computer”—but what is a computer? As far as I’ve seen, dicussions of the layman “computer” never broach the limitations of computers. People in general know “Garbage In, Garbage Out”—but the particular subject of the Halting Problem never came up. Thinking that I understand it to some degree, I offered a treatment of the subject.

But Lumpy thought I’d gotten it wrong. He said, “The brain is no better than a universal TM as far as computation ability goes.”

This was precisely my point. But even had I gotten it wrong—“no better than”? No better than what? And how was it no better than this thing—whatever it was? A “Universal Turing Machine”? What is that?

As I said, seldom did the idea of the computer as limited—other than by input”come up that some discussion of it seemed warranted.

Now I’ve heard that the brain was a computer from throngs of materialists, skeptics, and rationalists. But I had seldom seen the same conversation cover the nature of computers as Turing Machines limited by the Halting Problem.

Has anybody ever told you that computation is limited? If you think it would be nice to know and nobody has ever told you, then you are the reader that I am talking about.

The computer is not its singular architecture. It is not a vacuum-tube machine. It is not a silicon machine. It is not a 32-bit or 64-bit processor. Mathematicians first devised it as a theoretical machine which did computations step by step. Because we define it by its purpose and function, it remains linked to its role. And its role is heavily defined by TM theory.

Even had I bungled the job, I raised the issue: Whither the halt-less brain?

But more to the point, given Rice’s Theorem, the following becomes clear. Let’s say that the brain operates as the equivalent of a Turing Machine in language L. This just simply means that there is some equivalent encoding scheme which captures brain function. Then the capabilities of the language cannot be decided by a TM—i.e. the brain itself.

This holds true for the brain + computers, as well. Provided that the brain has a precise algorithm for requiring the operation of computers, we are doing nothing more than branchingto a subroutine. The encapsulation of routines is common in TM theory. Therefore, no matter how many TMs you bash together, they are still only doing the job of one equivalent TM. Thus, the human mind with all the computers it can make—with the most precise algorithms for submitting data to, and requiring data from machines can never be guaranteed to answer the question of what the brain TM, in whatever coding scheme it has (“language L”), can do.