Is Your Brain a Computer? The Two Sides of the Answer

The debate is still open and it won’t close anytime soon

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Let me start with a disclaimer: we don’t know how the brain works exactly and we probably won’t know in the foreseeable future. We don’t know how the brain goes from neuronal activity to the diversity of human behavior. The methods that we have to study the brain provide tons of data but a unified theory of the brain doesn’t seem to be near.

But we do know some things about the brain.

We know how neurons and synapses work. We know about the brain’s functional and structural hierarchical organization. We know that it does parallel processing. We know that it uses very little energy to do all it does.

And we know it resembles a computer in many ways. But, is it a computer?

We’ll understand the brain by looking at computers

The metaphor of the brain as a computer has been discussed by neuroscientists and computer scientists for decades. And its controversy still holds today.

Some argue that the brain is, in fact, a computer. They usually subscribe to this idea not because of its inherent truth, but because of its usefulness. A computer takes inputs, processes them, and provides…