Confusing brains and computers

Gill Eapen
2 min readSep 9, 2024

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A recent article highlights the conceptual borrowing and appropriation of terms and definitions of the AI discipline from cognitive sciences. At the same time, brain science seems to have done the same with computer science, since its inception. Thus, AI has ended up describing computers anthropomorphically, as computational brains with psychological properties, while brain and cognitive sciences have ended up describing brains and minds computationally and informationally, as biological computers (1).

This phenomenon seems to have led both fields astray. Unfortunately, there is nothing intelligent about artificial intelligence, that remains to be a statistical process aided by historical data and more recently nearly unlimited computing power and memory, afforded by a few monopolies. Similarly, there is nothing in the brain that works like a computer as we know it. This “cross-wiring,” is a side effect of a lack of understanding of the brain and relative over enthusiasm by technologists who get excited by unexpected outputs from Silicon.

Ironically, for these fields to advance, they must get disconnected from each other as there is nothing in common between the two, except confusing common terms, they borrowed from each other. It is time computer scientists understood that computers are tools and no amount of piling Silicon on top of each other is going to create a brain. Similarly, cognitive scientists must break away from computer science definitions at a fundamental level. Brains do not learn like computers, far from it.

Time to break the link between artificial intelligence and cognitive science and redefine properties independently and start over.

(1) Anthropomorphising Machines and Computerising Minds: The Crosswiring of Languages between Artificial Intelligence and Brain & Cognitive Sciences | Minds and Machines (springer.com)

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Gill Eapen

Gill Eapen is the founder and CEO of Decision Options ®, Mr. Eapen has over 30 years of experience in strategy, finance, engineering, and general management