http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10925841


I'm not sure what's new about this, since I was told this two years ago. :/ Oh, it was still a hypothesis back then.

Anyway, it does disprove epiphenomenalism. If the brain is like the internet, it obviously is not capable of producing rational things, while the internet even has supposedly rational actors. Hence, there has to be something else. [/flawed logic]

Drawing parallels with the way people think and how things happen on the internet leads me to believe this article has some merit. Or I'm just looking too hard in to things again.

The brain actually functions very similar to a computer, all information is transferred as electronic signals and memory is thought to be stored much like the one's and zero's of computer code (except with chemicals instead of blinking lights, of course)

Actually, the processes are rather different. I'm not sure whether it is binary code, it seems to me that it works more with electric stimuli to activate certain parts, not really sending information rather than triggering. ANyway, a computer uses a central calculator (processor, nowadays multiple ones are often installed), but the brain uses decentral calculation. This makes the brain fundamentally different to a single computer and more like the internet.

You're looking at the brain from a much larger scale. The very fundamental aspects of the brain (like cell-level fundamentals) are believed to work like a computer in some aspects

Scientifically, a brain is a computer. It does calculations, stores and can output data. That's what I recall to be the strict definition of a "scientific computer". So are you referring to the workings of the central processing unit?

My brain is a little rusty, because I learned this stuff a long time ago, but the CPU generally, when some program is started or something needs to be done, takes the memory from the RAM to do it. This is unlike the brain, but perhaps I misunderstood your statement.

Memory is stored in your brain with a kind of "chemical code," and while we have yet to even begin to understand that code it is believed to work similar to the "on" and "off" switches ("1's and 0's") of a computer.

Saying that a brain is scientifically a computer is rather ambiguous in my eyes. The point of a computer is technically calculating. Humans can calculate (not extremely efficiently, though) so in that respect humans are computers (and with this definition I agree with the conclusion). Humans can also get input, operate the input and give output. But unlike computers, humans can also generate output without input. Rationality and creativity are based on that. From a scientific view, humans would then also be "oracles".

The problem with this view is that it makes some people think that a computer is therefore not fundamentally different to the human brain, yet it is already on a rather basic level. Such a view would be rather flawed.

I fail to see why I am talking of the brain on a much larger scale. I am not talking of the brain at the macro-level, but at the level of a dozen of cells. Inside the cells, I do not imagine the processes in the cell to be radically different from other cells, just cut to the task. There will be some differences in chemical compounds, sure, but the cell processes would be determined by Stokes's law, osmotic pressure, electromagnetic effects of particles and other microscale processes. Saying that a brain is like a computer based on that is like saying one's ovaries or one's testicular glands are like a computer because of the cell processes, which are overall not all too different. I would say that the interaction between cells would be rather important and makes the difference between the glands and the brain. I do not think the (structural) difference is on a single level, but a (structural) difference on a single level does make a difference between the brain and a computer.

Actually there is a memory hierarchy involved. The CPU is basically a counter flipping bits between one and zero to do its thing. Now modern CPUs have something called a cache. The cache is a block of memory on the CPU itself making it quite fast to access. However, caches are expensive to make and that is where RAM comes in. It stores information in the short term, is slower than cache memory but still pretty fast to not be noticeable. RAM is cheaper to make, that's why you can fit so much of it on a computer. Even then, it has its limitations, as the most popular type of RAM can only store memory as long as there is some current running to remember the bits of information on them (this is also to save costs and isn't big a deal). Then we get to hard drive memory. This is slow because your hard drive is basically a CD player with a high capacity disk to store information on permanently; unless of course, you are using a solid state drive but let's not get in to that right now. It takes time to actually find where the information is and your computer uses a paging service of some kind. Once it finds the address, you have to wait for the reader of the hard drive to actually physically traverse to that particular spot on the hard drive to read information. Then the data has to be copied to a faster memory or directly to the CPU if there is enough space.

tl;dr Needless elaboration.