Your brain runs your body using something like a budget

Re:Your brain runs your body using something like a budget by skohan on Thursday November 26, 2020 @06:02AM (#25218852)

> Thinking in terms on software design and architecture you can start using a similar vocabulary.

But I think that's exactly the example of where the metaphor starts to give us bad information.

The biggest difference between the brain and a computer is that the brain is fundamentally parallel. Not more threads in a GPU parallel, but rather the processing the brain does is the manifestation of the parallel actions of a mass of information processing units interacting with one another.

To give an example of where using the computer metaphor gives rise to very misleading assumptions because of this: in many cases with a computer, more data equals more cost. If you need to iterate through a million data points to get a result vs. a thousand, it's going to take a lot more time to reach the answer. But with the brain it's precisely the opposite. More data points means a denser network of interconnections which can give a better answer sooner.

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Re:Your brain runs your body using something like a budget by datameta on Thursday November 26, 2020 @01:01PM (#25222197)

While as of late I try to avoid drawing this metaphor - what your last sentence describes is the act of using a deeper neural network model trained on a larger/cleaner/more representative dataset.

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Re:Your brain runs your body using something like a budget by skohan on Thursday November 26, 2020 @04:36PM (#25223693)

ANN's are a better metaphore (well they should be, they are biologically inspired) but are still woefully inadequate as analogies for what the brain is actually doing.

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