Here is yet more evidence that psychologist Robert Epstein is all wet when he claims that computation-based metaphors for understanding the brain are factually wrong and hindering research.

Actual research neuroscientists, summarizing what we know about memory, cheerfully use phrases like “storage of information”, “stored memory information”, “information retrieval”, “information storage”, “the systematic process of collecting and cataloging data”, “retriev[ing]” of data, and so forth. Epstein claims the brain does not form “representations of visual events”, but these researchers say “Memory involves the complex interplay between forming representations of novel objects or events…”. The main theme of the essays seems to be that spines and synapses are the fundamental basis for memory storage.

So who do you think is likely to know more about what’s going on in the brain? Actual neuroscientists who do research on the brain and summarize the state of the art about what is known in a peer-reviewed journal? Or a psychologist who publishes books like The Big Book of Stress-Relief Games?

Hat tip: John Wilkins.

P. S. Yes, I saw the following “Further, LTP and LTD can cooperate to redistribute synaptic weight. This notion differs from the traditional analogy between synapses and digital information storage devices, in which bits are stored and retrieved independently. On the other hand, coordination amongst multiple synapses, made by different inputs, provides benefits with regard to issues of normalization and signal-to-noise.” Again, nobody thinks that the brain is structured exactly like a modern digital computer. Mechanisms of storage and retrieval are likely to be quite different. But the modern theory of computation makes no assumptions that data and programs are stored in any particular fashion; it works just as well if data is stored on paper, disk, flash drive, or in brains.

I hate to pick on poor confused Robert Epstein again, but after thinking about it some more, I’d like to explain why an example in his foolish article doesn’t justify his claims.

Here I quote his example without the accompanying illustrations:

In a classroom exercise I have conducted many times over the years, I begin by recruiting a student to draw a detailed picture of a dollar bill – ‘as detailed as possible’, I say – on the blackboard in front of the room. When the student has finished, I cover the drawing with a sheet of paper, remove a dollar bill from my wallet, tape it to the board, and ask the student to repeat the task. When he or she is done, I remove the cover from the first drawing, and the class comments on the differences.

Because you might never have seen a demonstration like this, or because you might have trouble imagining the outcome, I have asked Jinny Hyun, one of the student interns at the institute where I conduct my research, to make the two drawings. Here is her drawing ‘from memory’ (notice the metaphor):

And here is the drawing she subsequently made with a dollar bill present:

Jinny was as surprised by the outcome as you probably are, but it is typical. As you can see, the drawing made in the absence of the dollar bill is horrible compared with the drawing made from an exemplar, even though Jinny has seen a dollar bill thousands of times.

What is the problem? Don’t we have a ‘representation’ of the dollar bill ‘stored’ in a ‘memory register’ in our brains? Can’t we just ‘retrieve’ it and use it to make our drawing?

Obviously not, and a thousand years of neuroscience will never locate a representation of a dollar bill stored inside the human brain for the simple reason that it is not there to be found.

Now let me explain why Epstein’s example doesn’t even come close to proving what he thinks it does.

First, the average person is not very good at drawing. I am probably much, much worse than the average person in this respect. When I play “pictionary”, for example, people always laugh at my stick figures. Yet, given something to look at and copy, I can do a reasonable job of copying what I see. I, like many people, have trouble converting what I see “in my mind’s eye” to a piece of paper. So it is not at all surprising to me that the students Epstein asks to draw a dollar bill produce the results he displays. His silly experiment says nothing about the brain and what it “stores” at all!

Second, Epstein claims that the brain stores no representation of a dollar bill whatsoever. He is pretty unequivocal about this. So let me suggest another experiment that decisively refutes Epstein’s claim: instead of asking students to draw a dollar bill (an exercise which evidently is mostly about the artistic ability of students), instead give them five different “dollar bills”, four of which have been altered in some fairly obvious respect. For example, one might have a portrait of Jefferson instead of Washington, another might have the “1” in only two corners instead of all four corners, another might have the treasury seal in red instead of the typical green for a federal reserve note, etc. And one of the five is an ordinary bill. Now ask them to pick out which bills are real and which are not. To make it really precise, each student should get just one bill and not be able to see the bills of others.

Here’s what I will bet: students will, with very high probability, be able to distinguish the real dollar bill from the altered ones. I know with certainty that I can do this.

Now, how could one possibly distinguish the real dollar bills from the fake ones if one has no representation of the real one stored in the brain?

And this is not pure speculation: thousands of cashiers every day are tasked with distinguishing real bills from fake ones. Somehow, even though they have no representation of the dollar bill stored in their brain, they manage to do this. Why, it’s magic!

– Did you hear the news, Victoria? Over in the States those clever Yanks have invented a flying machine!

– A flying machine! Good heavens! What kind of feathers does it have?

– Feathers? It has no feathers.

– Well, then, it cannot fly. Everyone knows that things that fly have feathers. It is preposterous to claim that something can fly without them.

OK, I admit it, I made that dialogue up. But that’s what springs to mind when I read yet another claim that the brain is not a computer, nor like a computer, and even that the language of computation is inappropriate when talking about the brain.

The most recent foolishness along these lines was penned by psychologist Robert Epstein. Knowing virtually nothing about Epstein, I am willing to wager that (a) Epstein has never taken a course in the theory of computation (b) could not pass the simplest undergraduate exam in that subject (c) does not know what the Church-Turing thesis is and (d) could not explain why the thesis is relevant to the question of whether the brain is a computer or not.

Here are just a few of the silly claims by Epstein, with my commentary:

“But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently.”

— Well, Epstein is wrong. We, like all living things, are certainly born with “information”. To name just one obvious example, there is an awful lot of DNA in our cells. Not only is this coded information, it is even coded in base 4, whereas modern digital computers use base 2 — the analogy is clear. We are certainly born with “rules” and “algorithms” and “programs”, as Frances Crick explains in detail about the human visual system in The Astonishing Hypothesis.

“We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them.”

— We certainly do store words in some form. When we are born, we are unable to pronounce or remember the word “Epstein”, but eventually, after being exposed to enough of his silly essays, suddenly we gain that capability. From where did this ability come? Something must have changed in the structure of the brain (not the arm or the foot or the stomach) that allows us to retrieve “Epstein” and pronounce it whenever something sufficiently stupid is experienced. The thing that is changed can reasonably be said to “store” the word.

As for rules, without some sort of encoding of rules somewhere, how can we produce so many syntactically correct sentences with such regularity and consistency? How can we produce sentences we’ve never produced before, and have them be grammatically correct?

“We don’t create representations of visual stimuli”

— We certainly do. Read Crick.

“Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.”

— No, organisms certainly do. They just don’t do it in exactly the same way that modern digital computers do. I think this is the root of Epstein’s confusion.

Anyone who understands the work of Turing realizes that computation is not the province of silicon alone. Any system that can do basic operations like storage and rewriting can do computation, whether it is a sandpile, or a membrane, or a Turing machine, or a person. Today we know (but Epstein apparently doesn’t) that every such system has essentially the same computing power (in the sense of what can be ultimately computed, with no bounds on space and time).

“The faulty logic of the IP metaphor is easy enough to state. It is based on a faulty syllogism – one with two reasonable premises and a faulty conclusion. Reasonable premise #1: all computers are capable of behaving intelligently. Reasonable premise #2: all computers are information processors. Faulty conclusion: all entities that are capable of behaving intelligently are information processors.”

— This is just utter nonsense. Nobody says “all computers are capable of behaving intelligently”. Take a very simple model of a computer, such as a finite automaton with two states computing the Thue-Morse sequence. I believe intelligence is a continuum, and I think we can ascribe intelligence to even simple computational models, but even I would say that this little computer doesn’t exhibit much intelligence at all. Furthermore, there are good theoretical reasons why finite automata don’t have enough power to “behave intelligently”; we need a more powerful model, such as the Turing machine.

The real syllogism goes something like this: humans can process information (we know this because humans can do basic tasks like addition and multiplication of integers). Humans can store information (we know this because I can remember my social security number and my birthdate). Things that both store information and process it are called (wait for it) computers.

“a thousand years of neuroscience will never locate a representation of a dollar bill stored inside the human brain for the simple reason that it is not there to be found.”

— Of course, this is utter nonsense. If there were no representation of any kind of a dollar bill in a brain, how could one produce a drawing of it, even imperfectly? I have never seen (just to pick one thing at random) a crystal of the mineral Fletcherite, nor even a picture of it. Ask me to draw it and I will be completely unable to do so because I have no representation of it stored in my brain. But ask me to draw a US dollar bill (in Canada we no longer have them!) and I can do a reasonable, but not exact job. How could I possibly do this if I have no information about a dollar bill stored in my memory anywhere? And how is that I fail for Fletcherite?

“The idea, advanced by several scientists, that specific memories are somehow stored in individual neurons is preposterous”

— Well, it may be preposterous to Epstein, but there is at least evidence for it, at least in some cases.

“A wealth of brain studies tells us, in fact, that multiple and sometimes large areas of the brain are often involved in even the most mundane memory tasks.”

— So what? What does this have to do with anything? There is no requirement, in saying that the brain is a computer, that memories and facts and beliefs be stored in individual neurons. Storage that is partitioned in various location, “smeared” across the brain, is perfectly compatible with computation. It’s as if Epstein has never heard of digital neural networks, where one can similarly say that a face is not stored in any particular location in memory, but rather distributed across many of them. These networks even exhibit some characteristics of brains, in that damaging parts of them don’t entirely get rid of the stored data.

“My favourite example of the dramatic difference between the IP perspective and what some now call the ‘anti-representational’ view of human functioning involves two different ways of explaining how a baseball player manages to catch a fly ball – beautifully explicated by Michael McBeath, now at Arizona State University, and his colleagues in a 1995 paper in Science. The IP perspective requires the player to formulate an estimate of various initial conditions of the ball’s flight – the force of the impact, the angle of the trajectory, that kind of thing – then to create and analyse an internal model of the path along which the ball will likely move, then to use that model to guide and adjust motor movements continuously in time in order to intercept the ball.

“That is all well and good if we functioned as computers do, but McBeath and his colleagues gave a simpler account: to catch the ball, the player simply needs to keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationship with respect to home plate and the surrounding scenery (technically, in a ‘linear optical trajectory’). This might sound complicated, but it is actually incredibly simple, and completely free of computations, representations and algorithms.”

— This is perhaps the single stupidest passage in Epstein’s article. He doesn’t seem to know that “keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationship with respect to home plate and the surrounding scenery” is an algorithm. Tell that description to any computer scientist, and they’ll say, “What an elegant algorithm!”. In exactly the same way, the way raster graphics machines draw a circle is a clever technique called “Bresenham’s algorithm”. It succeeds in drawing a circle using linear operations only, despite not having the quadratic equation of a circle (x–a)² + (y–b)² = r² explicitly encoded in it.

But more importantly, it shows Epstein hasn’t thought seriously at all about what it means to catch a fly ball. It is a very complicated affair, involving coordination of muscles and eyes. When you summarize it as “the simply needs to keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationship with respect to home plate and the surrounding scenery”, you hide all the amazing amount of computation and algorithms that are going on behind the scenes to coordinate movement, keep the player from falling over, and so forth. I’d like to see Epstein design a walking robot, let alone a running robot, without any algorithms at all.

“there is no reason to believe that any two of us are changed the same way by the same experience.”

— Perhaps not. But there is reason to believe that many of us are changed in approximately the same way. For example, all of us learn our natural language from parents and friends, and we somehow learn approximately the same language.

“We are organisms, not computers.  Get over it.”

— No, we are both organisms and computers. Get over it!

“The IP metaphor has had a half-century run, producing few, if any, insights along the way.”

— Say what? The computational model of the brain has had enormous success. Read Crick, for example, for an example of how the computational model has had some success in modeling the human visual system. Here’s an example from that book I give in my algorithms course at Waterloo: why is it that humans can find a single red R in a field of green R’s almost instantly whether there are 10 or 1000 letters, or a single red R in a field of red L’s almost as quickly, but has trouble finding the unique green R in a large sea of green L’s and red R’s and red L’s? If you understand algorithms and the distinction between parallel and sequential algorithms, you can explain this. If you’re Robert Epstein, I imagine you just sit there dumbfounded.

Other examples of successes include artificial neural nets, which have huge applications in things like handwriting recognition, face recognition, classification, robotics, and many other areas. They draw their inspiration from the structure of the brain, and somehow manage to function enormously well; they are used in industry all the time. If that is not great validation of the model, I don’t know what is.

I don’t know why people like Epstein feel the need to deny things for which the evidence is so overwhelming. He behaves like a creationist in denying evolution. And like creationists, he apparently has no training in a very relevant field (here, computer science) but still wants to pontificate on it. When intelligent people behave so stupidly, it makes me sad.

P. S. I forgot to include one of the best pieces of evidence that the brain, as a computer, is doing things roughly analogous to digital computers, and certainly no more powerful than our ordinary RAM model or multitape Turing machine. Here it is: mental calculators who can do large arithmetic calculations are known, and their feats have been catalogued: they can do things like multiply large numbers or extract square roots in their heads without pencil and paper. But in every example known, their extraordinary computational feats are restricted to things for which we know there exist polynomial-time algorithms. None of these computational savants have ever, in the histories I’ve read, been able to factor arbitrary large numbers in their heads (say numbers of 100 digits that are the product of two primes). They can multiply 50-digit numbers in their heads, but they can’t factor. And, not surprisingly, no polynomial-time algorithm for factoring is currently known, and perhaps there isn’t one.

Carol Wainio catalogues once again a list of Margaret Wente’s journalistic transgressions.

This is a story that Canadian media is not addressing with much intellectual honesty. Take this grotesque column by Emma Teitel, for example.

What journalism school in Canada will be brave enough and honest enough to recognize Wainio’s work — for example, by awarding her an honorary degree?

Poor Ted Cruz.

First, his god tells him to run for President of the US.

Then, his god humiliates him in primary after primary.

Ted wanted his Republican opponents to pray and drop out of the race.

But it didn’t quite work out that way.

What a capricious puppet-master god Ted worships!

Craig Kaplan, my brilliant and whimsical colleague, has invented a twitterbot, trump575, that tweets haikus constructed from the opus of Donald Trump. You can follow it here.

Somebody sent me a link to this piece by Emmett Rensin at Vox.

The author’s thesis is that liberals have stopped thinking and spend all their time being smug instead — but this is certainly not true of conservatives. Liberals, according to Rensin, “hate their former allies”. Conservatives, by contrast, are open-minded and persuadable. And, Rensin says, The Daily Show is a perfect example of this liberal smugness.

Well, Rensin goes wrong right there. “Smug” is not even close to the right word to describe Jon Stewart.  Bill Maher is smug. Jon Stewart is, at times, almost painfully earnest. Does he make fun of people? Absolutely. But modern conservatism has so many targets that the jokes write themselves: Ben Carson and his pyramids that stored grain. Donald Trump and his claim that he saw “thousands and thousands” of American Muslims celebrating the 9/11 attacks. Ted Cruz and his “Trus-Ted” slogan, when his record of public dishonesty is hard to deny. Rensin apparently thinks we are not allowed to poke fun at all this idiocy and dishonesty.

Here are some examples of liberal smug ignorance, according to Rensin: “the Founding Fathers were all secular deists”. Well, that’s clearly not so, but some were, at least during part of their life, like Thomas Paine and Ethan Allen. But how is this mistake worse than the conservative claim that “94 percent of the [the era of the Founders’] documents were based on the Bible” (debunked here)?

Another one: “that you’re actually, like, 30 times more likely to shoot yourself than an intruder”. Perhaps the number “30” is wrong, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a significant health risk in owning a gun. And how is this mistake worse than the conservative insistence on “more guns mean less crime”? Pro-gun “researchers” such as Kleck and Lott are treated by conservatives as unimpeachable, when in fact their errors are extensively documented.

Rensin’s thesis is essentially a denigration of the importance of knowledge and facts. Who cares, Rensin says implicitly, if watching Fox News makes you less well informed? Pointing that out is just liberal smugness. Knowledge and facts are just unimportant compared to empathy and open-mindedness, which liberals today lack (while, presumably, conservatives have it in spades). Pay no attention the fact that when President Obama cited empathy as a desirable characteristic in a Supreme Court justice, conservatives jumped all over him.

Open-mindedness is a virtue — I’ll agree with that. But open-mindedness without skepticism and facts and knowledge just becomes credulity, a willingess to believe anything if it confirms your world view.

Here are just a few of the things that conservatives “know” that just ain’t so: that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet (debunked here); that Bill Clinton delayed air traffic while he was having a haircut (debunked here); that Hillary Clinton was fired from the Watergate investigation for incompetence (debunked here). Visit any conservative website, mention Al or Bill or Hillary, and you’ll only have to wait a few minutes before one of these lies is dragged out yet again. I have grad-school-educated conservative friends that proudly repeat these stories, ferchrissake.

Rensin claims that all this liberal smugness has “corrupt[ed]” them, but he gives no examples of corruption. He claims the case against conservatives is “tenuous”, but just dismisses evidence like that given above and his own article.

Rensin thinks it is somehow “smug” for atheists to point out the religious hypocrisy of Kim Davis. It is here that his argument (and I use the term generously) becomes the most unhinged. Is it really necessary to be a Christian to criticize Christians? Do you have to believe in the divinity of Jesus or be a professional theologian to point out that Kim Davis cannot find support for her actions in Christian theology? When Mike Huckabee opportunistically elbowed out Ted Cruz to be at Kim Davis’s rally, Rensin finds Huckabee genuine and admirable, instead of the pandering opportunity it clearly was.

Rensin is rhetorically dishonest. At one point he tries to refute a claim about the Ku Klux Klan by citing statistics about Stormfront.org. But these are entirely different groups.

Rensin is upset that the Daily Show is “broadcast on national television”. Has he never listened to Fox News? Or conservative radio hosts with huge audiences, like Mark Levin and Michael Savage? The vitriol and the outright lies that happen every single day in these venues make Jon Stewart look like gentle fun.

Rensin claims that only Democrats have “made a point of openly disdaining” the dispossessed. One can only make that claim by wilfully ignoring the time Donald Trump made fun of a disabled reporter, or the time a Republican congressional candidate called poor people slothful and lazy, or Mitt Romney’s comment that he could never convince 47% of the American people that “they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives”.

Rensin thinks liberal smugness is going to ensure a Trump victory: “Faced with the prospect of an election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the smug will reach a fever pitch: six straight months of a sure thing, an opportunity to mock and scoff and ask, How could anybody vote for this guy? until a morning in November when they ask, What the fuck happened?“. Yet who is a better match for the word smug? Hillary Clinton? Bernie Sanders? Look, when even Bill Maher calls you smug, you know you’ve got smug issues.

Finally, I observe that there doesn’t seem to be any way to leave comments on Rensin’s piece. That seems pretty smug to me.

Here is a splendid example of a certain kind of conservative mind: the kind that can’t imagine how things could be any different, or why anyone would want them to be any different, from the way they are today. This kind of person always says, whenever anything novel is brought up, “But we’ve always done it this way!” Next, they go on to invent all sorts of silly reasons to avoid making any change.

Small-minded is what we used to call this trait, and it’s particularly on display here. Mike Strobel, who despite once being Editor-in-Chief of the Toronto Sun doesn’t seem to know the difference between “stationary” and “stationery”, can’t think of a single decent reason to turf the monarchy in Canada.

Instead, he believes keeping them around is a good idea because “the Trudeaus might declare themselves Canada’s royal family and we’d wake up one morning as subjects of King Justin”. Perhaps the Queen will save Strobel someday by pushing him out of the way of an errant taxi. Those two preposterous scenarios are about equally likely.

Allan Fotheringham, a commentator that actually has connected brain cells, once said, “Grown-up nations do not need, as head of state, a woman — however nice — who lives across a large ocean in a castle in a foreign country.” Someday Canada will grow up. Strobel, I’m not so sure about.