What We Are Reading Today: ‘In The Brain, In Theory'
'In The Brain, In Theory,' Romain Brette argues that the brain is not a 'biological computer' because living organisms are not engineered.
Engineering is the use of knowledge to solve technical problems, to build an artifact with a plan. Brette reviews the main theoretical frameworks for thinking about the brain, including computation, neural representations, information, and prediction, and finds them poorly suited to the study of biological cognition.
He proposes understanding the brain as a self-organized, developing community of living entities rather than an optimized assembly of machine components.
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