Mazviita Chirimuuta

But what I take issue with is the kind of ontologisation of that, saying that because computational neuroscience is this successful field of inquiry, we know now that the brain is a computer.

I think that is not an inference we should make.

To what extent are the mechanisms of the brain inherently bound up with the fact that the implementation here is in living tissue?

So I think it's really this sort of tantalizing

evidence about how the extent to which sort of brain processes and signaling between neurons, not just the electrical specialized signaling that neurons do, but biochemically, it's kind of outgrowths of signaling that's happening elsewhere in the body all of the time.

So that there's nothing

that we shouldn't think of neuronal cells as sort of distinctively cognitive as opposed to the other cells in the body, but that they're extensions of the ways that cells signal anyway.

And if neuronal function is so much just a manifestation of what's happening with metabolizing cells anyway, that makes it more of a stretch to say that a machine that's not living could have the same functionality.

Yeah, I mean, no one's trying to build artificial neural networks with living cells.

Hmm, it's just vestigial, huh?

I mean, I think we really need to take seriously the economy that is there and biological information processing.

We do a lot more with a very limited energy budget running our brains every day than artificial neural networks are really, really expensive to run.

It doesn't strike me that

biological cognition could get away with being that wasteful, that surely to keep things sort of blowing up in terms of like energy being consumed for information processing biologically, that there must have been a fair amount of pruning on the way.

Yeah, I agree.

I mean, what I say in the book in that chapter, I set out and I say this to be sort of very metaphysically neutral about what representation is, what intentionality is.

But at the same time, not what I directly wrote in the book.

I think I agree with you that there is something very important about

connecting the notion of agency and intelligence with this thing of being responsive to what is actually very distal.

It could be distal in time and space.