guy recently linked this essay, its old, but i don't think its significantly wrong (despite gpt evangelists) also read weizenbaum, libs, for the other side of the coin
this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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You've completely misunderstood their criticism of mind uploading.
The author asserts that you are not really your brain. If you copied your brain into a computer, that hapless brain would immediately dissociate and lose all sense of self because it has become unanchored from your body and your sociocultural and historical-materialist context.
You are not just a record of memories. You are also your home, your friends and family, what you ate for breakfast, how much sleep you got, how much exercise you're getting on a regular basis, your general pain and comfort levels, all sorts of things that exist outside of your brain. Your brain is not you. Your brain is part of you, probably the most important part, but a computer upload of your brain would not be you.
Embodied cognition. I don't see this as implying that what we're doing isn't computation (or information processing) in some sense. It's just that the way we're doing it is deeply, deeply different from how even neural networks instantiated on digital computers do it (among other things, our information processing is smeared out across the environment). That doesn't make it not computation in the same way that not having a cover and a mass in grams makes a PDF copy of Moby Dick not a book. There are functional, abstract similarities between PDFs and physical books that make them the same "kinds of things" in certain senses, but very different kinds of things in other senses.
Whether they're going to count as relevantly similar depends on which bundles of features you think are important or worth tracking, which in turn depends on what kinds of predictions you want to make or what you want to do. The fight about whether brains are "really" computers or not obscures the deeply value-laden and perspectival nature of a judgement like that. The danger doesn't lie in adopting the metaphor, but rather in failing to recognize it as a metaphor--or, to put it another way, in uncritically accepting the tech-bro framing of only those features that our brains have in common with digital computers as being things worth tracking, with the rest being "incidental."
I think I agree.
One metaphor I quite like is the brain as a ball of clay. Whenever you do anything the clay is gaining deformities and imprints and picking up impurities from the environment. Embodied cognition, right? Obviously the brain isn't actually a ball of clay but I think the metaphor is useful, and I like it more than I like being compared to a computer. After all, when a calculator computes the answer to a math problem the physical structure of the calculator doesn't change. The brain, though, actually changes! The computation metaphor misses this.
This is really useful for understanding memory, because every time you remember something you pick up that ball of clay and it changes.
Your analogy reminds me a bit of the Freud essay on the mystical writing pad
That should be a red flag to treat it with caution. Freud was a crank and his only contribution to psychology was being so wrong it inspired generations of scientists to debunk him.