We might as well call the moon a computer since it is ‘calculating’ the effect of a gravitational field on a moon sized object.

Yes. In fact, that’s sort of my point. There is no privileged sense of computation. They can be different even if they do, have invariants.

But as far as all the other process a brain does (breathing/maintaining heart rate/etc.) describing that as ‘a computer’ seems such an abuse of notation as to render the original definition meaningless.

I tend to agree that often times, the terminology of ‘attendance’ is better than the terminology of computation, but I don’t think that there isn’t -any- meaning in keeping the computer metaphor, because I do think it has practical implications.

At the risk of going down another rabbit hole, I’d really say that the Free Energy Principle does a pretty good job of showing why keeping a wide, but nonetheless useful, definition of computation on the table can, be useful. As in, a principled tool that can shed some light on scale free dynamics (and not in a absolute, definitive answer to all questions).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQk0AHu_nng

Maybe another reason I’m ok with the computer metaphor (in which we retain the lack of privelege, and in which the attendance metaphor is kept), is that it does sort provide us some interesting technical intuitions, too. Like, how the maximum power principle effects the design and building of technology of all kinds (whether it’s chemistry, electronics, energy, gardening) , how ambiguity (that is, the unknowable embedded environment) is an important functional element of deploying any sort of technology (or policy, or behavior), and how, yeah.

One day, the fact that simple and even slow things (like water, or the moon, or chemicals, or rocks, or animals) are capable computationally, but attend to different things, is in fact. Going to be meaningful and important.

RE: the ip perspective on brains,

From my perspective, science is catching up on this - in pockets. It goes under a lot of different names, and to be honest it’s be around in many forms for a long time. I highly, highly recommend catching up on Dr. Michael Levin and related work on this. There is still levels of speculation here, but there’s hard science and empirical observation that broadly, the neuro story on memory synapses doesn’t work. The alternative, that nearly every part of the body is both capable of independent problem solving and memory, puts actionable medical alternatives on the table.

The long story is that memory appears entirely to be opportunistic. Memory can and is stored in virtually everything that a body gets access to, internally AND externally. The brain’s main function is to re-imagine and reinterpret memory, not to be dictated by it. A memory isn’t a fact in a broad sense, it’s a dynamic that acts on the body. This is different in many ways from the hard division we try to make in modern computer design (although I’d argue that even the difference between memory and instruction in von neuman design continues to fall apart over time).

That said, and i realize this is semantic linguistic issue, but I do believe brains are computers, but only in the broadest sense of what computation could be, not in the highly specific sense of them being digital von neuman devices. What’s often missed in discussion about a computational world view is being clear to the reader that there is no privileged sort of computation. There’s nothing at all special or privileged about what our digital von neuman machines are, other than in a sense them being metabolisms that are functionally different than us.

When I express that brains are computers, I like to add things like, “in the sense that dance is computation, or politics is economics, or matter is experience, or money is culture.” Which is to say they can be different and yet the same, depending on entirely the perspective of what you mean by something “being” anything at all. (It’s similar to why ontologies are both useful but always wrong).

The bitter truth though is that I don’t think there is anything privileged about the human brain either – but that doesn’t come in the sense of there being no difference. I think quite the opposite, seeing many of /the other things/ as being capable, but being in its own sorts of attendance and meaning, provides much more rich questions of “why are we different, then?” Certainly more than presuming that it is capability of any particular thing that separates us from the other things.

Ultimately, I love artists because I want an ecosystem of art and artists and art admirers, and because I think respect should transcend form, not seek reductively the most commoditized realization of it.

In many ways… isn’t this what indigenous cultures already more or less believed?