Our hearts are pumps, our lungs are air exchangers, our veins and arteries are plumbing, our kidneys and liver are chemical factories, our GI system is a raw material intake / waste management system. and our bones and muscles are levers, gears and hydraulics.
If all those things are bio-machines then why couldn't our brains just be really sophisticated computers running incredible software?
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Could Our Brains just be Really Amazing Computers ???suzuki
Great question.
Your analogy to man-made devices is somewhat of a backwards take on things, as most machinery is actually made to mimic living things. Nevertheless, machines or beings, both are designed to take some form of energy from the surrounding environment, and convert it into work.
In that regard, the brain is very much like a computer that controls the body, but it has one amazing difference that artificial intelligence can't approach (yet.) The ability to recognize, store and relate patterns to one another. This is how people are able to do simple things that are beyond the most powerful computers.
While our brains do function in a (sort of) binary way, with the firing of neurons occurring or not occurring, they also are able to instantly interconnect experiences (which are just patterns of neurons that fire in a prescribed way based on the chemical triggers) to form new patterns which didn't exist beforehand. In other words, WE LEARN. What's more amazing is that we can relate things INSTANTLY. Think about how you can recall a memory from an hour ago, yesterday, or your childhood all in the same span of time. You can also experience something in the present, instantly connect it to something that happened thirty years ago, and then immediately act on the combination of both the old and new information almost without thinking. It's miraculous.
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