Aeon essay pushes back: your brain probably is a computer, whatever that means
gleech · x · 2026-10-05
Philosopher gleech amplified a rebuttal to the viral Aeon piece "Your Brain Does Not Process Information and it is Not a Computer," pointing to Kevin Lande's essay arguing the brain probably is a computer.
Lande's core points:
- "The brain is a computer" is neither mere metaphor nor a precisely understood hypothesis — we have clear reasons to think it is literally true, we just don't know what that means yet.
- The brain lacks hard-drive/RAM/CPU analogues, but none of those are essential to being a computer; we don't actually know what is essential.
- The essay defends computationalism as a still-powerful framework for understanding the mind.
A continuation of the long-running computationalism debate, with the response piece considered the more thoughtful of the two.
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