Your Brain Is Not A Computer

elon musk vs embodied cognition

Recently I wrote about knitting as a kind of attention through the lens of embodied cognition, and I liked it so much I adapted it into a video essay:

Much of it will sound familiar to my close readers, but I’ve added some things, too: like, if movement is a kind of attention, then we could see knitting and other repetitive crafts as a way of pacing the body, an idea inspired by Mikka Nielsen’s work on ADHD as a ‘desynchronized way of being in the world’.

She writes:

“Rituals of self-stimulation enable the body to become the moment—a body that ‘accrues time as a penalty in the form of understimulation, and that perceives this time as a burden’. (Goodwin, 2010:19)

Becoming the moment means slowing down the acceleration of inner time [and] insisting on the present through movement..”¹

I also added a bit of history to help us understand the macro reasons everyone seems to be really into yarncraft again: The Revival of Handicraft by William Morris, a leading figure of the 19th century Arts and Crafts Movement, who saw the return to crafting as an encouraging sign that people were unhappy with the industrialization of society, and the way machines cut them off from the process of making to churn out ‘ugly vulgarity’.²

But there’s one thing I skated through in explaining embodied cognition that deserves a bit more time: the idea that the brain is a computer, embodied cognition’s ideological foil.

What’s really interesting about this idea is the fact that computers were actually modeled after the brain, or at least, ‘a subset of human cognitive abilities, namely doing calculations’, as Romain Brette writes in a 2022 paper:

The brain-computer metaphor seems to offer a natural way to bridge mental and physiological domains. But it is important to realize that it does so precisely because computer words are themselves mental metaphors. In the seventeenth century, a “computer” was a person who did calculations (Hutto et al., 2018). Later on, by analogy, devices built to perform calculations were called computers.

We say for example that computers have “memory,” but memory is a cognitive ability possessed by persons: it is people who remember, and then we metaphorically say that a computer “memorizes” some information; but when you open some text file, the computer does not literally remember what you wrote….

No wonder computers offer a natural way to describe how the brain “implements” cognition: computers were designed with human cognition in mind in the first place.

Bette says the idea has become a ‘double metaphor’, circling itself — brain to computer back to brain again. This may seem like just a fun bit of trivia, but it actually forms the basis of a strange worldview shared by some of the most powerful men on Earth.

If the brain is just a computer, then who is to say our world has not been digitally simulated?

In one clip, Elon Musk is asked how likely it is that we live in a simulation, and he says, highly. It’s a popular idea — ‘glitch in the matrix’ videos have basically become their own genre on Tiktok, and tech billionaires apparently believe this secular theology³ so much that some are rumored to have funded research into breaking us out of the Matrix.

The idea can be traced to a 2003 paper by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, “ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?”, in which he presents a trilemma:

“…at least one of the following propositions is true:

(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage;

(2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);

(3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.”

Don’t worry if this doesn’t make any sense to you at first read, philosophers famously love convoluted thought experiments that they use to make more meta points about thoughts. That’s what this is, but pop culture has warped it into some kind of proof that we are all currently plugged into a supercomputer.

Bostrom explains that if you believe computing power will continue to accelerate into the future, to the point that we transcend the body and become “posthuman,” then due to mathematical probability, it is likely that we are actually in a simulation created by our successful ancestors right now.

This premise explains why tech billionaires like Musk wholeheartedly believe we are all simulated (and why you don’t really have to care about this unless you’re a techno-optimist, too) — their grand goals for the future of post-humanity have backed them into a philosophical corner.

Echoing Bostrom, Musk has said:

“either we’re going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality or civilization will cease to exist. Those are the two options.”

But are they? I could imagine several other possible futures for humanity right now that don’t center the endless acceleration of computing power.⁴ We could choose to do something else with our technology, if the capitalist demand for growth at all costs was not the driving force of our economy.

This seems like a failure of the imagination to me, not to mention a massive failure to account for the body. Aside from neurotransmitters and synapses, Bostrom doesn’t address the body at all in his 2003 paper. His argument relies on what he calls ‘the assumption of substrate independence’, which says that, in theory, consciousness doesn’t require a meat-brain and can function perfectly fine on silicon, or any other material.

Transhumanists like Bostrom view the body as an inefficient hindrance, something that needs to be tweaked and optimized and eventually left behind altogether.⁵ Disability, in this worldview, is a glitch, which is why Bostrom’s thought-child, longtermism, ends up being ‘eugenics on steroids’.

In contrast, embodied cognition says that we actually do need an electrified meat-body to think,⁶ because thinking is enacted in the relationship between the body and the environment.

In their seminal text, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch write:

“The core idea of enaction is that the living body is a self-organizing system. This is in contrast to viewing it as a machine that happens to be made of meat rather than silicon. Mechanisms act and change their state only because of input and programming from sources outside of themselves, whereas the living body continuously reorganizes itself to survive and maintain its own homeostasis… Survival means that the organism must preserve the integrity of its boundaries while having constant interchange with the environment.”

Through these interactions, with our varied bodies that have varied sensations and capacities, we create knowledges, but Musk and Bostrom’s posthuman agenda doesn’t see disabled knowledge.

As Alison Kafer has written, ‘disabled people are continually being written out of the future, rendered as the sign of the future no one wants,’ which is why it is important that we keep sharing the things we have learned in, with, and through our disabled bodies.

Such as: movement being a valid form of attention! Watch the video and let me know what you think!

1. from her chapter in the book Time Work: Studies of Temporal Agency

2. All I can think about is AI videos like this..

3. A good point from Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker: “The simulation argument is appealing, in part, because it gives atheists a way to talk about spirituality. The idea that we’re living in only a part of reality, with the whole permanently beyond our reach, can be a source of awe. About our simulators, one can ask the same questions one asks about God: Why did the creators of our world decide to include evil and suffering? (Can they change that setting in the preferences?) Where did the original, non-simulated world come from? In that sense, the simulation argument is a thoughtful and expansive materialist fable that is almost, but not quite, religious. There is, of course, no sanctity or holiness in the simulation argument. The people outside the simulation aren’t gods—they’re us.”

4. Sami Schalk writes about Octavia Butler’s alternative vision in The Future of Bodyminds, Bodyminds of the Future

5. for more on the ableism at the heart of transhumanism, see Vile Sovereigns in Bioethical Debate by Melinda Hall

6. okay actually they say it like this: “cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities”