If you could damage wires in a certain way and make the voices forget how to pronounce nouns, eliminate their short-term but not long-term memory, damage their color words, and so on, you would have a solid case for the wires doing internal, functional information-processing in causal arrangements which permitted the final output to be permuted in ways that corresponded to perturbing particular causal nodes. In much the same way, a calculator might be thought to be a radio if you are ignorant of its internals, but if you have a hypothesis that the calculator contains a binary half-adder and you can perturb particular transistors and see wrong answers in a way that matches what the half-adder hypothesis predicts for perturbing that transistor, you have shown the answers are generated internally rather than externally. In a world where we can directly monitor a cat’s thalamus and reconstruct part of its visual processing field, the radio hypothesis is not just privileging a hypothesis without evidence, it is frantically clinging to a hypothesis with strong contrary evidence in denial of a hypothesis with detailed confirming evidence.
(I don’t think the cat experiments are very conclusive here. As far as I know, the functions that have been identified in the early visual system are things like edge detection and motion detection. But such functions are used for video compression. So not only could a radio set perform them in principle, an ordinary digital TV set already does.)
I don’t think this is quite where the analogy was. The brain’s information-processing features you describe seem to be analogous to the radio’s volume and clarity… it seems Eagleman was trying to compare the radio’s content not to the brain’s content, but to consciousness or something. At least, that’s the best steelmanning attempt I’ve got.
If you could damage wires in a certain way and make the voices forget how to pronounce nouns, eliminate their short-term but not long-term memory, damage their color words, and so on, you would have a solid case for the wires doing internal, functional information-processing in causal arrangements which permitted the final output to be permuted in ways that corresponded to perturbing particular causal nodes. In much the same way, a calculator might be thought to be a radio if you are ignorant of its internals, but if you have a hypothesis that the calculator contains a binary half-adder and you can perturb particular transistors and see wrong answers in a way that matches what the half-adder hypothesis predicts for perturbing that transistor, you have shown the answers are generated internally rather than externally. In a world where we can directly monitor a cat’s thalamus and reconstruct part of its visual processing field, the radio hypothesis is not just privileging a hypothesis without evidence, it is frantically clinging to a hypothesis with strong contrary evidence in denial of a hypothesis with detailed confirming evidence.
(I don’t think the cat experiments are very conclusive here. As far as I know, the functions that have been identified in the early visual system are things like edge detection and motion detection. But such functions are used for video compression. So not only could a radio set perform them in principle, an ordinary digital TV set already does.)
I don’t think this is quite where the analogy was. The brain’s information-processing features you describe seem to be analogous to the radio’s volume and clarity… it seems Eagleman was trying to compare the radio’s content not to the brain’s content, but to consciousness or something. At least, that’s the best steelmanning attempt I’ve got.