On the Languages of Brains
摘要
The invention of digital computers over half a century ago fascinated scientists with enormous opportunities created by this new research tool, which potentially paralleled the capabilities of brainsComputerbrain-like. Von NeumannVon Neumann has been one of the pioneers of this new digital computing era. While appreciating potential of computers, he warned about a mechanistic parallel between brains and computers. In his last work about the relationship between computers and brains, he pointed out that the operation of brains can not obey the potentially very high precision of algorithms postulated by Turing machinesTuring machine, and thus it is absolutely implausible that brains would use such algorithms in their operations. At higher levels of abstraction, in the last pages of his final work, Von Neumann contends that the language of the brain can not be mathematics as we know it.