The info processing (IP) metaphor of the brain is wrong
Psychologist Robert Epstein, the former editor of Psychology Today, challenges anyone to show the brain processing information or data. The IP metaphor, he says, is so deeply embedded in thinking about thinking it prevents us from learning how the brain really works. Epstein also takes on popular luminaries including Ray Kurzweil and Henry Markram, seeing both exemplifying the extremes of wrongness we get into with the IP metaphor and the notion mental experience could persist outside the organic body.
The Empty Brain (Aeon article with audio)
Agreed. Except with this statement: “We can begin to build the framework of a metaphor-free theory of intelligent human behavior.” According to embodied cognition no we cannot; we replace it with a better metaphor. It this case, the embodied (enacted, embedded, extended) network metaphor. Hence my article on the collaborative commons and the ‘paradigm shift.’ This latter comment is more in line with that sentiment, the article quoting Radical Embodied Cognitive Science: “Intelligent behavior as a direct interaction between organisms and their world.” That too is a metaphor, just a better one.