Analog vs Digital (was Re: Is Scheme/Lisp somehow more "fundamental" than other languages?)

[Andrew Lentvorski]

David Brown wrote:
> I would say that the human brain is more general purpose than any computer
> that we've ever built.

I might agree.  Except that its "general purpose" is actually "pattern 
matching for survival".

> Computers we make have to be laboriously programmed.

Um, excuse me?  Literacy and education don't come for free, you know.

> The brain learns on its own.  It can't be directly programmed,
> and I don't think we're even close to understanding how it works.  But, it
> can be indirectly be programmed.  Words like "study", and "practice" come
> to mind.

And it has some absolutely spectacular failure modes: superstition, 
schizophrenia, paranoia, depression, etc.

And it has almost no debugging facilities.

-a