I've noticed that articles like this almost always fall back on implicit "brain as computer" metaphors: "systems involved in love and sex are coming online," "impact of the drugs on the developing circuitry itself." Anyone know of an article that discusses this? It seems to be everywhere in writings about the brain but rarely acknowledged. As for the article itself - I think it has a valid point but is overly flippant about the risks of addiction and relapse later in life. Just because it's statistically less likely than in youth doesn't mean addiction is a "developmental disorder" as the author suggests.
back
2 comments
My take is that it's that people 'understand' how computers work on the broad scale, but don't have any idea how electricity and chemicals can make our brains work. Also, to most people, computers are just our attempt at making brains.
I'm betting both of those.
It's explicitly named in Philosophy of Mind:
Thanks for the link - although I'm referring more to the (potentially false) analogy with present-day digital computers as opposed to the claim that the brain is a type of computational instrument, which is hard to find fault with. It's interesting how different eras apply their own en vogue technologies to understanding the mind. (I.e. Descartes and other late 17th and 18th c. thinkers visualized mental functions as clockwork-like mechanical interactions, the 20th century witnessed lots of "brain as factory" imagery, and now we're stuck on the brain as a network of computers).
Humans best understand systems by analogy to systems they already understand. We best understand systems we have built ourselves. It ends up limiting how we think about problems and which problems we can understand. For example, to model the circulatory system we needed experience with plumbing. You see the same kind of thinking in electronic circuit models.
Brains aren't computers but some aspects are analogous to computers. Some day we may create new systems that further our understanding of the brain and the mind
> It's interesting how different eras apply their own en vogue technologies to understanding the mind. (I.e. Descartes and other late 17th and 18th c. thinkers visualized mental functions as clockwork-like mechanical interactions, the 20th century witnessed lots of "brain as factory" imagery, and now we're stuck on the brain as a network of computers).
And each era got better and better models, and closer to the truth. The future eras' models of the brain will look much more like 'a network of computers' than an immaterial soul...
I don't think these analogies really go that far. It's more along the lines of switches and wires, which as far as I'm concerned is a simpler model than clockwork, or the hydraulics gmarx mentioned.
The analogy doesn't really go into mechanism, it just talks about routing and activation.