- That everything that makes you you and that makes you tick is located in your body, with the higher-order things like personality and memories being located in the brain;
- In particular, it's not located somewhere else outside the body, especially not in some metaphysical realm;
- That there is structure to the brain - patterns in arrangement of physical components and their transient states (including electrical and chemical signals) - that contains the entirety of you; that structure can be studied, and over time understood to a degree;
- That once we know enough about this structure, we can reach into the brain from outside to poke it with various implements, chemicals, beams and fields, and achieve changes we predicted will happen;
- That we can use insights from information theory, and even other areas of computer science and computer engineering, to better understand and predict the structure of the brain;
- That we can replicate various substructures of the brain in a simulation, and that such replicas will be useful to study the real brains, and also could be incorporated as components into computer systems we build ourselves;
- That artificial brains are possible to build;
- That artificial brains are possible to simulate on computers we build;
Some of those have already panned out. Some are used with great success in medicine. Others may take a while to verify.
Now, I recognize that some of the points I listed invite questions along the line of, "is that a prediction specific to 'brain is a computer', or would it also be a prediction of 'brain is an X' for many other X-es?". I believe the answer to that is "both", because anything you could substitute for 'X' that would yield similar predictions can itself be viewed as a computer! Computing systems aren't just next iteration of clockworks - computation is a new framework for interpreting the reality around us and making novel, precise predictions about it.
- That everything that makes you you and that makes you tick is located in your body, with the higher-order things like personality and memories being located in the brain;
- In particular, it's not located somewhere else outside the body, especially not in some metaphysical realm;
- That there is structure to the brain - patterns in arrangement of physical components and their transient states (including electrical and chemical signals) - that contains the entirety of you; that structure can be studied, and over time understood to a degree;
- That once we know enough about this structure, we can reach into the brain from outside to poke it with various implements, chemicals, beams and fields, and achieve changes we predicted will happen;
- That we can use insights from information theory, and even other areas of computer science and computer engineering, to better understand and predict the structure of the brain;
- That we can replicate various substructures of the brain in a simulation, and that such replicas will be useful to study the real brains, and also could be incorporated as components into computer systems we build ourselves;
- That artificial brains are possible to build;
- That artificial brains are possible to simulate on computers we build;
Some of those have already panned out. Some are used with great success in medicine. Others may take a while to verify.
Now, I recognize that some of the points I listed invite questions along the line of, "is that a prediction specific to 'brain is a computer', or would it also be a prediction of 'brain is an X' for many other X-es?". I believe the answer to that is "both", because anything you could substitute for 'X' that would yield similar predictions can itself be viewed as a computer! Computing systems aren't just next iteration of clockworks - computation is a new framework for interpreting the reality around us and making novel, precise predictions about it.