The notion of computation is fundamental to an autonomous neuroscience

Abstract

The increasing sophistication of the tools and results of cellular and molecular neuroscience would appear to suggest that explanatory force in neuroscience is defined by reduction to molecular biology. This view, however, is mistaken in that it loses sight of the goal of neuroscience proper: the characterization of the information content of biophysical variables and the transformation of these variables that lead to behaviors. Neuroscience is thus distinguished from applied molecular and cellular biology by the notion of computation. In this commentary, I will show how the notion of computation in neuroscience differs from that of other fields that investigate complex systems and argue that computation at various levels of neural organization is the paramount goal of neuroscientific explanation and not the so-called reduction of ''mind to molecules.''

From Something Old to Something New: Functionalist Lessons for the Cognitive Science of Scientific Creativity

“…But the nature of this shift toward closer contact between cognitive and neural explanations is illuminating. To a large extent, this shift has been possible not so much because, through contact with neuroscientific research, cognitive scientists have begun reconceptualizing cognition in neurophysiological terms—on the contrary, the shift is for the most part due to the increasing popularity of conceptualizations of the brain and neural processes in computational-representational terms (refer to endorsements as well as critical discussions in, e.g., Posner et al, 1988 ; Sejnowski et al, 1988 ; Barlow, 1994 ; Boden, 2008 ; Neske, 2010 ; Piccinini and Bahar, 2013 ; Anderson, 2014 ; Gazzaniga, 2014 ; Brette, 2019 ). The assumption that we find already in Newell, Shaw, and Simon's work and that remains widespread today is that, whatever it does, physiologically speaking, the brain can be adequately understood as engaging in storing and processing information.…”