You might get a kick out of this essay by Robert Epstein from 2016: https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati... (The empty brain - Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer)
Maybe I misunderstood it, but I feel that it's a weird article, because it fails to establish any vocabulary and then seem to uses words in uncertain ways, as if constructing the narrative by specifically crafting (but never truly explaining/define) some model that's not true, but presenting the argument with significantly expanded scope. Drastically reduced (which is not really correct, but may help me to convey my general impression/feelings only) it's kinda sorta like-ish "we aren't doing it the way our computers do, thus the information processing metaphor is wrong".
Like when talking about that experiment and an image of the dollar bill, it never talks about what's an "image", just states that there wasn't one stored in a brain, in "any sense". And then goes on describing the idea that seem to match the description of a "mental image" from cognitive science.
As I [very naively] get it... Information theory is a field of mathematics. Unlike all those previous concepts like humours, mechanical motions or electric activities, math is here to establish terminology and general principles that don't have to fundamentally change if^W when we learn more. And that's why it got stuck.
There is a whole genre of essays like this talking about behaviour in a human specific way. But, I wish they engaged with the notions of the Church-Turing thesis and the Universal Turing Machine which indicates that any behaviour following standard physics principles is in fact computable.
(FWIW, I dont think that humans can be reduced to computing, but the Church-Turing thesis is a powerful counterargument which more biologists and psychologists should engage with).
I stopped reading before reaching 2/3 of it but the start is already strawman after strawman (or misunderstanding to be generous).
I don’t think most people believe the brain is made up of a discrete Processing part that accesses information from a memory part that’s encoded in binary there. But just because the brain doesn’t contain a literal encoding of something in binary doesn’t mean the neurons don’t store the information.
If you download the weights of an LLM, you’re not going to find the text it can output „from memory“ anywhere in the file, but the weights still encode the information and can retrieve it (with some accuracy).
