Editorial: Current Thoughts on the Brain-Computer Analogy -All Metaphors Are Wrong, but Some Are Useful

Abstract

This project kicked off in the fall of 2020. There are two parts of the title of this Research Topic Special Issue. The first one evokes the issue raised by Turing ("Can machines think?", Turing, 1950), a question that we, the Editors, revisit reflecting our complementary multi-disciplinary backgrounds (Evolutionary Biology, GM; Evo-Devo, PM; and Computer Science, BM) and take it up again with a fresh start; this question made us realize how ripe the Brain-Computer analogy has become for a reassessment. The complexity of the subject needed the involvement of experts from the different fields that have been concerned with many related problems, namely Natural Sciences (here Biology and Physics), Mathematics, Psychology and Philosophy. Indeed, the Topic is certainly timely for, while this Issue was going to press, a number of publications have appeared that tackle these very issues both in Sciences (Reynolds, 2022; Yang and Lu, 2022) and Humanities (Kelty-Stephen et al., 2022).