No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.

- Robert Epstein, The Empty Brain (2016)

Okay.

• What would it even mean to "find" Beethoven's 5th in the brain?^🔍 At best, you could take a perfectly precise measurement of someone's brain state and use that data to reconstruct their memory of the music. (In the way that scientists are reconstructing visual imagery via fMRI and machine learning. They haven't "found" a cat inside the brain, but there's clearly some information about the cat in the brain that is statistically useful)
• metaphors are inescapable. some are better than others.
• the evolution of metaphors for the brain (clay → hydraulics → machines → electrochemistry) traces a series of practical but incomplete models: other paradigms, with their own entities and rules, which allowed us to iteratively complexify our conceptual model of the brain^🧠. once the limits of the metaphor were reached, or new technology with more complex or expressive dynamics was discovered^⚙️, the paradigm shifts.
• it's not a bad thing to have an incomplete paradigm. it's a bad thing once it supresses a better, more explanatory one from coming along. Robert suggests that this is what the humours metaphor did, though I think there were probably many more significant factors at play if you want to talk about why it took so long for the renaissance to happen.
• there's a type of computer process that people colloquially refer to as "baking." the computer isn't literally putting bits in an oven at 180°C, but the metaphor is helpful because it quickly conveys that some ingredients were assembled, and now a process is about to occur that will take some time, and there will be some output on the other side that we care about. language is full of these and we have to make subjective calls about which metaphors are best at capturing the dynamics of a system that are relevant to us based on how well we think they strike the right balance between clarity, correctness, intuitiveness, etc.
• it's not clear to me that the information processing metaphor is stunting us. on the contrary, artificial neural networks are allowing us to interpret the brain more than ever before. materialist theories of cognitive science are giving us actually falsifiable theories of consciousness.
• his example of a "non-algorithmic" explanation of how to catch a ball is literally an algorithm. I think we have fundamentally different understandings of what "information", "processing", and "computation" means.
• his "metaphor-free" everything-is-operant-conditioning proposal is a theory that collapsed in the 70s?

Misleading headlines notwithstanding, no one really has the slightest idea how the brain changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary.

Why don't we just say that that's retrieval, which is maybe kind of similar to other sorts of things that we call retrieval, and see if this helps us explain or make predictions about a system any better than before? "The brain doesn't retrieve. We simply sing." is not a predictive theory that could help us understand things, rather it suggests that we shouldn't even try.

I don't think this was a good representation of anti-representationalism, and I don't claim to have any answers as to how the brain works (I'm just a guy who really liked Being You) but I think if you're going to point out why the dominant paradigm doesn't work, you need to make a better case than this.