The brain contradicts the machine metaphor through entangled plastic processes

Evidence

The production of new neurons therefore does not simply serve to replace cells that have died; it participates in modulational plasticity and, in doing so, opens the concept of plasticity slightly more, just far enough to unsettle the concept of stability. Once more: the statue is alive, the program quickens itself; right where we have so often believed we would find only mechanism, we find a complex entanglement of different types of plasticity, which contradicts the ordinary representation of the brain as machine. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 98

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the reader’s goal: catching the brain-as-machine metaphor that flexibility substitutes for plasticity. — connects to: Digitalization reduces the sensory continuum to standardized discrete units manipulable by logic — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 208