Except the four element theory was rendered irrelevant by the germ theory. I doubt that understanding the brain will render memory and perception irrelevant.
Robots literally have memory and perception (we know because we built them), so clearly these are real phenomena that exist in the real world.
It seems to me unlikely that we are totally mistaken in conceptualizing ourselves in terms of these known real phenomena.
My intuition is that it isn't totally mistaken, more so that it is a massive simplification.
Whereas we seem to describe the brain as having "memory", as if that is something statically stored that is simply "retrieved" (somehow), it seems to me that this overlooks that the device that is doing this is also running an entire virtual model of simulated reality, which can not only remember things, but it can replay them, change variables and play them again, play them in reverse, manufacture completely fictional scenarios, run (as its default) a custom modified variation of "actual" reality that it finds more pleasing (this one has gotten lots of news coverage in the last few years), read the contents of realities running inside other minds (tens of millions if it so chooses), see into the future of "actual" reality, all sorts of different things.
"Brains have memory" is a bit of an understatement of what they actually do.
> "Brains have memory" is a bit of an understatement of what they actually do.
...but, I don't think anyone thinks that "brains have memory" is a complete statement of what they actually do. It's not a complete statement of what computers do either.
> ...but, I don't think anyone thinks that "brains have memory" is a complete statement of what they actually do.
Perhaps. This topic is a bit of a hobby for me, and I haven't really encountered much discussion that explicitly gets into the fine details and distinctions of the matter with respect to the human mind, as opposed to the plentiful discussion on the matter when it comes to computers.
A noteworthy distinction between these two is that computers are man made (such discussions are a necessary component of the development process), whereas the mind is made by ~nature, therefore it requires no such discussion.
If you can point me to any in-depth discussions on this distinction, or even any keywords that one might google, I would appreciate it.
Four element theory is on approximately the same epistemological plane as modern personality psychology. In some ways it's more useful than psychology, because it has a straightforward logic in terms of metaphor and relationships between parts, whereas psychology is a mess. Of course, it has very little to do with how the brain works, but psychology also has very little to do with how the brain works (it's more about the use of language to describe and regulate behavior), so it's not a big deal.
Robots literally have memory and perception (we know because we built them), so clearly these are real phenomena that exist in the real world.
It seems to me unlikely that we are totally mistaken in conceptualizing ourselves in terms of these known real phenomena.