Trends in Analog and Neural Computation – MetaDevo

Cognitive Science and AI typically subscribe to computationalism--the mind is a form of computation in the brain (or the overall nervous system including the brain). In the 1940s, explaining cognition as the brain computing was new, and started catching on in what would become computer science and AI…and eventually to some degree neuroscience. But many were modeling the brain using what you could call analog math.1Piccinini, And there were actual analog computers, many of which were used by the U.S. military starting in World War 2. Nowadays, most people use digital computers for research and AI work…and pretty much everything. But what happened to the non-digital theories, and why aren't there analog computers any more to experiment on those?