I finished "The Brain, In Theory" by @romainbrette.bsky.social
It was an amazing read, and now I'm questioning all my beliefs
Well if "the brain is a computer" simply means that people can calculate, I think that's rather misleading.
No, you can't say anything about a required number of operations if you don't specify anything about the operations. Complexity theory starts from a model of computation, in which, invariably, there is a finite set of basic operations that are combined.
Maybe because the terminology is incredibly misleading? The whole point of representation is that behavioral invariance is thanks to symbols in the brain, ie, reliable proxies. What the experiments show is precisely that system invariance is not due to component invariance (=symbols).
So I claim that the brain is a real estate agent. Learn from it!
Of course *some* of what we do is computation, like when we calculate. Computation is a specific kind of human behavior that we try to automate in computers. It doesn't follow that the brain is a computer, or that cognition in general is computation.