This is one of the worst straw man arguments I have ever seen. The author makes broad generalizations with no attempt at understanding, and then goes on to make completely ridiculous claims. Honestly made me sick to my stomach to read.
But it obviously processes information, or we wouldn't be able to interact with the world, or understand any of our sensory data.
Has this author ever worked with neural networks? It is clear that NNs can store representations, and although they are not the same as data stored on a hard-drive, they are still representational.
Our muscles and joints and bones and tendons and stuff that move us around, even though biological in origin is very much a mechanical machine.
noun: an apparatus using or applying mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task.
I don't get why would we suppose our cognitive functions to be any more than the result of physical phenomenon at some level. Especially when we know a little bit about the specifics (i.e drugs, brain surgery etc.).
Just because a machine is complicated or of personal interest doesn't make it any less a machine so I'm not sure this is a mistake.
Perhaps thinking the machine is simple enough to understand or that a frame of reference for objective understanding is possible may be mistakes though.
Yes and no... It is not a mistake because much (and perhaps eventually all) of observable human functionality and behavior can be logically explained and therefore eventually simulated. However, when logic becomes one's "Maslow's hammer" then of course not only are people machines but all of existence is just a giant machine. It's an easy mistake to make because we tend to conflate a very powerful tool used by the mind to operate in reality with reality itself. I think humans are unique (at least on this planet) in their ability to ask this question, but also in their ability to discover that the answer is negative - i.e there is much more to reality than a complex "dead" machine.
His definition of information is not the information theoretic definition, but one that is narrowly confined to his strawman.
It's just an embarrassingly bad attempt at refutation. I can't imagine how someone of his stature could write something like this when he should be familiar with research like our understanding of how the visual and auditory systems work (literally processing information).
The existence of misunderstandings by lay outsiders does not, in itself, invalidate the use of the metaphor, especially as it's used within the actual research community.
But I don't think his target is the neural-net style cognitive science that followed 70s-80s strong AI. It's contemporary neuroscience, which very frequently still models cognition as plain old symbol processing. There are thousands of fMRI-driven papers which do exactly this; neuroscientists still tend to work with a 20th century image of cognition (and a 19th century one of consciousness, but that's another story). This is not a straw man. It's alive and well and driving millions of dollars worth of research.