I think this is the key. "Just a state-machine" is a gross over-simplification. Imagine a tiny fruit-fly brain, vastly smaller than a human brain. Remarkably we can slice that brain into over 4000 pieces and try and rebuilt the connectome, which is a huge challenge in and of itself. Describing what's going on there as "state-machine" miss-represents a computer-science definition of "state-machine", and doesn't remotely reflect the biological complexity going on.