> At the end of the day, saying "it's just electrical signals" is a crude way of saying "it's using a model of computation that we understand and can replicate".
oh. well, that’s just a naive embrace of the andy grove fallacy.
as of this moment, the brain’s computational model (and if there is one, and if so how many) is neither well understood nor replicable.
it’s almost a category error to describe the process as “reverse engineering”, but even if that’s an appropriate mental model, it turns out that reverse engineering an evolved system that’s taken 4.5 billion years and has had no human design additions at all has very little in common with any similar approach you could take in, say, inspecting the trained weights of a neural network to back out what’s going on.