Imo, there isn't anything fundamentally special about the brain as a cognitive substrate. Even a pool of water could have cognition (reservoir computing), i feel that it's a general property that can emerge in any sufficiently high-dimensional physical system with enough internal degrees of freedom to explore many configurations, and enough coupling and stability to remain coherent, and enough plasticity for experience to leave persistent changes in its future dynamics.

And subjecting such a system to sustained external objective pressure...where some internal organisations perform better than others and it would progressively accumulate some useful structure about its environment.

The brain is just a really old artefact of billions of years of blind environmental weathering of matter being repeatedly shaped by the requirement that its host continue to exist as a coherent, persistent entity.

In short the brain is not fundamentally special in the principles that make cognition feasible.

What i'm trying to say in response to this article is that he's working at a far higher level of abstraction than is required. It's putting software before physics.

Also this somewhat chimes the same tune from the bitter lesson; it’s extremely non-trivial to reverse-engineer from the top down the residue of eons of evolutionary search. You’re basically trying to infer some smarter way of achieving this one absurdly overfit artefact it left behind...won't be betting against the full brunt of mother nature's massively parallel search.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna