> The author built a strawman by assuming people who use the metaphor of computation literally mean that the brain has a von Neumann architecture [0] or somethi

> The author built a strawman by assuming people who use the metaphor of computation literally mean that the brain has a von Neumann architecture [0] or something similar. 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.