"I can’t conceive of any sense in which songs or finger movements aren’t retrieved by the brain." And that's the issue, isn't it? I think he's using "retrieve"

"I can’t conceive of any sense in which songs or finger movements aren’t retrieved by the brain." And that's the issue, isn't it? I think he's using "retrieve" to mean something much closer to what a digital computer does. Ie, there's a single "place" in the brain where the song is compressed and stored. My definition of "retrieve" (and yours, I think) is implicitly more relaxed; I say that a rough distributed system that reacts to stimuli like songs by being able to approximately reproduce them later counts as "retrieval." As other commenters have noted, the article uses a very restrictive definition of computation/retrieval. I mean, earlier in the article, he gives a definition of the same game that the "Lifelong Learning" and "Reinforcement Learning" people use. I think he's actually on the same page as many learning theorists, and is just trying to make it clear to a general audience that a very "tight" match between the brain and Von Neumann machines isn't reasonable.