I agree with the gist of your response. I think we just disagree on the semantics of software in this case. Software being "instructions" that control the opera

I agree with the gist of your response. I think we just disagree on the semantics of software in this case. Software being "instructions" that control the operation of hardware doesn't apply to a biological brain because the instructions are a combination of the state of each neuron and the connections each neuron makes with its neighbors, which themselves change over time. There may be higher level abstractions that can exist independent of a neural network as its basis, but I wouldn't label that the software in the case of a biological brain. Even if there are higher level abstractions yet to be discovered, neural nets can open the door to them by allowing us to create more life-like simulations and then run experiments on it. I can imagine this is rather difficult in an actual biological entity.