To use your analogy, consider that the hard drive has to store some “repertoire of responses,” some code snippets, that your control unit can pick from in order

To use your analogy, consider that the hard drive has to store some “repertoire of responses,” some code snippets, that your control unit can pick from in order to solve the problem in front of it. It still very much matters what is and is not stored on that hard drive, even if the bulk of the lifting is done by the control unit and even if (in humans’ case) the control unit can be extremely creative in combining existing snippets into new responses.