Gradient ascent is what you use to find the image that tricks the DNN. If you could run repeated experiments on a brain in exactly the same state over and over

Gradient ascent is what you use to find the image that tricks the DNN. If you could run repeated experiments on a brain in exactly the same state over and over then you could perform gradient ascent on a brain as well. Whether the result of that hypothetical would be static that tricks the brain is unknown, but I don't see any reason to assume one way or the other. An easier experiment to help the discussion would be to calculate the probability that a random image of static can fool a DNN, rather than a special designed image that appears like noise. If the probability is not vanishingly small then there is indeed something fundamentally different at a functional level between brains and DNN. If not then we have to work harder to answer that question.