As someone (probably like many here) who graduated from a university which taught computer vision and peripheral neuroscience courses, with such titles as "Computational Neuroscience of Vision", I always felt that trying to understand the human brain as a kind of algorithm was a bit of an artefact of computer scientists as they approach biology. The truth is the visual cortex is vast, and not sufficient to explain th…
I think the advances in neural networks over the past few years have shown that the failure of such an approach was mostly a matter of scale. Trying to reduce the visual system into a few kilobytes of code is of course a fool's errand, but trying to emulate it with ~10^11 parameters is looking much less foolish.
"The brain is a computer" is a stupid analogy if you think of a computer as a scalar or vector machine, but it's much less stupid if you're thinking in tensors.