The sensory inputs and the body are much more integral than one would think. Biology is more of a cooperation between intelligent subsystems. Moreover the quantum properties that are harnessed by biology are not at all clear. There might be fundamental ways in which reality works that enable DNA to do what it does thanks to reliable interactions between particles like photons and electrons and maybe other excitations of quantum fields. Does this mean that the brain is not a machine? Well its a machine just like society is a machine, the curse of semantics. Does it run an algorithm? Well nobody wrote it. It just so happens that every complex form of matter is subject to a number of constraints proportional to its level of complexity. And its those constraints that dictate its behavior. You can say that such “algorithm” is sculpted by the constraints of the system, its just a byproduct. So there isn’t a “well defined entity” that its running a “well defined process”.
The sensory inputs and the body are much more integral than one would think. Biology is more of a cooperation between intelligent subsystems. Moreover the quantum properties that are harnessed by biology are not at all clear. There might be fundamental ways in which reality works that enable DNA to do what it does thanks to reliable interactions between particles like photons and electrons and maybe other excitations of quantum fields. Does this mean that the brain is not a machine? Well its a machine just like society is a machine, the curse of semantics. Does it run an algorithm? Well nobody wrote it. It just so happens that every complex form of matter is subject to a number of constraints proportional to its level of complexity. And its those constraints that dictate its behavior. You can say that such “algorithm” is sculpted by the constraints of the system, its just a byproduct. So there isn’t a “well defined entity” that its running a “well defined process”.