When you create a movie in your mind’s eye, then firstly, it’s not clear that it actually has the amount of detail that a computer-rendered movie does. But secondly, there is (probably) no structure in your visual cortex that would straightforwardly map to a number. (This is very unlike the case in a computer, where every voltage in some sense represents a number.) Instead your neurons are taking shortcuts that a human engineer would simulate by using explicit arithmetic. Recall the famous pitch-detecting circuit; it is clearly doing the equivalent of some arithmetic, but there’s certainly no explicit representation within it of any numbers.
Just because something can be achieved by explicitly representing numbers, doesn’t mean that your brain does it that way—not even under the hood. Consequently the comparison to things that were achieved by massive number-crunching capacity is not strong evidence of such capacity in your brain.
When you create a movie in your mind’s eye, then firstly, it’s not clear that it actually has the amount of detail that a computer-rendered movie does. But secondly, there is (probably) no structure in your visual cortex that would straightforwardly map to a number. (This is very unlike the case in a computer, where every voltage in some sense represents a number.) Instead your neurons are taking shortcuts that a human engineer would simulate by using explicit arithmetic. Recall the famous pitch-detecting circuit; it is clearly doing the equivalent of some arithmetic, but there’s certainly no explicit representation within it of any numbers.
Just because something can be achieved by explicitly representing numbers, doesn’t mean that your brain does it that way—not even under the hood. Consequently the comparison to things that were achieved by massive number-crunching capacity is not strong evidence of such capacity in your brain.