There are hundreds of trillions of synapses in the brain, and much of what they do (IANANS) could reasonably be described as pattern matching: mostly sitting idle waiting for patterns. (Since dendritic trees perform a lot of computation (for example, combining inputs at each branch), if you want to count the number of pattern matchers in the branch you can't just count neurons. A neuron can recognise more than one pattern.)
So yes, thanks to its insanely parallel architecture, the brain is also an insanely brute force pattern matcher, constantly matching against who knows how many trillions of previously seen patterns. (BTW IMHO this is why LLMs work so well)
(I do recognise the gap in my argument: are all those neurons actually receiving inputs to match against, or are they 'gated'? But we're really just arguing about semantics of applying "brute force", a CS term, to a neural architecture, where it has no definition.)
There are hundreds of trillions of synapses in the brain, and much of what they do (IANANS) could reasonably be described as pattern matching: mostly sitting idle waiting for patterns. (Since dendritic trees perform a lot of computation (for example, combining inputs at each branch), if you want to count the number of pattern matchers in the branch you can't just count neurons. A neuron can recognise more than one pattern.)
So yes, thanks to its insanely parallel architecture, the brain is also an insanely brute force pattern matcher, constantly matching against who knows how many trillions of previously seen patterns. (BTW IMHO this is why LLMs work so well)
(I do recognise the gap in my argument: are all those neurons actually receiving inputs to match against, or are they 'gated'? But we're really just arguing about semantics of applying "brute force", a CS term, to a neural architecture, where it has no definition.)