> None of that changes whether there is a physical capacity, which I think was the larger point?

Capacity in what sense? Are we saying it’s X MB of data the brain can store? That claim is steeped in assumptions.

On the other hand, no one is claiming the brain has infinite memory or anything. And it’s certainly not a very accurate memory system. I’m arguing against “capacity” being understood as “these specific physical components located here and here we can ID store memories, and can get crowded with too many memories” sense.

This most particularly fails because not all memory is even identical in the brain, whether we mean the physical changes associated, the topology of the information, or how it’s activated.

> There is no reason to believe distributed memory doesn't suffer from the capacity component of the bottleneck.

I didn’t know there was a capacity component to the bottleneck, only a bandwidth one.

All I’m trying to say is that analogy to current typical memory storage systems to explain the brains memory processes is not helpful.

> I guess my point is the brain not being "von Neumann" in architecture or digital is not proof that isn't a "computer" of some sort.

Indeed, since the word computer was first used for humans. But what kind of computer matters enormously. Ising machine? Quantum+classical stack? Reservoir computer? All those frameworks have processes in the brain they can point to as homology.

Which points to a possibility: maybe the brain is multiple types of computers interacting. And the physical realization of these computing architectures aren’t spatially separated but thread through each other in the biochemistry and physical dynamics of cells.