That is, yes, ANNs are not brains. There are countless differences. But are there differences at the computational level? ANNs are meant to model brain computation, not brain biology.
(There is still a lot to debate there, I'm not saying "ANNs are perfect computational models for the brain")
This is exactly why Fodor argues that psychology should be explained on its on level with symbols rather than appealing to neurology. But if you're interested in modeling symbols, there's much better options than ANNs (see nearly any programming language ever).
>ANNs are meant to model brain computation
But we don't really know how that works! So if you know if you're not modelling the low-level behaviour right, you can't assume that there's a correspondence of the higher level computation when you don't really know what that higher level computations are.
But we do have a hypothesis: that it is done by a large number of simple units with very high connectivity and in deep layers. This is what neural networks model.
Personally I was skeptical of this model of the brain, but they have achieved remarkable success in practice, as well as Nobel prizes. The neural networks people may have been onto something all along (I say that grudgingly).
Thus putting things similar to neurons in a network and making them able to learn could create behaviors similar to the brain. The fact that that biology used chemistry + electrical signal and computers use ReLU-like activation could be merely choosing the most efficient way to enable training.
He's the axis of this particular group of researchers, being the most senior at the place where they all met, Johns Hopkins.
So this is less a straw man and more a quick reminder to his peers: "Right, so, remember this particular thread we've spent the last 40 years hashing out, here we've got another contribution to that particular conversation."
65 years is a long time to be beating your head against an obvious dead end.
The article intro presents the claims as self-evident, when they’re not at all.
But, someone rise pointed out this may have been a dig at those attitudes, which makes more sense.