you're coming at me pretty hard here on the basis of fucking little

Don't start with "in fairness" and then make an extraordinary claim that effectively dismisses thousands of years of other academic fields just because, to you, the human brain seems like an algorithm. Reductionism makes a lot of comparisons possible; the brain is like a sponge. The brain is like a lump of fat. The brain is like a series of vacuum tubes.

"in fairness" is not a Redditism, it existed long before Reddit

Something can be a thing even if it existed before the label. Being pedantic about what I said and trying to split hairs on it reinforces the Redditness I was talking about.

I doubt anybody ever claimed brains are fire or wheels or clockwork.

No, each and every one of those things were previously assigned not only the essence of human thought, but in many cases the whole of the universe and all of its functions in previous eras.

I'd argue the general definition of an algorithm is "bunch of steps that will go from A to B", and yes, the brain does indeed do that because reality does that. I'm not arguing it's like a computer program, or like AI, or whatever.

Again, that's you in your comfortable field making presumptions that dismiss other fields that you're not trained or educated in. It's a habit that a lot of academics can make (if you are one) but at the higher end, most PhD programs train at least some admittance that one's knowledge is specialized and limited, not the whole of everything.

Then again, there are exceptions.