Brute force = check every possible next move, and then assuming you've picked that move, check every possible opponent's move... you end up playing out a whole game's worth of turns for each turn.
Brute force has this particular definition of trying every possible outcome.
Humans pattern match pretty quickly and more or less guess based off prior experience and "intuition" -- it's not a brute force approach.
It may be the case that the hardware of your brain isn't essentially brute forcing behind the scenes, but it certainly isn't obvious to me that this is the case.
I thinks it's provable that it's not a brute force process. Since combinatorial explosion means by definition you cannot play to the end, and humans can in fact play Go, there has to be something else going on.
You can still brute force all game states in a tree with height n, with some heuristic to estimate the strength of position at each game state. I certainly don't think humans solve Go, because I've never heard of any experts being undefeated.
