I know the brain isn't a computer, but why do we think examining the structure is going to reveal an algorithm for intelligence? Isn't that like taking an iPhone, cutting it into slices and studying it with the hopes of finding how GarageBand works?
Funny you'd mention that, there was a study from Jonas and Kording [0] that considered a microprocessor as an organism and applied analytic methods used in neuroscience to see if they can figure out how it processes information.
[0] Jonas, E. and Kording, K.P., 2017. Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor?. PLoS computational biology, 13(1), p.e1005268.
I think it is named after a 2002 study "Could a biologist fix a radio" which advocated that the current methods in biology were inadequate to understand a living body.
It was a plea to do more System Biology, but even if it is widely known it does not changed much the way biology is done.
In computer science, once you understand a data structure, its algorithm is often obvious [1]. Maybe the brain will be like that too, i.e. once you get its structure, you get its algorithm for free.
If you have the hardware schematic or the physical hardware and enough time, you can figure out what the hardware does. You can determine what its constraints are, and if you understand it well enough (for simplicity's sake, let's say you understand the hardware up to the level of the engineers who designed it), you can tell what the hardware system can and can't do and what type of codes are required to make the hardware work. You can tell at a low level what the GarageBand developers had to work with when they designed their game. And once you know the required codes, you can write software to generate the codes to make it work. And if you're really good and have the right tools, you can analyze the hardware and/or model the data flows to determine what the optimal data structures must be based on the hardware capacity constraints and data flow.
Google "reverse engineering hardware chip circuits" or watch Ken Shirriff's 2016 Hackaday talk...
It would tell you that GarageBand was a structure of processor opcodes that executed on the processor and had the ability to interface with a storage device, a video screen and an audio processor, among other things, and that the opcodes for GarageBand were likely stored on said storage device.
Maybe you wouldn't understand GarageBand yet, but you'd have a solid set of next steps for your research.
or we could do it like the way physicists design their experiments-smash two iPhones together at tremendous velocities and see what pops out. Can you imagine early anatomists taking the same approach because the Catholic church forbade cutting open the body.
But before we can exam the algorithms on an iphone we need to understand the hardware, and cutting it open and looking at the structure is definitely a step on that path.
