I think this is the key. "Just a state-machine" is a gross over-simplification. Imagine a tiny fruit-fly brain, vastly smaller than a human brain. Remarkably we can slice that brain into over 4000 pieces and try and rebuilt the connectome, which is a huge challenge in and of itself. Describing what's going on there as "state-machine" miss-represents a computer-science definition of "state-machine", and doesn't remotely reflect the biological complexity going on.
Whether it's more complex than a state machine can model (doubtful[0]) and whether it "doesn't remotely reflect the biological complexity" may be true but the guy's point still stands, it's a mechanism that can be modelled.
non-determinism can also be modeled as a state-machine (and in fact, you can prove non-deterministic state machines can always be represented by deterministic state machines).
Ugh, you're right and I used completely the wrong terminology. I meant some degree of randomness (I think the posh term is stochastic-something), noise, jitter etc. Not NFA/DFA stuff. Good catch and thanks.
