Ask yourself if it's apt to call a bird a flying machine.
You likely see the problem right away. That description is at least accurate within limits, but it's also reductive to the point where it will induce blindness if you don't recognize its limits. A "flying machine" is only one of the things a bird is. And if you were trying to figure out how to make something very much like a bird, you wouldn't get very far by focusing on the idea that a bird is an flying machine like an airplane.
Similarly, it's true enough that the brain is a computer in the sense that it does computation. That description is at least accurate within limits. But brains do things that we don't know how to get computers to do yet (yes, we're getting better at creating systems that have capacity for performing/optimizing tasks with less explicitly pre-encoded domain logic, but we're still doing that, and as far as I can tell nobody has demonstrated any testable or practically applicable idea of what constitutes consciousness). It's reasonable to assume that a computer might be only one of the things a brain is, and it seems likely that you won't get far by focusing on the idea that a brain is like a present-day von neumann digital computer in the same way a bird is like an airplane.