You're going to have to dig deeper. The concept of a receptive field goes all the way back to convolutional filters.

It's not surprising that we found out later the brain also uses such a fundamental element of signal theory.

Oh good. So you do admit that there are useful parallels between signal processing, statistical processing, and the brain, and that your whole rant was just that, a rant. Probably one aimed at making yourself look smart, dissing other smart people, and the silly wars between different disciplines.

Everything is regression, be it in a computer or in a brain.

Sure, and airplanes are inspired by birds. That doesn't mean that detailed studies of the Boeing 747 are going to unlock a lot of hitherto unknown mysteries of heron behaviour.

I mean, I know you’re just providing an analogy, but people are still studying the physics of bird flight and we’re nowhere close to building machines yet that can maneuver the way birds can. https://www.quantamagazine.org/geometric-analysis-reveals-ho...

I could believe "we have more to learn", but not "we're nowhere close":

https://youtu.be/w6VLzKACnS8?si=DZgOPuBRG4Vt98su

TIL