Just to point out what is wrong with your pipes and water metaphor. While an advanced perceptron can have many manifestations (many ways to compute a predication) in its simplest, and actually most common, form in modern modelling systems, it is like a pipe with multiple pipes of water, flowing and pulling out of the pipe, and the end of the pipe being the output. There are knobs on every input pipe (and a limiter on the output) that control the rate of flow into our out of the output pipe. Where your metaphor completely fails is that there are dynamic and kinetic controls instead of knobs controlling those flows. It's not switches although in some brain systems subsystems (for some kinds of neurons) it is. That doesn't make a difference in understanding how brains compute. Look to natural language. If you can talk about being happy or angry that is telling you how the brain computed knew you were happy or angry in such a way that you expected other brains to understand.
More detail here: I wrote this yesterday. Nothing to do with you or this conversation except they are on the same topic.
https://medium.com/liecatcher/saxe-and-media-lying-7e7c543ff5a5
Here is an interesting "emotion like" thing that natural language reveals about how your brain computes what to say and not say or how you understand the truth or lies in things you hear, read, or see and how you tell the truth or lies to others, computationally.
