Yes, they're very similar. Brain is trying to decipher meaning from a noisy and incomplete world.

I've actually wondered if intelligence could be defined through information theory, i.e. intelligence would be the inverse of error rate. Super-intelligence could operate at the Shannon limit.

That's the idea behind the Hutter prize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutter_Prize

I'm glad this just a metaphor about discrimination of signal from noise.

When the idea of consciousness comes up, too often I've heard the exact claim that consciousness cannot be from the brain. They assert the brain is just the receiver of the information coming from the soul. When asking why damage to a particular part of the brain usually results in a predictable deficit, they confidently reply that is also true of a radio receiver -- the non-physical soul is intact but the brain just garbles the message.