[fxtentacle]

I believe humans do look up tables. If pattern X, then deny possibilities Y and Z. And then you more or less consciously choose one of the remaining options.

If you can avoid making "obvious" (in retrospect) mistakes, you will be a competitive chess or go player.

And given that we have millions of neurons to suppress activity in one node if activity was high enough in another node, I would summarize the brain as effectively a huge chain of look up tables.