Compression details are probably not too important here.

Compression is to brains what lift is to wings. In both cases, people could see that there's an abstract principle at work - without necessarily knowing how best to implement it. In both cases people considered a range of solutions - with varying degrees of bioinspiration.

There are some areas where we scan. Pictures, movies, audio, etc. However, we didn't scan bird wings, we didn't scan to make solar power, or submarines, or cars, or memories. Look into this issue a bit, and I think most reasonable people will put machine intelligence into the "not scanned" category. We already have a mountain of machine intelligence in the world. None of it was made by scanning.