The person you are responding to is right and your assertion is incorrect. The person you replied to knows the ear delivers a frequency domain representation. They were disagreeing with the FFT part.
The FFT is a specific mathematical construction that carries out a Fourier Transform efficiently through a hierarchy of "butterfly" steps. The ear has no such thing. It is just ~20,000 hair cells, each resonant to a specific frequency. That is, each computation is local, very unlike the FFT.
I can roughly recall the mechanism by which it worked, and was told that this was an analog for how the Fourier transformation worked, and I vaguely remember going through one on paper. The spiral of the cochlear seems an analog of how the harmonium works. Does the earlier poster have a point with regard to the cochlear as a physical object performing a Fourier transform (though perhaps not a fast one)?
Fourier transform is different from FFT, which is Fast Fourier Transform. FFT is an optimization that involves decomposing a signal into multiple "smaller" signals, recursively performing FFT on those, and then combining the results.
The FFT is a specific mathematical construction that carries out a Fourier Transform efficiently through a hierarchy of "butterfly" steps. The ear has no such thing. It is just ~20,000 hair cells, each resonant to a specific frequency. That is, each computation is local, very unlike the FFT.