SneerClub

One needn’t go as far as souls anyway. Jefferson’s hypothesis—that there is some electrochemical basis to thought—is sufficient to solve the problem. Were it true, the reason computers seem fundamentally blocked from progress on the Turing Test would amount to the fact that they are wholly mechanical objects, while “thought” is as much a biological function as “digestion” or “copulation.”

Even if true, why couldn't the electrochemical processes be simulated too? I don't think it's necessary to strictly and completely reproduce a biological brain to produce thought in a computer, but even if it is, it's "just" a matter of scale. If you can increase the fidelity of the simulation with effectively infinite computing power, what would it be missing? It'd have to be something that can't be predicted, can't even have its unpredictability described with an equation (I don't know what any coin flip will turn up as, but I do know how to write a program that produces indistinguishable results from a real coin for a simulation), so it's just changing all the time and follows no rules whatsoever, but also you can't just write a program that does its own "random crap that can't be predicted" simulation because the real one is somehow also so precise that it's the only thing that makes consciousness work and a mechanical one isn't good enough?