Why not? Your brain isn't magic, just highly associative. We can do the same thing with computers real soon now.
Haven't people been saying this for decades? AI has a long history of impressive results, but somehow none of them have actually produced "thought".
Nobody even understands how the brain "thinks" at a neural level, let alone how to model that. All we can do at this point is try different models (which way or may not actually match reality) and hope we find one that works. But there's no evidence that we'll find a working model "real soon now". Impressive results that we can kinda-sorta imagine being the product of an intelligent system haven't historically been enough.
A handful of years ago I put together a computer fully loaded that gave me 1 teraflop of commuting power.
Today I can put together a computer the same size that will give me 32 to 50 teraflops of programmable computing power.
Many of the "AI" advances since 2007 are just running old 1970s-1990s AI algorithms on faster and faster and more parallel hardware. If you have to train a model for a few hundred trillion instructions, but your CPU only does 20 operations per second (and you have to share it with 1,000 other people), you can't iterate your science fast enough to make progress. Now we can iterate our science almost too quickly.
> how the brain "thinks" at a neural level,
Planes don't fly like birds. Birds don't fly like bees. True AI doesn't have to replicate mammalian (or avian or reptilian) neural topology.
I also agree that AI will never be "human" (i.e. it will be different), however without understanding how the human brain works, what chances do we have to create AI?
And we have yet to crack that nut. We have yet to understand even high-level stuff in detail, like how information is flowing from short-term memory to long-term and how we forget and why we do that (i.e. forgetfulness is surely an evolutionary trait). A brain is also fascinating in how it recovers from serious strokes by re-purposing brain structures. We have yet to produce software that is that sophisticated. And we don't even understand the brain from a biological perspective yet.
Surely huge progresses have been made, but on the other hand we may still be hundreds of years away and there's a very real possibility that we lack the intellectual capability, or maybe the resources to do it (we have a history of settling for lesser solutions if we stop seeing financial benefits, like with space exploration).
I think what the parent is trying to say is not that it's easy (it's not) but that there is nothing, in principle, to stop us from writing a program that acts like a brain.
[1]http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/R/Real-Soon-Now.html [2]http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RealSoonNow
It's also not pure algorithm, it's a physical entity, tangible and with real world properties and interactions.
Who said (or proved) it's just an information processing device?
So are computers.
Whether that's the case in human cognition remains to be shown (else we're taking for granted what we're trying to prove).
If we can bridge the simulated world to our world then we can interact with it.
Being in different worlds does not imply that it can never reach conciousness (among other properties). To imply that is invoking magic.
Anything from our world can be simulated.
To be literally "as real in its world (as we in ours)" several things need to happen:
1) its world should be an 1-1 simulated mapping of our world. Perhaps not to its whole extend (e.g. not the whole universe), but to ANY extend that affects the final result.
2) its world should have randomness equivalent to the quality of randomness (not sure if it's perfect) that our world has.
As for "Anything from our world can be simulated" -- that's a bold claim, provided that we haven't simulated ANYTHING at all yet, to the degree of interactions and complexity that exist in our world.
When we simulate the behavior of water in a fluids physics simulation, or the behavior of planets etc, it's amazing how much stuff we leave out. Our simulations are to a full-blown simulation what South Park cut-outs are to a photograph.
Besides, this notion reminds me of the naive 19th century ideas, that they could predict the course of the universe if only they had the details (motion, momentum, weight, etc) of all objects and the capacity to calculate their interactions. QM put a hole in that.
