It all boils down to whether the brain violates the physical Church-Turing thesis. That is does the brain perform computations that computers can't efficiently do?
For now there's no substantial evidence for that. So it seems that nothing prevents replication of brain's functionality (the part that is useful to us) in software. Machine learning successes point in the same direction.
Consciousness may suggest that something strange is going on in the brain, but, again, there's no substantial evidence for that.
I mixed up physical and extended theses. The physical one talks only about computability ("at all"). The extended one requires at most polynomial slowdown ("efficiently").
We are interested in the latter. Exponentially slow AI is of no use.
red75prime t1_ixgw4pi wrote
It all boils down to whether the brain violates the physical Church-Turing thesis. That is does the brain perform computations that computers can't efficiently do?
For now there's no substantial evidence for that. So it seems that nothing prevents replication of brain's functionality (the part that is useful to us) in software. Machine learning successes point in the same direction.
Consciousness may suggest that something strange is going on in the brain, but, again, there's no substantial evidence for that.