Comment by coldtea

>Okay but chemical and electrical exchanges in an body with a drive to not die is so vastly different than a matrix multiplication routine on a flat plane of silicon

I see your "flat plane of silicon" and raise you "a mush of tissue, water, fat, and blood". The substrate being a "mere" dumb soul-less material doesn't say much.

And the idea is that what matters is the processing - not the material it happens on, or the particular way it is.

Air molecules hitting a wall and coming back to us at various intervals are also "vastly different" to a " matrix multiplication routine on a flat plane of silicon".

But a matrix multiplication can nonetheless replicate the air-molecules-hitting-wall audio effect of reverbation on 0s and 1s representing the audio. We can even hook the result to a movable membrane controlled by electricity (what pros call "a speaker") to hear it.

The inability to see that the point of the comparison is that an algorithmic modelling of a physical (or biological, same thing) process can still replicate, even if much simpler, some of its qualities in a different domain (0s and 1s in silicon and electric signals vs some material molecules interacting) is therefore annoying.