Funny, I had this argument topic brought up by my dad several weeks ago.
Here's the WONDERFUL LITTLE DETAIL everyone making your side of the argument seems to miss: Intelligence and mental phenomena are what are known as "emergent phenomena/characteristics", something that happens when a definable system occurs. In this case, it's the brain. Brains make observations through senses, actual DATA is collected. Scientists somewhere were able to form fuzzy images based on MRI scans (or some other kind of advanced scan, maybe EEG?) of human subjects. Then, that data is processed through neural networks, and chemicals are at the very very very low end of the totem pole of the mechanic.
What this argument amounts to is this: "How do computers work if all they can do is talk in ones and zeroes?" Because in programming, there's high level language, which can be Named Languages like Python, Matlab, etc.. Gaming Engines also fall into the "High-level language, HLL" category. Below that, there are mid and low level languages, which parse out the complex commands given by HLLs into many more, but much simpler commands. Eventually, it gets down to "Is this one circuit ON or OFF?" which is either a 1 or a 0. Thus, a computer operates on 1s and 0s, but that's not the extent of it, there's way too much going on upstairs to say that computing is "Just 1s and 0s".
Here's the WONDERFUL LITTLE DETAIL everyone making your side of the argument seems to miss: Intelligence and mental phenomena are what are known as "emergent phenomena/characteristics", something that happens when a definable system occurs. In this case, it's the brain. Brains make observations through senses, actual DATA is collected. Scientists somewhere were able to form fuzzy images based on MRI scans (or some other kind of advanced scan, maybe EEG?) of human subjects. Then, that data is processed through neural networks, and chemicals are at the very very very low end of the totem pole of the mechanic.
What this argument amounts to is this: "How do computers work if all they can do is talk in ones and zeroes?" Because in programming, there's high level language, which can be Named Languages like Python, Matlab, etc.. Gaming Engines also fall into the "High-level language, HLL" category. Below that, there are mid and low level languages, which parse out the complex commands given by HLLs into many more, but much simpler commands. Eventually, it gets down to "Is this one circuit ON or OFF?" which is either a 1 or a 0. Thus, a computer operates on 1s and 0s, but that's not the extent of it, there's way too much going on upstairs to say that computing is "Just 1s and 0s".
