We are no different than computers

[Alex K]

Yep but that needn't persuade anyone it won't some day get done.
I just can't begin to imagine how electronic circuitry could possibly establish a nexus of caring and identity.
Sure, I can't explain how organic processes in our brain do it either. But clearly brains do it. Every day, ubiquitously. That we can't explain how bags of chemicals do it makes it even less likely that computers will be able to do it. They pretty much depend on us to design and program them, and we don't know how it works.

Knowing how it works is a whole different problem.
I find it plausible that we will reproduce it artificially without understanding how it works. At the risk of sounding like a broken record - even with todays simple AI, it can happen that you provide an infrastructure and you train it to do something, but you won't understand how it accomplishes what it has been trained to do microscopically. Because you didn't program it to do these things, you trained it.