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Hold on there a bit, what computers can do today doesn't even start to compare to what our brain can do.
Are you so sure? Do you know the physical capabilities of our brains, of modern computers?
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A person's brain has to: Receive, process and store thousands of light, sound, smell and touch signals coming from all over the body in realtime.
Computers are capable of doing this.
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Do complicated calculations of the external environment and body movement and it's effect, for instance to catch a ball.
Robots have been trained to catch balls.
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Learn to understand a complicated language system made up of visual and audio inputs without any help from the outside.
Computers have been taught to do this to a remarkable degree.
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Take data from a vast storage capacity, process it and make decisions based on a combination of that and what is percieved by your senses.
Computers tend to store information better than humans. Humans only perceive their storage to be error free, it isn't.
Computers are also faster than humans in querying for information in large data stores.
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Store the complete account of what you sensed, thought and felt during your whole life.
The human mind does not do this.
Can you remember precisely what you were doing on November 3rd 1987?
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Feel and show and try to control emotions based on memory and present experience.
Computers do this about as well as humans. Emotions are trivial to produce in software.
What makes our emotional experiences different is the other complex sets of behaviors it affects, not their existence in and of themselves.
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And to top it all off, all of this can happen at the same time and usually at least a number of them does.
Computers are great at doing things simultaneously.
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We can't even make a computer conscious of it's own existence..
This is practically the easiest thing to do with a computer, make its own state a part of its perceptual space. Again, as with emotions, it's not the self perception that is difficult, but the REST of the large scale awareness and cognitive functions that we consider human.
In any case, the problem is really not the hardware. A beowulf cluster running a number of high end P4's in parallel would probably be adequate computing power to run an emulated version of our minds. If we used high level emulation, forgoing precise biochemical representations, we might be able to get the non sensory related portions of our mind to run on an ordinary PC, or perhaps a PC available in the near future (5, 10, maybe 20Ghz).
The real differences is in the software. A human mind is a large scale distributed neural network, and AI software running on computers has typically consisted of classical serial algorithmic software. Distributed networks work dramatically differently than traditional software.
However, this does not mean that emulating large scale distributed networks on a PC is impractical. Serial processors running at high clockrates are more than capable of simulating vastly slower parallel networks running at very low firing rates (neurons for instance). The numbers of neurons and synapses that can be simulated are far smaller than those in the human brain, but the human brain is highly redundant, and it may not be necessary to simulate them all.
The neural processes that make up a persons personality, his attitudes, even his spiritual sense are located in specific areas of the brain, and these areas have been mapped. Other portions of the brain such as the visual and auditory centers are being mapped and reverse engineered in detail, and computer simulations of these structures are being used to duplicate their functions. Neuroscientists are a long way from reverse engineering the brain to the point where we can simulate higher level concsiousness, but there seems to be no fundamental roadblock to doing so in the reasonably near future (i.e. the next 50 years).
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..so don't act like we have found a way of bettering the awesome design we see in the way God has created us.
The design of our minds is inherently flawed. We've evolved to make invalid causal inferences, to respond to environmental stress with xenophobia and hate, to randomly believe in a variety of nonsense based on little or no evidence. We can not truly understand abstract mathematics, or theories such as quantum mechanics or relativity. We find it extremely difficult to learn and remember new information, languages, knowledge. Or memory is imperfect, and we progressively lose what we know imperceptibly as it is overwritten with new impressions.
There are a wide variety of problems with our current mental architecture. These can and probably will be corrected eventually.
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