My cellular biochemistry does a pretty good job of replicating itself with absolutely no understanding whatsoever of how to resolve the contradictions between general relativity and quantum mechanics.
When it comes to brains, I don't know if anyone knows what might be the simplest sufficient model that would usefully replicate them, even if you specify "usefully" well enough to know if this is about fundamentals of intelligence or about the impact of drugs on cognition, which are two completely different standards.
For example, perceptrons are a toy model, but modern AI can do more in (breadth XOR single-skill performance in various domains) than any single human, even with much smaller parameter counts than we have synapses; but the broad-skilled ones also mess up in inhuman ways, like being equally good at advanced calculus as basic arithmetic, or being a poet at the level of stereotypical teenager but in every language simultaneously.
If anyone's made a neutral network that can get high on simulated caffeine — and I'm not saying it hasn't been done — it's not reached any of the places I follow discussions on this kind of thing. (Google didn't help, results were about software named Caffeine and non-artificial neurones).
I'm not saying it isn't physics, I'm saying it doesn't know what the physics is.
We're physics too, but we don't know how it all fits together.
If a sub-part of us that knows less than we do can make a copy of us, despite not knowing how it all works, that's an existence proof that we don't need to understand how it all works to make a copy of us.
When it comes to brains, I don't know if anyone knows what might be the simplest sufficient model that would usefully replicate them, even if you specify "usefully" well enough to know if this is about fundamentals of intelligence or about the impact of drugs on cognition, which are two completely different standards.
For example, perceptrons are a toy model, but modern AI can do more in (breadth XOR single-skill performance in various domains) than any single human, even with much smaller parameter counts than we have synapses; but the broad-skilled ones also mess up in inhuman ways, like being equally good at advanced calculus as basic arithmetic, or being a poet at the level of stereotypical teenager but in every language simultaneously.
If anyone's made a neutral network that can get high on simulated caffeine — and I'm not saying it hasn't been done — it's not reached any of the places I follow discussions on this kind of thing. (Google didn't help, results were about software named Caffeine and non-artificial neurones).