One cannot logically be a determinist in physics and chemistry and biology, and a mystic in psychology.

- Donald O. Hebb (1904-1985)


I am sorry but this is malarkey, akin to saying that it is not logical to believe in electronics as the science behind telephones unless you ALSO believe electronics is the science of thought, an absurd proposition. Thought, qualia, awareness are QUALITATIVELY different and orders of magnitude more telling in the overall scheme of human life than mechanisms are.

Here's another effort: suppose you wrote the word "understanding" into a memory register and then copied it into the next cells of the register over and over again until every row in that register was full of the binary settings for the hexadecimal code for the ASCII characters for the word "understanding". Then suppose you also duplicated that entire register with all those settings and linked the duplicate to the primary and repeated these ten thousand times, so there ten thousand registers, let's say of 1 megabyte each, ten thousand megabytes of memory reflecting thousands of copies of the word "understanding", all powered up. Stack them all up in a closet somewhere, all set and humming happily.

Do you believe all that electromechanical complexity now understands anything?

Really?

A