Don't take any virtual planes! Reply

No disagreement with Powers (2001) about the power of computation to simulate neural nets, continuity, and paralellism. That's just the Church/Turing Thesis (that computation can simulate just about anything). But nets, continuity and parallel processing are just means, not ends. Real-world performance capacity, in contrast, is an end. And there is no way that a simulated transducer (optical, say) can transduce real light. It's the wrong causality, be it ever so Turing-Equivalent to it. So a virtual robot or virtual brain is no more able to think than a virtual plane is able to fly.