The article wasn't about this, but the headline reminded me of a conundrum I first encountered while reading "Permutation City."

The protagonist considers how consciousness can be simulated. Simulated entities experience subjective time at the same rate, whether their mental faculties are computed in real-time, or if they are only computed once a day (which would result in the "outside world" speeding by them, but their subjective perception of the flow of time never changes).

The protagonist then considers how the same computations could be done on an abacus by hand, over a long enough time period. The question is then, are the mechanisms that compute and result in our own consciousness that different from had someone done it on a computer, or even on an abacus?