> It does not follow that " a purely bioelectrical system at least is able to reproduce an entity that believes itself to be conscious" simply because you believe yourself to be conscious
You are right, that does not follow. It does however follow that if we are purely bioelectric systems, and that is sufficient for us to believe ourselves to be conscious, then it is reasonable to presume that a clone of such a system will presume itself to be conscious. That is the claim I was making.
> A human simply being purely bioelectrical is the very thing in question.
You cut of "If the brain is purely bioelectrical" from the part you quoted above, and so what you attacked above was a strawman of your own making, and not the argument I made.
> That is simply some LCD pixels on my screen. What you define it to be has absolutely no bearing on the physical implementation of the pixels.
That is entirely irrelevant. It is a representation of an implementation of an symbolic representation of an abstract thought in a programming language that runs on a Turing machine (it is valid Ruby). As such it is proof that a turing machine can represent abstract thought.
> The problem here is that you don't understand the point.
We clearly do not understand each other, but so far I have seen nothing to suggest that you have a meaningful argument. You're trying to create a distinction between the abstract and an instantiation of the idea to create a separation that makes representing the abstract notion in a computational device impossible. But representing abstract thought in symbolic form is something humanity has been capable of four hundreds if not thousands of years at a minimum. The point is that abstraction and symbolic representation does not get any less real because you invent additional intermediate steps.
Sure, what you read appeared to you as some LCD pixels on your screen, but that does not make it any less a symbolic representation of the abstract idea, rather than an interpretation of the idea. If you fail to understand it and instead interpret it as a sentence on 3d polygonal mesh generation is irrelevant - it does not change the abstract notion, any more than misinterpreting a thought changes the original thought.
You argued we could not represent anything but an interpretation of an abstract idea. The above is proof this is not true, because any abstract idea can be exchanged for a symbol representing that idea, and the symbol can be accurately reproduced.
This is a foundational aspect of communications, of symbolic logic, of linguistics, and a whole range of other scientific disciplines, because it is such a central aspect of the ability for human discourse about abstract ideas.
If you want to attack AI there are many angles to take - we do not know whether or not consciousness requires some form of dualism for example, hence my constant qualifications ("if the brain is purely bio-electrical") about it. That's a weak spot.
But our ability to represent abstract ideas in computation is not one of the weak spots. It's one of the easiest parts of AI, or indeed of any computation.
The understanding of how to represent abstract notion by symbolic substitution is old enough that you see that transition happening in language going back thousands of years, when concrete concepts starts being used as symbols of abstract ideas.