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I could be wrong but I think they might have been talking about a hypothetical, arbitrarily complex software. As a limiting case, if software were simulating a mind down to the quarks, it becomes unclear what the difference would be.

I agree with your point of course, what we have today is certainly not like a human mind

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The problem with the hypothetical arbitrarily complex software is that there is no particular reason to believe it could exist, never mind that it will (at least not for meaningful definitions of "software"). A computer so powerful and a programmer so smart that they can represent the behaviour of the constituent parts of a human brain at the subatomic level as a state machine programmable to achieve different thought processes is at least as much of an imaginary construct as the metaphysical dualist mind it's supposed to be a counter argument to.

And you don't need to think that your brain is anything other than an immensely complex state machine to think that some of the core parts of what we consider to be self-awareness (emotions... or chemical responses to certain stimuli which have over billions of years helped the brain parts of biological organisms make more optimal eating and fighting and fucking decisions for the survival of the gene code) are an altogether different level of problem to train an AI on than solving maths problems or generating text. Not least because if you want AIs to write love letters to each other, you can get very pleasing results quickly with a Chinese room without the inconvenience of having to simulate all the intractable chemistry of desire.

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