[peterwiese]

I appreciate your opinion, because its food for thought, which is always great. Actually, it's really hard to refute your point after giving it some thought. But then again, I am pretty sure that there is a difference. I think it lies in the "universality" of our knowledge creation capabilities. In the end, we (humans) are the ones who fathered (mothered?) the algorithms driving the chess computer. I.e. we discovered an alternative way to reason about problems arising in a play of chess. It turns out, that the alternative solution we discovered, is actually better suited to make a successful move than the one humans use when reasoning about chess problems. This is because there is no "fundamental principle" of a successful chess move. It's all just predictions down different branches of possibilities. This is something a computer is naturally much better at than a human brain. Compare this to problems in different domains, those that cannot be modeled with our mathematical tool set: creativity, morality, consciousness, etc. Those a random concepts that may exist on different levels of emergence, but they are nonetheless real, or at least i'd say there is a consensus among most people that these phenomena have a bearing in reality.

The assumption that our brains are nothing but glorified (bio-) computers naturally leads to the conclusion that there is not a single thing humans can do, that cannot be done by any other equally capable computing platform, be it implemented in silicon-based or dna-based hardware. While I agree with this assumption, you shouldn't be so quick as to assume that we are already at the point where we can effectively re-implement the software which defines a human on any platform. There are a still "hard" problems of which we have no clue at all how to model them, even conceptually. The fact that we can do statistical analysis on an ordinary computer superior to a human doesn't mean much.