Maybe. It would be a lot more profound if we definitely *could* reproduce the brain's behaviour. The devil is in the detail as they say. But a challenge to Chalmer's position has occurred to me. It seems to me that Bruno has convincingly argued that *if* comp holds, then consciousness supervenes on the computation, not on the physical matter. But functionalism suggests that what counts is the output, not the manner in which it as arrived at. That is to say, the brain or whatever neural subunit or computer is doing the processing is a black box. You input something and then read the output, but the intervening steps don't matter. Consider what this might mean in terms of a brain. Let's say a vastly advanced alien species comes to earth. It looks at our puny little brains and decides to make one to fool us. This constructed person/brain receives normal conversational input and outputs conversation that it knows will perfectly mimic a human being. But in fact the computer doing this processing is vastly superior to the human brain. It's like a modern PC emulating a TRS-80, except much more so. When it computes/thinks up a response, it draws on a vast amount of knowledge, intelligence and creativity and accesses qualia undreamed of by a human. Yet its response will completely fool any normal human and will pass Turing tests till the cows come home. What this thought experiment shows is that, while half-qualia may be absurd, it most certainly is possible to reproduce the outputs of a brain without replicating its qualia. It might have completely different qualia, just as a very good actor's emotions can't be distinguished from the real thing, even though his or her internal experience is quite different. And if qualia can be quite different even though the functional outputs are the same, this does seem to leave functionalism in something of a quandary. All we can say is that there must be some kind of qualia occurring, rather a different result from what Chalmers is claiming. When we extend this type of scenario to artificial neurons or partial brain prostheses as in Chamer's paper, we quickly run up against perplexing problems. Imagine the advanced alien provides these prostheses. It takes the same inputs and generates the same correct outputs, but it processes those inputs within a much vaster, more complex system. Does the brain utilizing this advanced prosthesis experience a kind of expanded consciousness because of this, without that difference being detectable? Or do the qualia remain somehow confined to the prosthesis (whatever that means)? These crazy quandaries suggest to me that basically, we don't know shit.
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