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Thomas comments on Future of Moral Machines - New York Times [link] - Less Wrong Discussion
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What else it would be? Except the divine origin of thoughts nothing was submitted as an alternative so far.
I distrust "what else would it be"-style arguments; they are ultimately appeals to inadequate imagination.
Certainly of the things we understand reasonably well, computation is the only candidate that could explain intelligence; if intelligence weren't fundamentally a computational process it would have to fundamentally be something we don't yet understand.
Just to be clear, I'm not challenging the conclusion; given the sorts of things that intelligence does, and the sorts of things that computations do, that intelligence is a form of computation seems pretty likely to me. What I'm pushing back on is the impulse to play burden-of-proof tennis with questions like this, rather than accepting the burden of proof and trying to meet it.
I can imagine a great many other things it could be, but in the real world people have to go by the evidential support. Your post is just a variation of the "argument from ignorance" , as in "We don't know in detail what intelligence is, so it could be something else", even though you admit "Certainly of the things we understand reasonably well, computation is the only candidate that could explain intelligence".
Building an AI does not require it being a computer - it could be a bunch of rubber bands if that's what worked. The assumption is more like intelligence is not inherently mysterious, and humans are not at some special perfect point of intelligence.
You can build a computer out of pretty much anything, including rubber bands.