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Am I right to think that this statement is based on the assumption that the brain (and all computation machines) have been proven to have Turing machine equivalents based on the Church-Turing thesis? If that is the case I would refer you to this article’s section Misunderstandings of the Thesis. If I have understood wrong I would be grateful if you could offer some more details on your point.
We can demonstrate the erroneous logic of this statement by saying something like: ”Indeed, not even language is based on symbolic manipulation: at the deepest level, it's all sound waves pushing air particles back and forth”.
As Searle points out the meaning of zeros, ones, logic gates etc. is observer relative in the same way money (not the paper, the meaning) is observer relative and thus ontologically subjective. The electrons are indeed ontologically objective but that is not true regarding the syntactic structures of which they are elements in a computer. Watch this video of Searle explaining this (from 9:12).
No, otherwise we would have the certainty that the brain is Turing-equivalent and I wouldn't have prefaced with "Either the brain is capable of doing things that would require infinite resources for a computer to perform". We do not have proof that everything not calculable by a Turing machine requires infinite resources, otherwise Church-Turing wi... (read more)