“What Turing’s arguments suggest is that the things that it should be possible to compute with neurons in a brain are exactly the same things that it should be possible to compute with, say, transistors inside a computer. That’s kind of a scary thought because it suggests that you and I are machines somehow. Or at least what we’re able to ever think is somehow the same set of things that a computer could think. And a lot of people find that a very threatening thought because it suggests that somehow maybe they’re not so worthwhile. If they’re “just a computer”. We’re used to computers, computers are dumb machines, we know that they’re not valuable in the sense that people are valuable. So somehow people find it very insulting, the notion that they are a machine. And yet Turing’s argument is that what you can compute doesn’t matter what you’re built out of. That’s the essence of it. And so it doesn’t really matter that we’re built of biological components. What we can compute is the same as what a transistor computer can compute.”

— Dr. Daniel Hillis, The Strange Life and Death of Dr Turing (1992)