Scott Aaronson has an argument along roughly the same line regarding the Chinese room thought experiment. He points out that although it is usually framed as a

Scott Aaronson has an argument along roughly the same line regarding the Chinese room thought experiment. He points out that although it is usually framed as a "room" or a "box", the amount of space required to simulate a conversation of length n with just a lookup table is exponential. So in fact, the "room" would have to be colossally large for any reasonable n. There is a much more involved discussion of it, but the upshot is that the separation between polynomial and exponential time or space is a plausible place to draw the line between "really actually thinking and understanding" vs. "just a computation".