The most standard objection of all is that we're trying to emulate an extremely complex long running chemical process in 1s and 0s on very different hardware, a

The most standard objection of all is that we're trying to emulate an extremely complex long running chemical process in 1s and 0s on very different hardware, and whilst it may be logically possible to do this, the human brain isn't nearly smart enough to understand its own architecture well enough to design an even more complex emulation architecture (either a brain emulation program or an accurate evolution-of-consciousness simulator). I don't think that requires a "soul": I think it works quite well with the assumption that human self awareness is linked to complex organism-survival-biased chemical processes we call emotions which are pretty orthogonal to the sort of probability-estimation optimizations we select for with ML models. And also pretty orthogonal to those models yielding useful results...