Theoretically, yes, I would assume a 100% accurately-simulated brain to be as sentient as the real thing (of course, then you can never turn it off without committing murder). Given that we don't fully understand the properties of a single neuron yet, I am deeply skeptical of the accuracy of these simulations.
Even in that wikipedia article you linked:
> These early attempts of simulation have been criticized for not being biologically realistic. Although we have the complete structural connectome, we do not know the synaptic weights at each of the known synapses. We do not even know whether the synapses are inhibitory or excitatory. To compensate for this the Hiroshima group used machine learning to find some weights of the synapses which would generate the desired behaviour. It is therefore no surprise that the model displayed the behaviour, and it may not represent true understanding of the system.
The common thread running through many of these comments is people who don't appreciate just how complex biology is, and how much we don't understand, are nevertheless confidently asserting that some Turning machine they can half-imagine will obviously be able to "think" the way a brain does.
The common thread is materialism. If you don't introduce any mystical entities such as a soul, it is inevitable that it's possible to construct something that operates indistinguishably from what we consider natural life - it's a question of engineering and biological research at that point. The question of whether it's 100 years removed from my laptop, or 1000 years, is a completely different one. It took humans literally millennia to get from horses to cars, yet both are on the same spectrum.
The Chinese Room argument essentially tries to make a point that it's impossible at any level of complexity. The only way that can be true is if you reject materialism entirely, and adopt the notion that there's something else that "bestows" intelligence on a brain, that cannot be replicated by any artificial physical means (but is somehow still replicated in utero). It's not really a verifiable claim, which is evident from the very design of the experiment - it says that there are things that appear intelligent to any possible test, but still aren't, because common sense, essentially.
Even in that wikipedia article you linked:
> These early attempts of simulation have been criticized for not being biologically realistic. Although we have the complete structural connectome, we do not know the synaptic weights at each of the known synapses. We do not even know whether the synapses are inhibitory or excitatory. To compensate for this the Hiroshima group used machine learning to find some weights of the synapses which would generate the desired behaviour. It is therefore no surprise that the model displayed the behaviour, and it may not represent true understanding of the system.
The common thread running through many of these comments is people who don't appreciate just how complex biology is, and how much we don't understand, are nevertheless confidently asserting that some Turning machine they can half-imagine will obviously be able to "think" the way a brain does.