Because silicon can’t, says chemist:
WHEN Lee Cronin was 9 he was given a Sinclair ZX81 computer and a chemistry set. Unlike most children, Cronin imagined how great it would be if the two things could be combined to make a programmable chemical computer.
Now 45 and the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, Cronin leads a research team of more than 50 people, but his childhood obsessions remain. He is constructing chemical brains, and has ambitions to create artificial life – using a radical new approach. Rowan Hooper, “Why creating a chemical brain will be how we understand consciousness” at New Scientist (paywall)
The problem with consciousness is not that we don’t understand how it originates but that we don’t even know what it is. The best explanation I (O’Leary for News) ever heard was: It is like looking into and out of a window at the same time. Possibly, the chemical brain will have an advantage in doing so. We will see.
See also: Post-modern science: The illusion of consciousness sees through itself
From Scientific American: “we may all be alters—dissociated personalities— of universal consciousness.”
and
Is artificial intelligence taking over? Or is a fashionable panic afoot?