I think this comes down to whether the chemistry is providing some kind of deep value or is just being used by evolution to produce a version of generic stochastic behavior that could be trivially reproduced on silicon. My intuition is the latter- it would be a surprising coincidence if some complicated electro-chemical reaction behavior provided an essential building block for human intelligence that would otherwise be impossible.
But, from a best-of-all-possible-worlds perspective, surprising coincidences that are necessary to observe coincidences and label them as surprising aren't crazy. At least not more crazy than the fact that slightly adjusted physical constants would prevent the universe from existing.
> My intuition is the latter- it would be a surprising coincidence if some complicated electro-chemical reaction behavior provided an essential building block for human intelligence that would otherwise be impossible.
Well, I wouldn't say impossible: just that BMI's are probably first. Then probably wetware/bio-hardware sentience, before silicon sentience happens.
My point is the mechanisms for sentience/consciousness/experience are not well understood. I would suspect the electro-chemical reactions inside every cell to be critical to replicating those cells functions.
You would never try to replicate a car never looking under the hood! You might make something that looks like a car, seems to act like a car, but has a drastically simpler engine (hamsters on wheels), and have designs that support that bad architecture (like making the car lighter) with unforeseen consequences (the car flips in a light breeze). The metaphor transfers nicely to machine intelligence: I think.