I think if they define intelligence that way, it isn't a very interesting discussion, because we're back to Church-Turing: Either they can show that this actually has an effect on the ability to reason and the possible outputs of the system that somehow exceeds the Turing computable, or those aspects are irrelevant to an outside observer of said entity because the entity would still be able to act in exactly the same way.

I can't prove that you have a subjective experience of feeling emotion, and you can't prove that I do - we can only determine that either one of us acts as if we do.

And so this is all rather orthogonal to how we define intelligence, as whether or not a simulation can simulate such aspects as "actual" feeling is only relevant if the Church-Turing thesis is proven wrong.