>Okay but chemical and electrical exchanges in an body with a drive to not die is so vastly different than a matrix multiplication routine on a flat plane of silicon

I see your "flat plane of silicon" and raise you "a mush of tissue, water, fat, and blood". The substrate being a "mere" dumb soul-less material doesn't say much.

And the idea is that what matters is the processing - not the material it happens on, or the particular way it is.

Air molecules hitting a wall and coming back to us at various intervals are also "vastly different" to a " matrix multiplication routine on a flat plane of silicon".

But a matrix multiplication can nonetheless replicate the air-molecules-hitting-wall audio effect of reverbation on 0s and 1s representing the audio. We can even hook the result to a movable membrane controlled by electricity (what pros call "a speaker") to hear it.

The inability to see that the point of the comparison is that an algorithmic modelling of a physical (or biological, same thing) process can still replicate, even if much simpler, some of its qualities in a different domain (0s and 1s in silicon and electric signals vs some material molecules interacting) is therefore annoying.

Intelligence does not require "chemical and electrical exchanges in an body". Are you attempting to axiomatically claim that only biological beings can be intelligent (in which case, that's not a useful definition for the purposes of this discussion)? If not, then that's a red herring.

"Annoying" does not mean "false".