I wrote a long reply to a comment that disappeared, so I'm posting it here instead

Searle and others have argued that consciousness is a property of a biological brain.

What are their arguments for that consciousness is a property of a biological brain? Does biological matter have special properties that non-biological matter does not? Does non-biological matter have some sort of restrictions or limitations? What's the juicy details I'm missing out on?

To put it another way: it is not unreasonable to maintain that whatever is meant by "consciousness" includes specific physical properties.

Okay, what are those properties, and why can nerve circuits made out of carbon compounds produce these properties but not electrical circuits made out of copper not produce these properties?

This view denies the mind/body or software/hardware dualism, of the kind that you seem to suggest here. If consciousness is an intrinsic property of a specific medium (brains) it cannot be installed like software onto another medium (silicon chips).

Software is just a logical abstraction of hardware. You can easily make hardware circuits that does a certain calculation without one line of code.

It's just that we prefer reusability and general purpose computing, so we make hardware that's specifically aimed to be controlled by software to do a task, as opposed to making hardware to do that task. But this doesn't change the fact that we could also just have made one separate piece of hardware for every task we wanted to do (though it would be tedious work).

Obviously software cannot do things like produce sound or light, you need a hardware speaker or a hardware lamp to do that, but any sort of logical system, tally, or calculation done in hardware circuitry can also be done in software.

So making hardware and software to be a sort of divide is misguided.

If consciousness is an intrinsic property of a specific medium (brains) it cannot be installed like software onto another medium (silicon chips).

But the thing is, "brains" is a compound, not an atomic substance. For brains to have some sort of property that the sum of it's parts does not possess (a whole bunch of atoms), there would need to be some sort of magic involved that poofs this property into existence the second enough atoms are correctly aligned to produce carbon compounds that are correctly aligned into the shape of a brain.

Brains are made out of atoms. Silicon chips are made out of atoms. Now, to be fair, they do have different physical properties, for instance, brains are somewhat wet and squishy, which silicon chips are not. But it's not enough to just state that brains have "some" property that silicon chips do not have, you have to tell me what property this is so we can examine it, and make sure it's not just something fantastical and illusionary.

Think about a painting by Picasso, for example. Even a perfect down to the molecule reproduction of a Picasso would still not count as a Picasso.

And if I want to know why it's not a Picasso, you can tell me, "Why, it's because the person known as Picasso did not physically craft this copy". So there we have a concrete reason as to why it's not a Picasso. You do not reply "It is because the original painting has some property that the copied painting cannot have, therefore only one of them is a Picasso." That would clearly be a unsatisfactory co-op out answer that doesn't justify the distinction.