The brain (the tissue) is not the "hardware", with it's "contents" being the software. I'd say that the analogy makes no sense. Whatever you can "emulate", you're emulating because you've got the "hardware" to do it.
To illustrate my point: we can't emulate perceiving time at a much slower pace or viewing a wider spectrum of light. Okay, that's a wrong example since we're limited by our eyes - the peripherals/sensing devices. Perhaps try emulating interpreting visible light as a color blind person would.
The separation between hardware (brain) and software (soul?) is practically non-existent. It's closer to a state-machine.
That's sort of a nitpick on the analogy I think. There might not be much of a hardware/software distinction in the brain but there is a distinction between processes that are not conscious, that seemingly take place automatically and effortlessly, and processes that are conscious, that seem to be effortful, deliberate, that require focus. I think that's the distinction that the analogy is going for -- the emulation going on is patching up some failures to do automatic effortless work by doing deliberate, focused, effortful work.
Yes, precisely. As an example, much of human communication is non-verbal and automatic. You're picking up on various queues, body language, there's a flow to it and all of it is subconscious.
If the machinery that does all of that is missing, broken, or functions poorly, you end up with an individual who has difficulty communicating well. He can speak, is intelligent, but seems absolutely daft when it comes to social interactions.
The general response of such individuals is to use the parts that work well to reach a reasonable outcome. For example, that persons' memory might be excellent. So that person memorizes hundreds of social interactions, recalls the specific one he happens to be in, and presses the play button on the recording.
The result isn't perfect. It's sluggish. Kind of like emulating software on hardware it was never meant to run on (hence, the analogy). But it works and certainly works better than nothing.
I think there can still be "emulation". For instance, when I was in elementary school I thought it was hard to remember the full multiplication table. Instead of remembering 7×9 I would think 7×10-7 = 63. That's IMHO a type of algorithm (software) of breaking down the multiplication so it requires less rote memorization (emulation).
I can give you another example. When I first had to learn what was my left and right hand, I instead visualized that I sat on a particular chair in a particular room. Then the window would be to the left, so the hand closest to the window would be the left hand. IMHO, also an emulation.
(Edit - In the second example, I visualized myself in a 3rd party perspective, so it also involved rotating the room in my head. My problem was that I couldn't apply left and right to myself at that age, only relative to other things)
I'm not dyslexic, but I still have a hellish time with left and right. I finally had to "logic out" that when I look in the rear-view mirror, left is left and right is right (when seeing the turn signals of the person behind me). Still can't solve 3-D puzzles ("which of these diagrams is the same as this one") worth a damn.
Hardware: Closer to autonomous functions. Require no thought, you just do it. Example: Saying "Thank you" reflexively when someone does something kind.
Software: Have to mentally process the situation. Did this person do something kind? Is there a response I should give? Oh! "Thank you!"
Still a false dichotomy. Everything we do runs the gamut from autonomous to executive. For instance, a relatively illiterate person will have to focus purposefully in order to read a street sign, whereas your average literate person will look at a street sign while holding 7 other things in his mind at the same time.
I think a better analogy are those processor flags found in /proc/cpuinfo in Linux systems.
If your processor doesn't have the vmx or the svm flags, for example, you can't use hardware virtualization but can still use software virtualization in its place, with a performance cost.
I see how the mind and body could be seen as a state machine, since there's a strong connection that flows both ways, but there's really only so much that the mind can do to change the body. Try thinking yourself strong enough to lift a horse... So I think the analogy works in the rough, but can actually be taken further. We have parts of our mind/body "stack" that are able to operate and change on all time scales and levels of persistence.
You can change your body (to a degree) through surgery or slow habit - (hardware / firmware); you can change your prevailing mood, knowledge, and skills through slow habit (again, only to a degree) - firmware; there seems to be a level of chemical mood or emotion that changes on the time scale of minutes or hours - disk persistence; you can change what you're thinking about and your current state of mind in a minute or so - memory; and you can react to your immediate objects of focus very quickly - cache.
To illustrate my point: we can't emulate perceiving time at a much slower pace or viewing a wider spectrum of light. Okay, that's a wrong example since we're limited by our eyes - the peripherals/sensing devices. Perhaps try emulating interpreting visible light as a color blind person would.
The separation between hardware (brain) and software (soul?) is practically non-existent. It's closer to a state-machine.