[westoncb]

> humans can mimic something just from a single (even partial) observation;

Human learning is similarly based on large numbers of exposures; we don't form categories from single exposures. There are times where it looks that way, but what's happening instead is we come across a new particular instance of an already known general category (e.g. I have the general category 'cat', and I know they can vary on the dimensions, color, size, unruliness, etc.—and I've never seen a purple cat before, but I understand it after one exposure because it's just another value for an already known attribute. The less obvious examples are just super abstract, but have the same basic relationships in place).

> Then the hard problem of consciousness

That, by definition, doesn't have to do with any states of physical matter, nor any kind of computation. It's asking about the subjectivity of state transitions. So it should not be involved in considering a functional equivalent for (important subsets of) human brain behavior.

Edit: to clarify about the 'hard problem' relation to this: if you take Searle's 'Chinese Room' critique, for the question of functional equivalence it doesn't matter whether the person in the room understands Chinese or not; it just matters that at the end of the day the correct cards are held up.