[otikik]

There’s not a single missing something, there’s at least 2.

One of them is physical structure. You can get 10M somethings, sure, but how do you wire them together is probably more important than how many there are. And there’s many possible combinations.

The other missing part is that we have not figured out the high level software. A squirrel brain is a “desktop PC running windows”-level of utility. A bunch of neurons interlinked is some fashion is equivalent to a blank CPU. We know how the individual transistors work, but the BIOS, and OS are still unknown.

It’s quite possible that problem 1 and problem 2 are related, because evolution doesn’t care about making things easy to understand for us with clear delimitations.