AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
There should be a name for this very common assumption. You see it everywhere, a sort of axiomatic belief that mechanism is "mere", too lowly to support meaning and minds. This is in the middle of a book that is showing the opposite! Weird. the lowly matter axiom, there, now it has a name, if not a great one.
I think it's a consequence of deeply ingrained mind/body dualism. What interests me is how indignant it makes people if you deny this axiom. You are insulting them if you imply that their precious minds/souls/selves could be made of something as gross and crass as mechanisms.
Spinoza might be the one philosopher who successfully gets beyond this duality, but I need to read more of him to be sure.
Minsky of course made a career out of denying this axiom. Other AI people too of course, but he aimed straight at it. His Minsky/Matter, Mind, and Models paper has a theory for why the dualism arises in the first place.
There is a standard sort of MIT answer to this: saying that minds are mechanical is not lowering minds, it is elevating machines.