For the completely opposite view, listen to Daniel Dennet on The Life Scientific [1].
Dennet argues that combining Darwin's strange inversion of reason (complexity from bottom up iterative refinement) with Turing's Universal Machine provides a way of understanding how we are machines, built of mahcines, built of machines, etc. and it is the heirarchy that allows the complexity of minds to emerge.
That heirarchical iterative schemes are unexpectedly powerful is well mirrored by the recent successes of deep neural nets, and Dennet cites Hinton.
It's worth a listen and summarises his new book From Bacteria to Bach.