If you take the Turing Test to it's logical conclusion, a program that is indistinguishable from a human intelligence is a human intelligence. There's no means to some other end. The program is the intelligence.
This is also something that Turing came up with in the 40s & 50s. Not exactly novel.
But it's clear that it has methodological implications for how one does science:
For example, if you think computers are just a way to simulate continuous systems, it would not occur to you to sample random programs and see what they do. It would not occur to you to enumerate simple programs. And you wouldn't think that it is very interesting that such and such a simple program can do such a such a computation.
If you did, it would. And if you were ambitious enough, you would actually try hunting for the program that computes the universe, as Wolfram has been doing on a cluster in his basement (I love this tidbit) for some years now: http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_wolfram_computing_a_theory_...
The first i am agnostic to (although i do like the feynman quote at the top of http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0206089v2 which was linked to above), and the second is most certainly false, as i have indicated above.
The evidence in NKS to support wolfram's assertion that the universe is a simple program is circumstantial at best, and so his windmill tilting quests for the program that is the universe seems quixotic at best, and arrogantly foolhardy at worst.
Analytical modeling, algorithmic modeling, or whatever other model someone wants to use to represent reality are models until you can prove them to actually be fundamentally connected with the manner in which reality functions.
Re models: now we're getting into epistemology. I don't think the aim you ascribe to scientists to "prove them (models) to actually be fundamentally connected with the manner in which reality functions" has much meaning when one is talking about, say, quantum field theory. How do I connect the mathematics of QFT with what is "really going on"? You can't. It just is.
That sounds remarkable indeed; can you point to an online reference that has more info on this? thanks.