When I read that analogy, I found it inept. Fire is a well defined physical process. Understanding / cognition is not necessarily physical and certainly not well defined.

This depends on the assumption that all brain activity is the process of realizing computable functions. I'm not really aware of any strong philosophical or neurological positions that has established this beyond dispute. Not to resurrect vitalism or something but we'd first need to establish that biological systems are reducible to strictly physical systems. Even so, I think there's some reason to think that the highly complex social historical process of human development might complicate things a bit more than just brute force "simulate enough neurons". Worse, whose brain exactly do you simulate? We are all different. How do we determine which minute differences in neural architecture matter?

Searle was known for the Chinese Room experiment, whicb demonstrated language in its translational states to be strong enclitic feature of various judgements of the intermediary.

Do you need differential equations to understand what’s happening in a transistor?