If you accept that computation is universal, then yes, you could definitely achieve human-like understanding through means that are completely different from the actual human wet-ware.

It might not be very efficient... but it's certainly possible. If the universe is isomorphic to a Turing machine, then the human brain certainly is. If that is so, then it is possible in principle to create a human-like machine with any other Turing-complete machine. It just might take you a billion years to simulate one second of human brain activity.

It's not obvious that either the universe or the human brain are isomorphic to a Turing machine.

There's an epistemological tendency to assume the universe is isomorphic to the most complex mechanical model available at the time.

Historically, those models seem to be reliably wrong; the universe always turns out to be more complicated and subtle than we imagine it is.

You don't need to replicate human brain to achieve human brain-like behavior.

Well if you consider quantum mechanics to essentially be a complex probabilistic cellular automaton, then I don't think we'd even need to mirror our specific biological mechanisms of intelligence; we'd just need to run the right cellular automaton and wait. Detecting life may be more difficult though.

> wait.

"wait" sounds like find the right cellular automata.