To be fair, this is just dualism, but in a non-religious way :P
To offer an analogy: The intelligence of Throg Skullcrusher, a level 54 Orc Captain in the Foul Fortress with a current task of "collect food"... does not actually arise from the polygons or textures that form his head, even though taking points of head damage causes Clumsiness.
But in a simulation that could be routed around by having a physical computer the size of Jupiter operate a human scale body in the simulation. You could share and cache compute resources across 6 billion humans within a single human compute core the size of Jupiter (or maybe ~100 Jupiters). Since most computation is probably redundant, you could probably simulate many orders of magnitude more humans with a single human compute core.
To observers within the simulation it would look like human cognition is achievable in 3 lbs of tissue. But this would simply be an illusion created by the simulation environment. There'd be no way of knowing for sure until we fully reverse engineer a single human brain down to the level of base compute operations.