True, but in the analogous situation with real VMs you wouldn't actually have to. You'd be able to observe the behaviour implemented by the VM's instruction set, and then you'd know everything you needed in order to write a VM implementation of your own which was indistinguishable from the original one to processes running inside it.
The trouble with brains is that even working out what the VM's analogue of instructions is is a total pain, because it's all so continuous and vague.
eta: In fact it seems more analogous to the problem of determining the underlying rules of physics than to VMs. You can clearly see various kinds of macroscopic behaviour, but there are dark corners where it's less obvious what's going on, and working out the underlying rule set of which all of that behaviour is emergent consequences is generally a hard problem.
no subject
The trouble with brains is that even working out what the VM's analogue of instructions is is a total pain, because it's all so continuous and vague.
eta: In fact it seems more analogous to the problem of determining the underlying rules of physics than to VMs. You can clearly see various kinds of macroscopic behaviour, but there are dark corners where it's less obvious what's going on, and working out the underlying rule set of which all of that behaviour is emergent consequences is generally a hard problem.