Thought is a process, like math.

You're making a baseless assumption about the inner being of every process. If you simulate physics then you're actually doing different physics, where the map is not the terrain. If the hardware is different then the inner being of the thing may very well be different.

You're actually displaying a lack of imagination here. You're not considering things other than consciousness. If you simulate the processes which on the surface resemble the processes that you see in the brain when observing from the outside, what you produce may be something equally interesting and yet totally different in-itself from subjective experience.

You don't know as much as you think you know.

You say that, and GAs were used decades ago to design FPGAs to a spec. The evolved design worked perfectly on the test chip, so the design was copied onto a second chip and it failed. The logic gates were identical but the GA had utilised microscopic differences in the substrate and there were large areas of programmed chip totally unconnected to the main circuit. Without them, the first chip didn’t work any more.

There are likely quantum effects available at the size / scale of neurons, and it’s brave to say evolution wouldn’t exploit them if there was some benefit.