It seems by your periodically hostile comments ("oh so smug terms the 'soul'") indicates that you have a disdain for my position, so I assume you think my position is your option 2, but I don't ignore self-reports of sentience. I'm closer to option 1, I see it as plausible that a sufficiently general algorithm could have the same level of sentience as humans.
The third position strikes me as at least just as ridiculous as the second. Of course we don't totally understand biological life, but just saying there's something "special" is wild. We're a configuration of non-sentient parts that produce sentience. Computers are also a configuration of non-sentient parts. To claim that there's no configuration of silicon that could arrive at sentience but that there is a configuration of carbon that could arrive at sentience is imbuing carbon with some properties that seems vastly more complex than the physical reality of carbon would allow.