The two rhetorical questions in your first paragraph assume the universe is discrete and finite, and I am not sure why. But also, that has nothing to do with what we are talking about. You think that if you show the computers and brains work the same way(they don’t), or in a similar way(maybe) I will have to accept an AI can do everything a human can, but that is not true at all.
Treating an AI like a subject capable of receiving information is inaccurate, but I will still assume it is identical to a human in that regard for the sake of argument.
It would still be nothing like a college student grappling with abstract concepts. It would be like giving you university textbooks on quantum mechanics written in chinese, and making you study them(it would be even more accurate if you didn’t know any language at all). You would be able to notice patterns in the ways the words are placed relative to each other, and also use this information(theoretically) to make a combination of characters that resembles the texts you have, but you wouldn’t be able to understand what they reference. Even if you had a dictionary you wouldn’t be, because you wouldn’t be able to understand the definitions. Words don’t magically have their meanings stored inside, they are jnterpreted in our heads, but an AI can’t do that, the word means nothing to it.
Well that is what Trump was doing, appealing to his base, while completely alienating the centre-left and left. And it worked.