Sentient Life

People who take a scientific, materialist view on the world have largely arrived at the idea that consciousness is a purely physical process. If some combination of chemical interactions in the brain can produce sentience, what other types of interaction could combine to produce it? In science fiction, there is already a plethora of movies and books dealing with the possible creation of sentient computers. What about more arcane possibilities? In some ways, governments and other large organizations behave like single organisms; could a large enough bureaucracy become self-aware and intelligent, with flows of paperwork acting like neurons in the brain? Could slang terms and catch phrases begin to interact in a way that mirrors transistors in a computer?