How do you program a software mind to have had infancy, childhood, and a lifetime of social human interaction? I'm saying that's MUCH harder than simply making neural nets to perform specific duties.

Yeah it'll be harder, but I don't see anything in principle which makes it impossible. If you can simulate the growth and plasticity of the brain to enough precision, then you could probably simulate 20 years of development in a very short time.

Maybe I'm making a massively overly pedantic point. It's just that your post began with a claim that certain things "cannot be given" to an artificial mind, which sounded like you were proposing absolute limits to AI.