That would be quite an extraordinary claim that requires equally extraordinary evidence.

What we do know at this point is that no amount of "just chemistry" has ever managed to create even the most rudimentary form of "life" from inert chemicals.

And the only working models we have for "intelligence" at this point are inextricably bound to life.

If not, then the history of science strongly suggests we can eventually learn the mechanisms of life and intelligence and then find a way to imperfectly yet sufficiently reimplement them.

No. I am simply suggesting that creating life (and intelligence) from inert materals may involve more than "just chemistry". In the same way that lead can not be turned into gold by "just chemistry".

I welcome knowledge and proof to the contrary but thus far, there is none.

Perhaps to truly understand life we need to look deeply at physics, geology, fluid dynamics, and many other specialized fields, in addition to chemistry. And maybe we will need some new discoveries in these areas than have not yet been made. Is that all?

I don’t think there is really much contention between that and the idea that life is “just chemistry”. I would bet most people saying that are totally fine with what I wrote above and are likely just trying to be concise with their words.

Unless you mean more than you are plainly saying, this seems like splitting hairs about the taxonomy of scientific understanding. Understanding is understanding, regardless of how you categorize it.

Much of our progress in medicine, science, and technology has been made due to the idea that the world around operates in an orderly fashion and can be investigated and understood.

The ultimate proof is actually doing it. Start with nothing but inert materials and produce a new, unique form of living organism using "just chemistry".

I'm not saying it can't be done, I am saying that thus far, it hasn't been done. And the reason it hasn't been done might be because "just chemistry" is an overly simplistic description of what is needed to actually achieve it.

But feel free to prove me wrong.

EDIT: some grammar

I am happy to admit that doing a good job of differentiating is tricky business indeed, and that we all make many blatant errors and are prone to developing distorted ways of seeing things.

Nonetheless, I do believe that humanity has acquired some real understanding of the world and will continue to do so.

Keep in mind that no amount of rocketeering has ever put a man on Mars, but that hardly constitutes a proof, or even serious evidence, that it is impossible.

Arguments from ignorance are a terrible thing.

The fact that it has not been done with "just chemistry" is no proof but it does tend to skew the probabilities toward the view that substantially more may be required.

One would think that the synthesis of urea back in 1828 would at least weaken this argument, but hey...

That claim has roughly the same epistemological status as Last Thursdayism ("the world was created last Thursday in a state where we have memories and see evidence of past events but those events aren't actually real.").

> What we do know at this point is that no amount of "just chemistry" has ever managed to create even the most rudimentary form of "life" from inert chemicals.

How do we know that? Are you just talking about humans practicing chemistry?

For example, how transfer of functions emerges after hemispherectomy (half a brain is removed), to best of my understanding is unknown.

(There are a few more technicalities which amount to forcing the simulator to solve an uncomputable puzzle before we tell them the laws. Let M be a turning machine that whose halting behaviour is undecidable. Even a spin-1/2 system might be "uncomputable" if all I tell you is that its Hamiltonian is (1 0; 0 1) if M halts and (1 0; 0 2) otherwise. Since a spin-1/2 system is one of the most blatantly computable things out there, this objection doesn't have much force.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing%E2%80%93...

Actually it's not uncommon for AI "sceptics" (the sort of people who write these articles not just people who suspect we'll have another AI Winter) to just not accept Church-Turing at all, or to insist upon squinting at it in a peculiar way that renders it tautological.

I'm consistently disappointed that people who feel they're quite sure general AI isn't possible mostly have bad intuitions about Computer Science. Twice so far I've been recommended books by sceptics "which will show you why you're wrong" and been disappointed with the poor quality of argument deployed which sometimes is little more than a show of incredulity or a resort to mysterious dualism.

A more robust attempt at this sort of argument was put up by Stevan Harnad, who taught an undergraduate class I sat in on many years ago now (one of the privileges of a post-graduate is that they're entitled to attend relevant undergraduate lectures and so I did). Harnad thinks† you need to build a robot because the intelligence will need some means to experience the universe for itself. But Harnad doesn't disbelieve that general AI is in principle possible, he just thinks our present methods can't get there.

† In general with people who've made a career of such thing they are very careful with words, and so I have doubtless mis-characterized (or even misunderstood) the details and you should blame me for that not Stevan.

In other words, this rudimentary analog logic playback device is every bit as "smart" as any other binary logic computer will ever be --- which is to say, not at all.

If you have code changing code, based on input, which is a neural net, then you have a bit more.

What is it then? Magic?

The fact that you don't understand how it works doesn't make it magical.

Every program ever written for your desktop computer was ultimately "compiled" into a long series of simple binary logic operations that your computer blindly repeats at very high speed. For every set of inputs, it recreates the same output --- kinda like a loom mechanically weaves a particular pattern at high speed once it has been "programmed" using a set of punch cards not unlike those once used to program computers.

A computer is dynamic playback machine, which can change what "to play" and how to play it over time.

Indeed magic, for anyone who does not understand it.

By it's nature, binary logic is "dynamic".

A computer is just a playback machine for binary logic.

I'm of the opinion that we don't even know what questions we are trying to answer.

What is intelligence? What is consciousness?

Can you explain them in concrete terms that are acceptable to everyone and don't have any notable exceptions? That's going to be the first step to being anywhere close to realizing general a.i..

That there is a tough engineering job involved in reproducing such machinery so we can grown brain matter at will, and that we'd prefer our computers to be less squishy does not mean it is likely to be impossible to reproduce it.

Although you can argue that we already do it because we, as a species, reproduce.

It could be quite possible that our level of intelligence is not reproducible by the means we have chosen. It could be that there is something inherent in our entire composition that allows for our particular expression of intelligence and consciousness.

I'm not saying it's impossible. I am saying that first, we don't even know what we're looking for. And when pressed as to what that is, the answer comes down to basically, "You know..." while gesturing broadly.

I'm very much sympathetic to the idea that there could potentially be aspects about the specific structure of a brain that is necessary to produce intelligence, or at least necessary for sentience. But does not inherently make it impossible to reproduce. For it to be impossible to reproduce a brain, there would need to be something in the cellular machinery used to construct a brain that we can not pick a party and replicate.

As a reminder, the argument made in the article is that it is impossible even in principle, not that it is impossible to do it using a digital computer of typical current architecture.

Tell me what it is first. Define "artificial general intelligence" in a way that is generally accepted.

Is it possible? I don't know because I don't even know what we're trying to do.

Maybe you could discuss whether classical computers could achieve AGI, but I think overall the quest is to build machines with AGI, not necessarily in the form of classical computers.

Humans are animals. Part of the paper defends the notion that a lot of human intelligence is tacit based on being embodied in the world as a living organism. The idea that humans are biological robots is only one that came about as metaphor when we created machines and some similarities were noted.

Are we? How do you know this?

Define "general intelligence". Then prove we have it. Then demonstrate that this definition that includes us doesn't include something commonly accepted to not have the same qualities.

Also, if we don't have "general intelligence", what does that mean?

I believe, it is disputed, whether humans are just machines. But it is mostly a matter of definition, I believe.

We haven't figured out how to travel faster than the speed of light. That doesn't necessarily mean it can't be done. But we currently lack the knowledge and resources needed to do it.

Machine comes from mechanic and there is doubt, that general artificial intelligence can be achieved with a mechanical base.

But if you define any complex systema machine, then yeah sure, we humans are machines. Therefore GAI can be achieved with machines. Tautological proof.