What does AGI have to do with anything?

Perhaps essentially the implied framework needed to model "an intelligence" as a prerequisite to encode a human general intelligence.

Of course I would expect a "chemical emulation or decoding" to be needed for that approach as a minimium requirement as physical brains aren't in a vacuum and have all sorts of hormonal influnces. And emulation is tricky even when dealing with simpler things like computers or Hawking's Voice emulator where the original worked based upon the assumption of transistor noise.

Even if we could get every last neuron modeled accurately without the hormonal issues there would be major emotional differences from things like not having any fear or dopamine and a configuration that expects them.

Yes. And furthermore to your point regarding emulation...if it was required to get to quantum level accuracy it might not be possible, at least according to Sandberg in his brain emulation opinion.

And even furthermore, things like the microbiome's influence on the brain are not yet well understood.

But why do you need any of that to solve biological aging? It's like, step 1: boil the ocean.

Hopefully we don't. But we need to solve dementia which might require a deeper understanding of the connectome. And furthermore, the longer we age the more new diseases we will discover.

By the time we have multi-centenarians there might be whole new types of dementia that could arise.

Perhaps a better question than (do we need AGI) might be, do we need to solve protein folding before we can make meaningful progress. ie should protein folding be considered an ancillary problem or a perquisite for other solutions that must developed on the technology stack to make progress in age research

Protein folding is pretty nearly solved in the last few years, as demonstrated by AlphaFold.

Ability to invent things that narrow AI might not be able to very well.

If, as Thiel and others have pointed out, ingenuity is slowing down, then in order to solve aging it might be necessary to have AGI invent the things for us to solve aging.

Would be curious if someone was of the opinion that we can invent the tech to solving aging ourselves and what resources would be needed to do so or if that process requires AGI first due to the barriers of solving aging being too great for us considering the resources required.