Is this paper any good? The way the abstract makes me wary of the results claimed.
From the paper: "For example, it is not conceivable that we could create a mathematical model that would enable the computation of the appropriate interpretation of interrupted statements, or of statements made by people who are talking over each other, or of the appropriate length of a pause in a conversation, which may depend on context (remembrance dinner or cocktail party), on emotional loading of the situation, on knowledge of the other person’s social standing or dialogue history, or on what the other person is doing – perhaps looking at his phone – when the conversation pauses."
Optimists in the comments here have hope for advances in mathematics that would give us a new method for modeling that could be applied. Maybe their hope isn't unfounded. I'm just a dude who read an academic paper. But I did enjoy it.
I'd say most of the arguments in the comments boil down to "human brains do it so the paper's argument requires human brains to work on mechanisms other than non-quantum physics, which is mathematically model-able, which is a strong assumption."
We have some maths. We haven't solved all of physics. We don't even know if solving all of physics will help us model intelligence. We have no way to know whether, even if we had an accurate model of the function of the brain and of our intelligence, we would be able to run it as a program, and on an actual computer.
We know so little about what intelligence is and the dead certainty that, because we have maths, we should be able to reproduce it is just as unfounded as the opposite assumption, championed by the article.