I don't get this line of thinking. AGI already exists - it's in our heads!
So then the question is: is what's in our heads magic, or can we build it? If you think it's magic, fine - no point arguing. But if not, we will build it one day.
We can't really talk too much about the differences between the intelligence of a dog and the intelligence of a human; in real terms. It seems as though humans might have more connections, different types of cells but then again; there's species out there that also have types of neurons we don't have and more dense regions in areas of the brain than we do.
And on top of that, dive into a single neuron and you will find a world of complexity. The reason why a neuron might fire or not given a stimuli is an extremely complicated and often stochastic process; that's actually one of the reasons why we use non-linearities in the neural networks we create. But how nuance are we really capturing?
The reason we do mathematics the way we do has well studied neurological patterns, we come out of the box with understandings of the world. And many animals do, actually, similar neurological patterns are found in different species.
It's incredible to think of the precision and the complexity of the tasks a fly undertakes during their life, and we actually have mapped the entire brain (if we can call it that, i would) of a fly. Every neuron and every connection the fly has. There's experiments done with neural networks where we've tried to imitate these (the brain of a fly has less parameters [number of nodes and edges] than modern LLMs) with very interesting results. But can we say we understand them? Not really.
And finally, I want to bring up something that's not usually considered when it comes to these things but there's a lot of processes at the molecular level in our cells that actually make use of quantum mechanics, there's a whole field of biology that's dedicated to studying these processes. So yeah, I mean, maybe we can build it but first we need to understand what's going on and why, I believe.
> Mitochondria have been demonstrated to utilize quantum tunneling in their function as the powerhouse of eukaryotic cells.
It is less magic, just insanely complicated. We therefore very well might not build it one day. Your claim we would solve it one day is not obvious and needs solid evidence. Some cryptographic problems require millions of years of compute to solve, why cant it be the case that AGI requires petayears of compute? A billion fold increase in compute still won't do it, hence, maybe not ever. 4 billion years and a trillion fold increase in compute might not be enough. (Assuming we have that long. Dawkins was most concerned about humanity surviving the next 500 years.)
Humans aren’t built by humans? Where do humans come from, then?
They say the kids aren’t having sex anymore, but I didn’t realize it was because they aren’t aware of the function.