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This makes no sense.

If you believe in eg a mind or soul then maybe it's possible we cannot make AGI.

But if we are purely biological then obviously it's possible to replicate that in principle.

That doesn’t contradict what they said. We may one day design a biological computing system that is capable of it. We don’t entirely understand how neurons work; it’s reasonable to posit that the differences that many AGI boosters assert don’t matter do matter— just not in ways we’ve discovered yet.

I mentioned this in another thread, but I do wonder if we engineer a sort of biological computer, will it really be a computer at all, and not a new kind of life itself?

> not a new kind of life itself?

In my opinion, this is more a philosophical question than an engineering one. Is something alive because it’s conscious? Is it alive because it’s intelligent? Is a virus alive, or a bacteria, or an LLM?

Beats me.

Maybe — though we’d still have engineered it, which is the point I was trying to make.

We understand how neurons work to quite a bit of detail.

The Allen Institute doesn’t seem to think so. We don’t even know how the brain of a roundworm ticks and it’s only got 302 neurons— all of which are mapped, along with their connections.

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