yeah perhaps I drew him into this one, but "innate quality of human organic compounds" seemed like a bit of human elitism to me. To which I say "hey buddy, just because we are (apparently) the most dominant species on the planet (which I also am not too certain I agree with), doesn't mean we are the end all be all, or worse, somehow different than all the animalia we happen to try to place ourselves "above" or something. Trust me, when humans wear out their welcome here (which seems to be coming with great alacrity with regard to cosmic timescales), the insects will be more than happy to eat our corpses and continue on happily without us. We are adaptable, but not THE MOST adaptable organism on the planet. And regarding the philosophical position business, I also call bollocks, as there was not one rational argument presented to back his premise regarding the "innate quality of organic human compounds". Is the human neuron somehow magically different than a chimp's neuron? Methinks not, i.e. it is particularly unsound to somehow make our molecules different than any other organisms molecules simply because we are human.

No, human intelligence is an emergent quality, and I fathom that even our massive representations of humanity's information (akin to what Google is compiling) will soon begin to exhibit interesting qualities of its own once it becomes complex enough to exhibit perhaps interesting, unanticipated emergent qualities (in fact, if it didn't I would be absolutely shocked). Many strange and unpredictable (or at the very least unanticipated) things arise from even the simplest of "complex systems" (Conway's game of life and some of Wolfram's automata), much less the wonderful systems detailed by our individual neural mappings and our individual genomes. (q.v. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergent_behavior)

People always think that some human will "write" an AI like HAL or the like, but it is much more likely that nature will roll its own AI once we have made a comfy enough nest for it to germinate. After all, isn't that how we got here? (from an evolutionary biologists standpoint anyhow...)

And again, sorry for being contentious. I just despise the "religious" argument (even if there is no "named religion" being expounded... Let's keep Ockham's Razor at the ready here....)