The Ghost in the Machine is Just Looking for a Bathroom
Our animal brilliance embarrasses us. Deep down, we know that the entire human project - the symphonies, the tensor calculus, the Large Hadron Collider - is an absurdly over-engineered solution to mitigate the same four-note chord of appetite that preoccupies a squirrel: eat, mate, not-die, sleep. That cosmic thrift insults our elaborate costume rack. So we insist the costume must be the cause, not the consequence, and postulate a ghost big enough to justify the stage lights. The search for Artificial General Intelligence, then, is not a quest for the future; it's a reverse-engineered alibi for the past. We look at the cathedral, the smartphone, the Sistine Chapel, and tell ourselves a comforting lie: “Impossible. Impossible that a dumb, sweating, farting mammal did all this just to scratch an itch. Therefore, the mammal must harbour a shard of eternity.” In short, we export our grandest artefacts, then re-import them as proof of a divine essence. It's a circular receipt that...
