Okay, it's a magical god-given treasure, which is as good a definition as any in this context, which illustrates the problem. When most talk about general AI, w

Okay, it's a magical god-given treasure, which is as good a definition as any in this context, which illustrates the problem. When most talk about general AI, what they talk about is artificial consciousness. That's fair enough, but you can't build what you don't understand. If someone says general AI is possible because consciousness is not a magical god-given treasure, I'm allowed to ask what is is instead. That would give me a model to at least see how someone would approach it, something to falsify against. General AI is to current AI what flying saucers are to airplanes: if you look at the latter it's easy to envision the former, and seeing the technological advances it seems inevitable. On closer inspection though, a whole new sets of concepts--some very improbably--are needed. Flying saucers would need some gravity cancellation property. Not impossible by itself, but far from a natural evolution of aircraft. By analogy, general AI would need a workable model of consciousness. Again, not impossible by itself, but also not a natural consequence of current advances in the field of AI.