Yes, I realize that the phrase "difficult to imagine" is fun to pounce on. There's a big difference between "flight" and "general intelligence"; namely that the

Yes, I realize that the phrase "difficult to imagine" is fun to pounce on. There's a big difference between "flight" and "general intelligence"; namely that the former is like Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography and the latter is... not. Anyways, maybe what I'm suggesting is that if you can point to something and say "that is a (artificial?) general intelligence", then I suspect you will also feel compelled to say "that is (artificial?) life". Definitely wandering off into the weeds here, but why not: I see evolution as a computational problem. In its most primitive, there is no computer, but any specific problem can still be solved with luck and memory. If you have a structure that recognizes a solution, then you just wait until you randomly bump into it. The challenges of evolution in a given environment are specific to that environment, and thus memory without a computer can go a really, really long way. If human intelligence is general intelligence, it is still the logical progression of this chain of memory and (later on) compute operations. I can reason about the abstraction of general intelligence, but it feels like any concrete general intelligence will proceed through essentially the same steps. The general intelligence must reside in a concrete existence, and whatever form this takes I feel very strongly that it will be recognizable as what we call "life".