That would be quite an extraordinary claim that requires equally extraordinary evidence.
What we do know at this point is that no amount of "just chemistry" has ever managed to create even the most rudimentary form of "life" from inert chemicals.
And the only working models we have for "intelligence" at this point are inextricably bound to life.
If not, then the history of science strongly suggests we can eventually learn the mechanisms of life and intelligence and then find a way to imperfectly yet sufficiently reimplement them.
No. I am simply suggesting that creating life (and intelligence) from inert materals may involve more than "just chemistry". In the same way that lead can not be turned into gold by "just chemistry".
I welcome knowledge and proof to the contrary but thus far, there is none.
Perhaps to truly understand life we need to look deeply at physics, geology, fluid dynamics, and many other specialized fields, in addition to chemistry. And maybe we will need some new discoveries in these areas than have not yet been made. Is that all?
I don’t think there is really much contention between that and the idea that life is “just chemistry”. I would bet most people saying that are totally fine with what I wrote above and are likely just trying to be concise with their words.
Unless you mean more than you are plainly saying, this seems like splitting hairs about the taxonomy of scientific understanding. Understanding is understanding, regardless of how you categorize it.
Much of our progress in medicine, science, and technology has been made due to the idea that the world around operates in an orderly fashion and can be investigated and understood.
The ultimate proof is actually doing it. Start with nothing but inert materials and produce a new, unique form of living organism using "just chemistry".
I'm not saying it can't be done, I am saying that thus far, it hasn't been done. And the reason it hasn't been done might be because "just chemistry" is an overly simplistic description of what is needed to actually achieve it.
But feel free to prove me wrong.
EDIT: some grammar
I am happy to admit that doing a good job of differentiating is tricky business indeed, and that we all make many blatant errors and are prone to developing distorted ways of seeing things.
Nonetheless, I do believe that humanity has acquired some real understanding of the world and will continue to do so.
Keep in mind that no amount of rocketeering has ever put a man on Mars, but that hardly constitutes a proof, or even serious evidence, that it is impossible.
Arguments from ignorance are a terrible thing.
The fact that it has not been done with "just chemistry" is no proof but it does tend to skew the probabilities toward the view that substantially more may be required.
One would think that the synthesis of urea back in 1828 would at least weaken this argument, but hey...
That claim has roughly the same epistemological status as Last Thursdayism ("the world was created last Thursday in a state where we have memories and see evidence of past events but those events aren't actually real.").
> What we do know at this point is that no amount of "just chemistry" has ever managed to create even the most rudimentary form of "life" from inert chemicals.
How do we know that? Are you just talking about humans practicing chemistry?
For example, how transfer of functions emerges after hemispherectomy (half a brain is removed), to best of my understanding is unknown.
(There are a few more technicalities which amount to forcing the simulator to solve an uncomputable puzzle before we tell them the laws. Let M be a turning machine that whose halting behaviour is undecidable. Even a spin-1/2 system might be "uncomputable" if all I tell you is that its Hamiltonian is (1 0; 0 1) if M halts and (1 0; 0 2) otherwise. Since a spin-1/2 system is one of the most blatantly computable things out there, this objection doesn't have much force.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing%E2%80%93...
Actually it's not uncommon for AI "sceptics" (the sort of people who write these articles not just people who suspect we'll have another AI Winter) to just not accept Church-Turing at all, or to insist upon squinting at it in a peculiar way that renders it tautological.
I'm consistently disappointed that people who feel they're quite sure general AI isn't possible mostly have bad intuitions about Computer Science. Twice so far I've been recommended books by sceptics "which will show you why you're wrong" and been disappointed with the poor quality of argument deployed which sometimes is little more than a show of incredulity or a resort to mysterious dualism.
A more robust attempt at this sort of argument was put up by Stevan Harnad, who taught an undergraduate class I sat in on many years ago now (one of the privileges of a post-graduate is that they're entitled to attend relevant undergraduate lectures and so I did). Harnad thinks† you need to build a robot because the intelligence will need some means to experience the universe for itself. But Harnad doesn't disbelieve that general AI is in principle possible, he just thinks our present methods can't get there.
† In general with people who've made a career of such thing they are very careful with words, and so I have doubtless mis-characterized (or even misunderstood) the details and you should blame me for that not Stevan.