Intelligence is not a single trait but the culmination of a causal chain. The sequence begins with evolution enabling sensing, which necessitates memory. This leads to consciousness and imagination, which finally allows for free will — the sum total of which is intelligence.
Lee Cronin argues that both Newtonian and quantum physics are incomplete because they lack a fundamental concept of causation. This omission is why physics struggles to explain the emergence of complex systems like biology and intelligence, which are inherently causal.
Agency emerges from a continuous interaction with the physical world, a process refined over billions of years of evolution. Current AIs, operating in a discrete digital environment, lack the necessary architecture and causal history to ever develop genuine agency or free will.
While today's computers cannot achieve AGI, it is not theoretically impossible. Creating a generally intelligent system will require a new physical substrate—likely biological or chemical—that can replicate the brain's enormous, dynamic configurational space, which silicon architecture cannot.
Selection is not exclusive to biology. It is a fundamental physical force that acts on matter, favoring configurations that persist over time. This process of 'selfish matter' battling for persistence was happening long before the first cells emerged, making life a natural consequence of physics.
The human brain contains more potential connections than there are atoms in the universe. This immense, dynamic 'configurational space' is the source of its power, not raw processing speed. Silicon chips are fundamentally different and cannot replicate this morphing, high-dimensional architecture.
When AI pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton see agency in an LLM, they are misinterpreting the output. What they are actually witnessing is a compressed, probabilistic reflection of the immense creativity and knowledge from all the humans who created its training data. It's an echo, not a mind.
A more effective way to define life is not by its internal components (like RNA or metabolism) but by its unique capability. Life is any system that can recursively produce many identical copies of highly complex objects, a feat only achievable through evolution.
AI models operate in a 'probability space,' making predictions by interpolating from past data. True human creativity operates in a 'possibility space,' generating novel ideas that have no precedent and cannot be probabilistically calculated. This is why AI can't invent something truly new.
Lee Cronin's Assembly Theory offers a way to find alien life by quantifying molecular complexity. Using mass spectrometry, scientists can search for molecules with a high 'assembly index,' a clear signature that they were constructed by an evolutionary process rather than random chemistry.
A new scientific theory isn't valuable if it only recategorizes what we already know. Its true merit lies in suggesting an outrageous, unique, and testable experiment that no other existing theory could conceive of. Without this, it's just a reframing of old ideas.
The 'P(doom)' argument is nonsensical because it lacks any plausible mechanism for how an AI could spontaneously gain agency and take over. This fear-mongering distracts from the immediate, tangible dangers of AI: mass production of fake data, political manipulation, and mass hysteria.