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Sure. But the existence of a mountain peak does not imply that you can walk up there in shorts and flipflops. The origin of intelligence (and consciousness) in the brain are unclear. We know how many neurons are in a human brain, but we don't know if a neuron is the fundamental unit of cogitation. It might well be the case that Von Neumann level intelligence require simulating his brain in full fidelity. Even granting that such a thing is possible in theory, it is decidedly unclear that simulating the 10^26 atoms of his brain is practical.
I dunno, I think between the various biological sciences we can fully account for almost all of our cognitive processes. Or, I read a book that claimed about as much.
Its also unclear if that's necessary. I believe it would be sufficient, but many, many processes can probably be distilled to algorithms rather than high fidelity simulation.
But again, if we can run Von Neumann's brain on carbon-based hardware, and said hardware is not the most energy-efficient computation we can achieve, we should be able to make a Von-Neumann level intellect with comparable ability, at less energy cost.
The design and architecture of the mind may vary substantially from the human model, but the efficiency of processing inputs would be the same, as observed from the outputs.
Certainly so far we have yet to beat the human brain's (general) intelligence per watt.
I'll chalk up this line of argument as "extending lines on graphs." I don't fully discount it, it's useful as an outside view, but it seems inadequate as an inside view explanation.
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