1.7 Five Key Words 9 a dramatic way to carry out some of its cognitive processes (a hypothesis for which there is no current evidence), this doesn’t imply that these quantum phenomena are necessary in order to carry out the given cognitive processes. For example there is evidence that birds use quantum nonlocal phenomena to carry out navigation based on the Earth’s magnetic fields [GRM~ 11]; yet scientists have built instruments that carry out the same functions without using any special quantum effects. The importance of quantum phenomena in biology (except via their obvious role in giving rise to biological phenomena describable via classical physics) remains a subject of debate [AGBD* 08]. Quantum “magic” aside, it is also conceivable that building AGI is fundamentally impossible for some other reason we don’t understand. Without getting religious about it, it is rationally quite possible that some aspects of the universe are beyond the scope of scientific methods. Science is fundamentally about recognizing patterns in finite sets of bits (e.g. finite sets of finite-precision observations), whereas mathematics recognizes many sets much larger than this. Selmer Bringsjord [BZ03], and other advocates of “hypercomputing” approaches to intelligence, argue that the human mind depends on massively large infinite sets and therefore can never be simulated on digital computers nor understood via finite sets of finite-precision measurements such as science deals with. But again, while this sort of possibility is interesting to speculate about, there’s no real reason to believe it at this time. Brain science and AI are both very young sciences and the “working hypothesis” that digital computers can manifest advanced AGI has hardly been explored at all yet, relative to what will be possible in the next decades as computers get more and more powerful and our understanding of neuroscience and cognitive science gets more and more complete. The CogPrime AGI design presented he