SneerClub

I'll gladly endorse most of what the author is saying.

This isn't really a debate club, and I'm not really trying to change your mind. I will just end on a note that:

I’ll start with the topline findings, as it were: I think the idea of a so-called “Artificial General Intelligence” is a pipe dream that does not realistically or plausibly extend from any currently existent computer technology. Indeed, my strong suspicion AGI is wholly impossible for computers as we presently understand them.

Neither the author nor me really suggest that it is impossible for machines to think (indeed humans are biological machines), only that it is likely—nothing so stark as inherently—that Turing Machines cannot. "Computable" in the essay means something specific.

Simulation != Simulacrum.

And because I can't resist, I'll just clarify that when I said:

Even if you (or anyone) can’t design a statistical test that can detect the difference of a sequence of heads or tails, doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist.

It means that the test does (or can possibly) exist that, it's just not achievable by humans. [Although I will also note that for methods that don't rely on measuring the physical world (pseudo random-number generators) the tests designed by humans a more than adequate to discriminate the generated list from the real thing.]