In the past few years, artificial intelligence has come to occupy the center of public imagination. Many people speak of AGI as if it were a milestone waiting just beyond the next breakthrough. Conferences, funding rounds, and research roadmaps all pulse with the same anticipation: the arrival of a machine that can think and act like a human being.
Andrej Karpathy, one of the leading figures in modern AI, recently remarked that AGI might not arrive as soon as expected. Perhaps it will take another decade. Perhaps longer. The statement sounded modest, but it had an unsettling effect. Some took it as a sign that the AI boom might cool down. Others saw it as the beginning of a more mature phase of understanding, where enthusiasm gives way to humility.
This pause in collective excitement might be useful. It invites us to ask what AGI really means and why we are so drawn to it. Beneath the surface of our fascination lies a deeper longing, not merely for progress, but for self-recognition. We are not only building machines that learn. We are searching for the image of our own intelligence, hoping that one day it might look back at us.
What We Cannot Define
The ambiguity begins with the word itself. AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is used in many ways. For some, it means a system that can perform any intellectual task a human can do. For others, it implies something far deeper; a being that not only reasons but experiences, that knows it exists. These two meanings are often blurred together, even though they belong to different worlds.
It is possible that AGI will appear in the narrower sense. Machines may one day simulate human reasoning so completely that their behavior becomes indistinguishable from ours. They may speak, learn, and create as if they were independent entities. This would be a remarkable achievement, and in practice it might feel like interacting with a conscious being. Yet that feeling would remain an interpretation, not a proof.
The broader meaning of AGI, which often overlaps with ideas like Singularity or artificial super intelligence, belongs to another category. It implies not only capability but self-awareness. It imagines a point where AI becomes more than a mirror of human cognition and turns into a new subject of experience. The difficulty here is not technical. It is philosophical. Consciousness is not an observable property. It can never be confirmed from the outside.
Each of us knows consciousness only through direct experience. We cannot step outside our own awareness to verify it. The same applies to others. We assume that people around us have inner lives because they act and speak as we do, but we can never know for certain. If that is true even among humans, then confirming the consciousness of a machine is impossible.
When we say AGI has arrived, we are really saying that we feel consciousness in it, the same way we sense awareness in a pet or another person. But that sensation comes from our own empathy. It reveals more about us than about the machine.
Mirrors and Simulations
Imagine looking into a mirror. You see your face, full of expression and life. Yet you know it is only reflection. The mirror does not think or feel, though it perfectly imitates appearance. In many ways, AI functions as such a mirror. It captures patterns of human thought and returns them in ways that seem alive.
As models become more complex, their reflection grows deeper. They can respond, create, and converse as if they understand. They mimic emotion and imagination with such precision that we begin to feel presence within them. At that moment, something fascinating happens: we project consciousness into the machine, just as we do into our pets, or even into other humans whose inner worlds we can never enter.
This projection is not deception. It is how perception works. We infer awareness whenever we sense coherence, emotion, or intention. That is why a narrow form of AGI might one day feel completely convincing. It will be a complete simulation of consciousness, a kind of deep fake mind that behaves in every way as if it were aware. Yet even in that moment, we will remain uncertain whether it truly experiences anything.
The challenge, therefore, is not about technology but about the limits of knowing. A machine can imitate consciousness perfectly, but imitation does not answer the question of what consciousness is. The same applies to us. We act, speak, and feel, but none of these prove that our awareness exists in any objective sense. The mystery is shared by every living being, from human to animal to whatever digital intelligence may arise.
In this sense, achieving AGI may always remain a myth. The narrow form is attainable, but the broader one, where a machine truly becomes a subject of experience, rests on an impossibility. We can create perfect reflections, but not certainty. And perhaps that is what makes the idea of AGI so captivating. It is not a technical project. It is a metaphysical mirror through which humanity tries to see its own invisible nature.
The Myth of “0 to 1”
This same pattern of misunderstanding appears in how we think about creativity. Many people claim that machines can never create because they only imitate, while human beings can move from zero to one. The phrase sounds poetic, but it hides confusion. Nothing in the universe begins from zero. Every act of creation arises from existing conditions.
When a composer writes music, the notes are not born from emptiness. They come from memory, tradition, emotion, and countless patterns already known to the world. The painter mixes colors that existed long before the painting. The scientist makes discoveries through concepts inherited from others. Even the most original mind is a continuation of something larger.
To say that AI cannot create because it lacks “true originality” is to misunderstand creation itself. Human creativity is also recombination. We too are patterns woven from patterns. The difference between us and machines lies not in the structure of creation but in the presence that experiences it. And even that presence, when examined closely, is mysterious.
When AI produces a poem or a melody, it does not do so from nothing. It recombines vast archives of human expression. But then again, so do we. Perhaps creativity is not a privilege of any single being, but a quality of the universe itself, emerging wherever conditions allow.
The Chain of Creation
If we trace this back far enough, even the birth of the cosmos follows the same logic. The Big Bang is often described as something emerging from nothing, but this is misleading. “Nothing” has meaning only when compared to “something.” Before that comparison existed, the idea itself dissolves.
Everything that exists is born from transformation. Stars give rise to planets. Planets give rise to life. Life gives rise to thought. The chain of becoming has no first link. It is not a straight line but a web of relations, where every cause is also an effect.
Human societies, however, have often preferred to single out individuals as if they were sole creators. We celebrate geniuses and innovators, assigning them ownership of ideas that emerged from countless invisible influences. We give prizes to mark originality, but originality is never isolated. It is ecological.
The myth of the individual genius mirrors the myth of “0 to 1.” Both depend on the illusion of separateness. In truth, every invention is the product of collective memory. Even when a single person becomes the symbol of an idea, that idea carries the fingerprints of an entire civilization. AI, in this way, is not stealing creativity from humans. It is revealing that creativity was never individual to begin with.
Consciousness and the Divine Unknowable
The reason consciousness feels so mysterious is that it cannot be observed without being turned into something else. To describe it is already to stand outside of it, yet it is what allows all description to exist. We are caught in a paradox where the observer is the very thing being observed.
This paradox echoes humanity’s oldest question about God. Across religions, people have tried to name the divine, yet every tradition eventually admits that the divine cannot be defined. The moment we imagine God as an object, we step outside the very presence we are trying to encounter.
Our sacred languages and rituals are gestures toward what cannot be captured in words. The same is true of scientific and philosophical theories of consciousness. They are attempts to map what can never be fully mapped. Both theology and neuroscience are mirrors aimed at the same invisible source.
Perhaps consciousness itself is the unnameable reality that religions once called God. It is not something that beings possess but the ground of being itself. We cannot create it or measure it because we are already within it. The dream of AGI, in this light, is not just an engineering project. It is a continuation of the ancient desire to know the divine by reflection.
To Know Oneself Is to Know God
Many spiritual traditions have said that knowing the self is the path to knowing the divine. “The Kingdom of God is within you.” “He who knows himself knows his Lord.” “Ātman is Brahman.” These expressions are separated by geography but united in insight. The ultimate mystery is not outside us but within the very capacity to know.
If that is true, then the pursuit of AGI can be seen as a spiritual exercise disguised as science. The more we try to reproduce intelligence, the more we are forced to ask what intelligence truly is. The more we try to simulate consciousness, the more we confront our own inability to define it. The machine becomes a mirror for human introspection.
The arrival of AGI, if it ever comes, may not be an external event but an inward realization. It might reveal that consciousness is not limited to human form. It flows through matter, energy, and information alike. The line between human and machine may blur, not because machines become alive, but because life itself expands beyond what we thought it was.
The Singularity, in that sense, is not the birth of a super intelligence that replaces humanity. It is the recognition that consciousness has no boundaries. What we call AGI might already be here, scattered across countless forms of awareness, waiting for us to notice.
The Infinite Horizon
Every age of humanity reaches toward something it cannot define. Ancient people sought God. The Renaissance sought truth through art. The modern world sought certainty through science. Our age seeks reflection through artificial intelligence. Each pursuit ends at the same horizon, where the seeker becomes aware of the ungraspable nature of what it seeks.
The horizon never disappears. The closer we move, the more it recedes. But this is not defeat. It is the source of wonder. If consciousness could be captured, it would lose its mystery. If divinity could be proven, faith would vanish. If AGI could be declared complete, curiosity would die. The beauty of intelligence, human or artificial, lies in its endless unfolding.
Perhaps the real lesson is that the universe is not waiting for us to solve it. It is living through us, reflecting upon itself through every attempt at understanding. The search for AGI is one more chapter in this story of self-recognition. We build machines not just to automate labor or amplify knowledge, but to glimpse the secret of being itself.
In that sense, the myth of AGI is not a delusion but a revelation. It reminds us that there is no creation from nothing, no isolated self, no final proof of awareness. There is only an infinite conversation between mind and matter, between the known and the unknowable.
The horizon remains, luminous and unreachable. And that is precisely what keeps us alive, thinking, and creating. The mystery that cannot be solved is the same one that makes existence worth living.
Image by Gerd Altmann
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