> If you’ve watched as many David Attenborough-narrated nature documentaries as I have or follow Nature is Metal, you know that many non-human animals spend their entire existence merely surviving.
First a not so nice response:
Humans also spend their entire existence merely surviving. Once they stop doing that we generally don't consider them to be human.
Perhaps a somewhat nicer disagreement:
Lots of animals show some behavior that is not directly related to their immediate survival. Lots of young animals play, they can only do that because they do not have to be concerned with their immediate survival.
What do you think?
No. Various manifestations of mental illness and diseases of the mammal nervous system are deeply linked to the whole body and not just the conscious part of the brain. They were arbitrarily sculpted by evolution and encode a lot of information from the ancestral environment of all ancestors. You can't replicate that by simulating a process of evolution of various AI implementations. The fact that the vagal nerve activation influences facial muscles and human interaction in general is not something you'd expect in what most people think of an AI. And yet it plays a crucial role in mental health.
Would you expect an AI to suffer from ADHD? PTSD? Almost certainly not. Because most of these conditions result from an interactions of brains of different evolutionary ages.
Unless of course you're trying to replicate a mammal nervous system its entirety. But then your goal is not singularity and you're definitely not optimizing for intelligence.