It is the feelings and emotions, which originated and dwell in that biological terrain, that are constitutive of human intelligence, consciousness and the capacity for cultural creation. In short, a map of the computational mind is not the territory of what it means to be human.
Our minds operate in two registers. In one register, we deal with perception, movement, memories, reasoning, verbal languages and mathematical languages. This register needs to be precise and can be easily described in computational terms.
This is the world of synaptic signals that is well captured by AI and robotics.
But there is a second register, that pertains to emotions and feelings that describes the state of life in our living body and that does not lend itself easily to a computational account.
Current AI and robotics do not address this second register.
Bacteria can be very intelligent, but they don’t know what they are doing, the great moment of development of consciousness is the moment creatures started having feelings. Minds are not made by nervous systems alone but rather by nervous systems in cooperation with many other and far older living systems of our body, including metabolic, endocrine, immune and circulatory systems.
Nervous systems are late-comers in evolution. They are useful servants of the older life systems.
Nervous systems have declared a considerable degree of independence relative to the older systems they serve but they are by no means free of those older systems. They do not stand alone. Unfortunately, conventional conceptions of mind are based on the idea that nervous systems make minds by themselves.