There are plenty of people that argue that you need nontechnological pixi dust for intelligence.

Yes, quite unfortunately. That reeks to me of wishful thinking.

Maybe that was a sensible thing to think in 1926, when the closest things we had to "an artificial replica of human intelligence" was the automatic telephone exchange and the mechanical adding machine. But knowledge and technology both have advanced since.

Now, we're in 2026, and the list of "things that humans can do but machines can't" has grown quite thin. "Human brain is doing something truly magical" is quite hard to justify on technical merits, and it's the emotional value that makes the idea linger.

There are also people who think there might be emergent behavior at play that would require extremely high fidelity simulation to achieve.

Also, the real thing (intelligence) as it is currently in operation isn't that well understood