[ithkuil]

"the experience of a beautiful sinset is just the firing of a million of neurons in a specific pattern, nothing more."

There are emergent properties of programming, the craft, that you need to master if you want to navigate the next levels of complexity. Just reasoning about sequences of state transition is going to be I'll suited for many occasions, even if technically that's all you need to model everything.

[amw-zero]

Sure but the purpose of software is to build a program that works correctly. We're not building sunsets.

[ithkuil]

I didn't say sunset, I said the process of experiencing a sunset. Building an AI that can reach that level of complexity is certainly an engineering problem and under the hood it can be modeled by state transition somewhere deep in the mechanism, but you won't get there and implement a human-level intelligence if you deliberately avoid higher level abstractions.