The interesting thing about minds is that they are able to produce interesting conjunctions of and inferences from, seemingly unrelated data/experiences. Minds appear to be more than the sum of their experiences. This ability appears to defy the best efforts of coders to parallel.

EDIT: This got voted down, perhaps because of the above: it may be worth me stating that I am not posing a 'mysterious question' - the key words are 'appears to' - in other words, this is an aspect which needs significant further work..

I consider almost all code 'banal', in that almost all code 'performs little computation of interest'. Pavitra clearly distinguishes between 'interest' and 'value'.

Surely one way of looking at AI research is that it is an attempt to produce code that is not banal?