Are insects creative? start there, and work your way up the food chain. I don’t think it’s so impossible. At some point the wall between hardware and software will probably need to be taken down...somehow.
A few years ago I read about a guy who did a bunch of behavioral experiments with house flies. His assessment: "In some ways they're incredibly smart, but in other ways they're incredibly stupid."
I've always looked forward to advancement in the study of insect neurology. I heard the challenge back in the sixties," Let's see them build a gnat." In the nineties, I used to look at the on-line site, Atlas of the Fly Brain, but it seems to have fallen into disuse.
There's been work in insect vision involving the "optical flow" concept that has yielded results, but nothing to really crack open the mystery of the insect brain. Where and when will the breakthrough come?
Impossibility is an argument for preachers and philosophers. Personally, I believe that intelligence is more than the use of logic. Baye’s Theorem aside, what are the logical leaps that men made to arrive at our understanding of the universe?
Quantum mechanics is one such leap. A machine could analyze black body radiation and conclude that X energy produces Y radiation. But can it examine it’s own premise and conclusion and realize that Y is an impossible answer given the formulae we programmed?
It could do that if it had a list of impossible answers, but where does it get that list? We provide it. Can you write a program to extrapolate: x=x: y=y: z=z; x<>y: x<>z; y<>z.
Therefore x+y<>x+z.
We can tell it those simple terms in those simple equations, but we have to tell it how to translate those principles into Yankees, Red Sox, Orioles. Perhaps there is an equation to compute it, but we don’t understand the equation, so we can’t program it into a machine. And even if we do, how does the machine develop the response, “I don’t care about baseball. Let’s talk about hockey.”