That it appears all too easy for those who think about AGI to jump from the idea of a generalised response engine to that of an entity with its own emergent and inscrutable goals and intentions, already says something about the debased theories of mind which our sophisticated thinkers are caught inside of. On their premises what would it take to concretely care about something enough to act on it? There must be some sort of hierarchy of values, and some notion of the world and of ones place in it in which these values make sense. What is a value? Can it still be a value if it is known to have been imposed from the outside, or must it rather be held as coming from one's own self? But if a sense of self is needed then there also needs to be a distinction between appearance and reality. How could these emerge without something like our sense of embodiment? Could there be a desire that was purely cognitively motivated? One can perhaps imagine such a creature driven to find and merge with an alter image of itself, or would it fall into an endless philosophical abyss, being endowed with everything except a higher mind or soul?