I don’t think there’s anything magical about consciousness that can’t be modelled and executed on a computer. I’m just saying that current approaches to AI are inherently limited because they’re not based on symbolic logic.

A neural network gets tuned based on some input data, and it has no understanding what that data represents. It’s just a bunch of numbers without any context. All it can do is to say that a particular numeric input matches one of the inputs its been trained on previously within a certain confidence interval.

On the other hand, the neural network in the brain evolved to represent the physical environment, and that’s the shared context we have when we interact with one another. Our language relies on a lot of shared context based on this.

And I think that in order to make AI that has human style intelligence we have to train it within the context of a physical environment that it learns to interact with to create this share context that we can relate to.