[DonaldFisk]

I wouldn't be so critical of GOFAI. Much high-level reasoning either does or can involve symbol manipulation. There are some impressive systems, such as Cyc, which do precisely that. It isn't useful for low-level tasks like vision or walking, so other approaches are needed to complement it.

> but we're past the point of just manipulating empty symbols.

We've now reached the point where we can manipulate large matrices containing floating point numbers. I don't see how this makes systems any more conscious.