[simonh]

Sure, and that’s why I say I don’t accept the assumptions in any of these arguments. The examples you give - imagination, thinking new thoughts. It seems to me these are how we construct and transform the models of reality and behaviour that our minds process.

I see no reason why a computer system could not, in principle, generate new models of systems or behaviour and transform them, iterate on them, etc. maybe that’s imagination, or even innovation. Maybe consciousness is processing a model of oneself.

You say computers cannot do these things. I say they simply don’t do them yet, but I see no reason to assume that they cannot in principle.

In fact maybe they can do some of these things at a primitive level. GPT3 can do basic arithmetic, so clearly it has generated a model of arithmetic. Now it can even run code. So it can produce models but probably not mutate, or merge, or perform other higher level processing on them the way we can. Baby steps for sure.