I wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;t useful for low-level tasks like vision or walking, so other approaches are needed to complement it.<p>&gt; but we&#x27;re past the point of just manipulating empty symbols.<p>We&#x27;ve now reached the point where we can manipulate large matrices containing floating point numbers.   I don&#x27;t see how this makes systems any more conscious.