I never said it’s directly like an Ilm. That’s a very specific form. The brain has many different structures - and the neural interconnections we can map have been shown to be a form of convolution in much the same way that many ai systems use (not by coincidence). Scientists generally avoid metaphysics like subjects of consciousness because it’s inherently unprovable. We can look at the results of processing/thought and quantify the complexity and accuracy. We do this for children at various ages and can see how they learn to think in increasing complexity. We can do this for ai systems too. The leaps that we’ve seen over the last few years as computational power of computers has reached some threshold, show emergent abilities that only a decade ago were thought to be impossible. Since we can never know anyone else’s experience, we can only go on input/output. And so if it looks like intelligence, then it is intelligence. Then the concept of ‘thought’ in this context is only semantics. There is, so far, nothing to suggest that magic is needed for our brains to think; it’s just a physical process - so as we add more complexity and different structures to ai systems, there’s no reason to think we can’t make them do the same as our brains, or more.