Humans mostly do this through analogy. If you tell me that you didn’t read my column, and I tell you I don’t care because I didn’t want you to read it anyway, you’re going to think, “That guy is just bloated with sour grapes.” You have this category in your head, “sour grapes.” You’re comparing my behavior with all the other behaviors you’ve witnessed. I match the sour grapes category. You’ve derived an essence to explain my emotional state.

Two years ago, Hofstadter says, A.I. could not reliably perform this kind of thinking. But now it is performing this kind of thinking all the time. And if it can perform these tasks in ways that make sense, Hofstadter says, then how can we say it lacks understanding, or that it’s not thinking?

And if A.I. can do all this kind of thinking, Hofstadter concludes, then it is developing consciousness. He has long argued that consciousness comes in degrees and that if there’s thinking, there’s consciousness. A bee has one level of consciousness, a dog a higher level, an infant a higher level, and an adult a higher level still. “We’re approaching the stage when we’re going to have a hard time saying that this machine is totally unconscious. We’re going to have to grant it some degree of consciousness, some degree of aliveness,” he says.

Normally, when tech executives tell me A.I. will soon achieve general, human level intelligence, I silently think to myself: “This person may know tech, but he doesn’t really know human intelligence. He doesn’t understand how complex, vast and deep the human mind really is.”

But Hofstadter does understand the human mind — as well as anybody. He’s a humanist down to his bones, with a reverence for the mystery of human consciousness, who has written movingly about love and the deep interpenetration of souls. So his words carry weight. They shook me.

But so far he has not fully converted me. I still see these things as inanimate tools. On our call I tried to briefly counter Hofstadter by arguing that the bots are not really thinking; they’re just piggybacking on human thought. Starting as babies, we humans begin to build models of the world, and those models are informed by hard experiences and joyful experiences, emotional loss and delight, moral triumphs and moral failures — the mess of human life. A lot of the ensuing wisdom is stored deep in the unconscious recesses of our minds, but some of it is turned into language.

A.I. is capable of synthesizing these linguistic expressions, which humans have put on the internet and, thus, into its training base. But, I’d still argue, the machine is not having anything like a human learning experience. It’s playing on the surface with language, but the emotion-drenched process of learning from actual experience and the hard-earned accumulation of what we call wisdom are absent.