I'm not entirely convinced that its even possible, in principle, to program a being that could have an imagination. The author's contention is that it is, but only if we can develop the philosophical framework to decide what it means to have a creative thought, and thus the programmer might have a guide. I don't necessarily think he's wrong, but I think its incomplete for two main reasons. Firstly, consciousness isn't a function of a brain, but of an organism; your kidney, liver and heart all fundamentally contribute to your imagination. A disembodied brain is essentially a useless lump of matter. And secondly, if it even makes sense to compare computers and brains, then a brain is much more like an analog computer (though some neuronal outputs have a binary component), and I wonder whether digital logic can ever replicate its subtleties. The quantum suggestion is just silly. Penrose is famous. If he weren't, that suggestion would have been laughed off years ago. Quantum coherence certainly cannot exist at the temperatures and with the complexity of a body.
He lost me when he used "universality" to say this: That's the basis of the buildup to his main argument (philosophical framework). It seems flimsy. Maybe because I barely have a working knowledge of AI sufficient enough to understand this article. Anyway, the reason I liked his point about chess so much was because every approach to building AI, to depicting AI in film or literature, always starts and ends by metaphorically copying the brain. I feel that this may be impossible, but that there are other avenues to creating artificial intelligence.And yet ‘originating things’, ‘following analysis’, and ‘anticipating analytical relations and truths’ are all behaviours of brains and, therefore, of the atoms of which brains are composed.