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What is the question you want to ask? I think this is a bigger question than it presents here. We don't really know what is thoughts actually, what is the actual representation of it. If we don't even know what we trying to study, the conclusion might be pretty useless.

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Another example: we ask whether animals are 'conscious' or not, or we declare ex cathedra that certain animals are conscious, all the while without being able to explain what consciousness is, or what qualia are, or how these work.

If we could then we'd know if the question made sense.

I like David Deutsch's criterion for assessing claims about these issues: if you can't program it, you haven't understood it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J21QuHrIqXg

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