Anti-cognitivst curmudgeon David Gelernter has a sustained critique of digital AI in Technology Review:

I believe it is hugely unlikely, though not impossible, that a conscious mind will ever be built out of software. Even if it could be, the result (I will argue) would be fairly useless in itself. But an unconscious simulated intelligence certainly could be built out of software--and might be useful. Unfortunately, AI, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind are nowhere near knowing how to build one. They are missing the most important fact about thought: the "cognitive continuum" that connects the seemingly unconnected puzzle pieces of thinking (for example analytical thought, common sense, analogical thought, free association, creativity, hallucination). The cognitive continuum explains how all these reflect different values of one quantity or parameter that I will call "mental focus" or "concentration"--which changes over the course of a day and a lifetime. Without this cognitive continuum, AI has no comprehensive view of thought: it tends to ignore some thought modes (such as free association and dreaming), is uncertain how to integrate emotion and thought, and has made strikingly little progress in understanding analogies--which seem to underlie creativity.

As a matter of sensibility and of theory, this strongly echoes Peirce's insistence on metaphysical continuity. As a matter of sensibility, because it seems very hard to get a coherent theory of experience and learning if one emphasizes discontinuity. As a matter of theory, Peirce emphasizes at least two kinds of continuity. The first is the continuity between subject and object, or rather the incoherence of those categories because they are continuous with each other. The second one - and the more relevant for this discussion - is Peirce's emphasis on the continuity of semiosis - thought emerges as (is?) the qualia of firstness and the recalcitrance of secondness mediated by the interpretative role of thirdness. Inversely, the problems that AI is having - if they genuinely turn out to be a result of discontinuity - would seem to bear powerful testament to the entirety of the tightly-knit Peircean architectonic.

In Peircean terms, Gelernter's argument is that AI can't seem to link thirdness - consciousness - to firstness - immediate sensations of properties. This is why AIs fail with analogies. When humans encounter an analogy, we are "struck" by the similarity between the two things being compared. It hits us in firstness as well as thirdness. But when an AI encounters an analogy, it tries to work on the whole thing cognitively in the register of thirdness. This strategy has been failing for decades - so much so that it's tempting to take it as a rebuke of Searle's "metaphoricity is determinative" approach. After the jump, the limits - or, more properly, requirements - that a Peircean approach suggests for any project that seeks to build a conscious AI..