Yes, and to future generations, denying that possibility will probably seem as silly as Lord Kelvin’s infamous statement about the impossibility of heavier than air flight seems to us now. I mean, did that man just never see birds?
Computers are perfectly capable of originality even now. Just think of genetic algorithms’ ability to find novel solutions to appropriately posed problems through self-selection, or think of computer-composed music, or hell, think of the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush, which reportedly was designed by one of Stephen Thaler’s Creativity Machines…
So could your brain, though, falsely reporting its own sentience to itself. Yes, that’s circular, but not any more vicious than, say, a river carving its own bed, which in turn directs its flow, or the gravitational field being a source of the gravitational field.
Just think of a p-zombie computer, a zombot, that outwardly has all the capacities of a human being, i.e. it would pass any test for consciousness you might confront it with, provided a human can, too. Now add a second zombot, and have the first zombot examine it for consciousness – which it of course can do as well as any human. Naturally, the first zombot will judge the second one conscious.
But now, just connect the first zombot’s output to its input, and have it examine itself for consciousness – what’s gonna happen? Well, since as a zombot, it is able to perfectly pass any test for consciousness, it will obviously judge itself to be conscious. And in the end, that’s all you’re doing, too – judging yourself conscious. You can model the process of introspection as asking yourself questions about being conscious; the mental content you experience is generated by and represented as the set of answers to these questions.
So, in fact, if you can build a zombot, you can build a ‘truly’ conscious computer just as well; or at least, something that’ll believe itself to be one. And in the mind, what you believe is what is: you can’t merely believe to experience, say, a headache, for that belief is indistinguishable from the experience.
I may have to steal that line at some point…