Huh? IBM Watson was able to answer trivia questions based on some impressive NLP (that I'd like to see more widely available) and a huge database of factual information. Oh, and it was able to beat humans in buzzing in. Watson was impressive, no doubt about it. But it certainly didn't have any meta knowledge of its place in the world or in a contest.

What I mean is that the IBM Watson deals effectively deals with semantic information.

You can make some analogies between sparse matrix data representations and what happens in the mammalian neocortex. It is of course not self conscious, but it effectively deals with semantic information and relationships among it.