Daemon

Try putting the essence of it in a few sentences.

I read some of it when it first appeared, I looked again at it now, it's incoherent.

Hi GrahamJ. That does seem to be a widely held belief, but I think it is a misunderstanding, in fact I feel I know it is a mistake, with almost a math...

Could you say more about why you distinguish emotions from the other aspects of experience? Could you give some examples of thoughts with no emotional...

Isn't sound equivalent to colour here? Sound involves your eardrums and your brain.

I don't understand why you are telling me that, as if it was a point against me. I don't understand why you are asking me that.

Two experiencing entities. But I don't really think the effects of cutting the corpus callosum are as straightforward as they are sometimes portrayed,...

You're correct to point out that I ignored your discussion of AHS etc, apologies. I ignored it because it doesn't stand up, but I should have explaine...

I've looked at this many times, and thought about it, but I just can't see why you think it is significant. Why do you think being tolerant against th...

What I've noticed is, if you ask two Buddhists any challenging question about their religion, you get four or more contradictory answers.

I'd like to join in. David Mitchell on "Passion": https://youtu.be/Bz2-49q6DOI

I used to work as an accident investigator, it was striking how often people talked about common sense (and the lack of it) after accidents. I began t...

I've been talking about this in the discussion on "understanding". I believe what you need to correctly interpret what others say is not so much commo...

Thanks for the thoughtful and thought-provoking response InPitzotl. That's broadly what I meant when I said that it's experience that makes you an ind...

Because you're an experiencing being you know what "want" means. Like the cat you know what it feels like to want food, or attention. This is the Phil...

Google "Jennifer Aniston cells". And here's a related discussion: https://jeffbowers.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/blog/grandmother-cells/

The cat wants something. The robot is not capable of wanting. The heat seeking missile is not capable of wanting.

You're wrong because the robot doesn't have a goal. We have a goal, for the robot.

But a robot buying bananas is?

But where do the goals come from, if not from "mere thought"?

What I really mean is that it didn't interact with anything in the way we interact with things. It doesn't see, feel, hear, smell or taste bananas, an...

It might be better to take a clearer case, as you drinking the coffee is agentive, which muddies the water a little. So we'll ask "why is it agentive ...

That isn't a difficult question. Only conscious entities can be agentive, but not everything conscious entities do is agentive.

But neither does a robot. I'm talking about acting as an agent. That's something computers and robots can't do, because they aren't agents. We don't t...

Yes. The Stanford Encyclopedia says that the Turing Test was initially suggested as a means to determine whether a machine can think. But we know how ...

You seem to be contradicting yourself. The other day you had a robot understanding things, now you say a computer doesn't know what a banana is. I've ...

I thought some examples of Gricean Implicature might amusingly illustrate what computers can't understand (and why): A: I broke a finger yesterday. Im...

That's interesting, because from what I've gathered, there's a great deal of disagreement about what he means, among those who have really familiarise...

What you've set out here is just one side of the disagreement about Mary's Room, but I am suggesting that not just red but everything you have learned...

Mary's deficit in the room is only that she hasn't seen red. Apart from that she is a normal experiencing human being. A computer doesn't experience a...

Researchers have compared the results of machine translation to a jar of cookies, only 5% of which are poisoned. Computers can make an amazingly good ...

I wrote this above: My suggestion is that understanding something means relating it correctly to the world, which you know and can know only through e...

A robot is not an individual, an entity, an agent, a person. To say that a robot is shopping is a category error. Of course in everyday conversation w...

to I don't really see what you're getting at here. I'm not saying you need to experience pain to understand shopping. You need to experience pain to u...

I am not saying that experience is the explanation for understanding, I am saying that it is necessary for understanding. To understand what "pain" me...

I can understand what you're saying, but it is quite wrong. When you experience through your senses you see, feel and hear. A computer does not see, f...

You can redefine "understanding" in such a way that it is something a robot or a computer can do, but the "understanding" I am talking about is still ...

We're not trying to explain how you get bananas, we're trying to explain understanding.

Thank you, that is interesting, but it is definitely not what I am saying. My suggestion is that understanding something means relating it correctly t...

I guess, if you were confused by the same thing today as you were yesterday, you could say "I'm feeling the same confusion as I felt yesterday".

As I emphasised in the OP, experience is the crucial element the computer lacks, that's the reason it can't understand. The same applies to robots. Bu...

I shouldn't be having to say this stuff. It feels like you are all suffering from a sort of mass delusion.

A robot does not "encounter" things any more than a PC does. When we encounter something, we experience it, we see it, feel it, hear it. A robot does ...

There's no significant difference.

In the case of a computer, it isn't just that we know how it was constructed and how it behaves, the point is that we know it is not using understandi...

Just for clarity, the part from "Critics hold" onwards is the SEP and not Searle. The evidence we have that humans understand is not the same as the e...

Say something interesting ffs.

Your use of the metaphor wasn't very helpful. We don't reach understanding in the way the fly gets out of the bottle.

I think he knew already.

Because understanding can't take place without an entity which understands.