Are you saying that sometimes intention matters, just not for chairs?
Intention matters for chairs as well. I am saying that all of the circumstances are relevant, and one factor like intention may not completely settle it, but it is one of the factors that determine the matter.
Yes, in this case by "meaningful" I meant, "can be meaningfully extended to robots". I admit that this wasn't clear.
Unquestionably, it can be meaningfully extended to robots. You simply mean the same thing that you mean in the regular case. The only question is whether there is any feeling there, not if "feeling" has a meaning, since we already admitted that it does have a meaning.
Indeed, if it turned out that you did not have a brain or anything equivalent, you would have falsified my theory. Falsification is a good thing.
The possibility of falsification is a good thing for a physical theory. It is a very bad thing for a theory of the meaning of a word. As you already admitted, the fact that the pieces of furniture we normally sit on are called chairs is not subject to falsification, because that is just what is meant by "chair." But a physical theory of a chair, e.g. "chairs are made of atoms," is falsifiable, since someone could examine a chair and discover that it was not made of atoms. He would not then say, "We have discovered that 'chair' meant something different from what we thought." He would say, "We knew what 'chair' meant, and that is unchanged, but we have learned something new about the physical constitution of chairs."
In the same way, I am referring to certain feelings when I talk about "pain." The fact that the word pain refers to those feelings cannot be falsified, because it is just what that word means. But whether pain depends on a brain activity is a falsifiable physical theory; it has nothing to do with the meaning of the word "pain."
Unfortunately for you, you do have a brain.
Assuming that I do, that is fortunate, not unfortunate. But as I was saying, neither you or I know that I do, since neither of us has seen the inside of my head.
Are you going to feel the robot's feeling and compare?
No. The question is not whether the robot has a feeling which feels similar to me as my feeling of pain; the question is whether the robot has a feeling that feels to the robot the same way that my feeling feels to me. And since this has two subjects in it, there is no subject that can feel them both and compare them. And this is just how it is, whether you like it or not, and this is what "pain" refers to, whether you like it or not.
Intention matters for chairs as well. I am saying that all of the circumstances are relevant, and one factor like intention may not completely settle it, but it is one of the factors that determine the matter.
Can you actually support your claim that intention matters? To clarify, I'm suggesting that intention merely correlates with shape, but has no predictive power on its own.
It is a very bad thing for a theory of the meaning of a word.
It's somewhat complicated. "Experiences are brain states" is to an extent a theory. "Pain is the st...
(This post grew out of an old conversation with Wei Dai.)
Imagine a person sitting in a room, communicating with the outside world through a terminal. Further imagine that the person knows some secret fact (e.g. that the Moon landings were a hoax), but is absolutely committed to never revealing their knowledge of it in any way.
Can you, by observing the input-output behavior of the system, distinguish it from a person who doesn't know the secret, or knows some other secret instead?
Clearly the only reasonable answer is "no, not in general".
Now imagine a person in the same situation, claiming to possess some mental skill that's hard for you to verify (e.g. visualizing four-dimensional objects in their mind's eye). Can you, by observing the input-output behavior, distinguish it from someone who is lying about having the skill, but has a good grasp of four-dimensional math otherwise?
Again, clearly, the only reasonable answer is "not in general".
Now imagine a sealed box that behaves exactly like a human, dutifully saying things like "I'm conscious", "I experience red" and so on. Moreover, you know from trustworthy sources that the box was built by scanning a human brain, and then optimizing the resulting program to use less CPU and memory (preserving the same input-output behavior). Would you be willing to trust that the box is in fact conscious, and has the same internal experiences as the human brain it was created from?
A philosopher believing in computationalism would emphatically say yes. But considering the examples above, I would say I'm not sure! Not at all!