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 state that follows stubbing your toe and precedes saying ouch" is more of a pure definition. Similarly we could say that the sun is "giant ball of gas undergoing nuclear fusion" or we could say that it is "a bright spot in the sky" - the first is more of a theory than the second, but somehow I'm comfortable calling both of them "definitions".
And since this has two subjects in it, there is no subject that can feel them both and compare them.
Well, if two things can be similar (or the same), then there has to be some way to compare them, right?
Can you actually support your claim that intention matters?
Artificial things are made for a purpose, and being made for a purpose is part of why they are called what they are called. This is an obvious fact about how these words are used and does not need additional support.
"Pain is the state that follows stubbing your toe and precedes saying ouch" is more of a pure definition.
If you mean pain is the conscious state that follows in that situation, yes, if you mean the third person state that folllows, no.
...Similarly we could say that the s
(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!