I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.

Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God's existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores.

The reason that no computer program can ever be a mind is simply that a computer program is only syntactical, and minds are more than syntactical. Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content.

Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.

Whatever is referred to must exist. Let us call this the axiom of existence.

The assertion fallacy is the fallacy of confusing the conditions for the performance of the speech act of assertion with the analysis of the meaning of particular words occurring in certain assertions.

Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.