Where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality.

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.

Many people mistakenly suppose that the essence of consciousness is that of a control mechanism

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

We do not live in several different, or even two different, worlds, a mental world and a physical world, a scientific world and a world of common sense. Rather, there is just one world; it is the world we all live in, and we need to account for how we exist as part of it.

How do we get from electrons to elections and from protons to presidents?

There are clear cases in which "understanding" literally applies and clear cases in which it does not apply; and these two sorts of cases are all I need for this argument.