We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

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

If you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself

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

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

Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself.

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