[tsimionescu]

The machine does the same thing regardless of whether you ascribe meaning to it or not. In this sense it is like the thermostat from Searle's example, which he was claiming computers are not.

This property of determinacy seems ill defined as well. It's basically defined from the assumption that the human mind is immaterial. If a machine and a human both arrive at the same result when posed a question (say, they both produce some sound that you interpret as meaning '42'), by what measure can you claim that one had semantic meaning and the other did not?

The idea of cognitivism is that there is no fundamental difference (even though of course it is very likely that the process by which this particular machine arrived at that result is different from the process by which the human did).

If I stand by a door and open it when big objects come into my field of view, how is that different from a machine doing the same?

And then, if I had a Machine that could converse and act just like a human (including describing its feelings and internal sensations) while doing nothing fundamentally different from our current PCs, by what measure would you say that this machine is 'simualting' a mind and is not in fact a mind in itself? (though of course it would be a different mind than a human would have).

[happythomist]

I don't agree, but I've reached my personal limit for philosophical discussion for the day, so I'll let you have the last word.

Thanks for the discussion! :)