You didn’t have to have a semantic or intentional interpretation of the boxes to see it: a caused red, and b caused green—an obvious pattern in need of explanation. In each instance of button-pressing, the scientists understood exactly how each step in
Suppose lightning strikes a dead tree in a swamp; I am standing nearby. My body is reduced to its elements, while entirely by coincidence (and out of different molecules) the tree is turned into my physical replica. My replica, The Swampman, moves
Note even though all the robot’s intentional states and acts are derived from your purposes, they are beginning to become detached somewhat from your purposes. Since you designed the robot to “think for itself” to some degree, its “thinking” may escape your
Brains are energetically very expensive organs, and if they can’t do the important job of destinguish the words meaning, they aren’t earning their keep. Brains, in other words, are supposed to be semantic engines. What brains are made of is kazillions of
Ruth Millikan (for instance) is right that given the nature of design constraints, it is unlikely in the extreme that there could be different ways of skinning the cat that left two radically different, globally indeterminate, tied-for-first-place interpretations. Indeterminacy of radical translation
Suppose Pat says that Mike “has a thing about redheads.” What Pat means, roughly, is that Mike has a stereotype of a redhead that is rather derogatory and influences Mike’s expectations about, and interactions with, redheads. It could turn out that Mike