Thinking, or feeling
On the axis: Can a machine think · a machine's inner feel
Reasoning is one thing, feeling another: a machine might compute everything without there being "something it is like" to be it, thought with no consciousness at all.
Justification
Nagel holds that an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and that this subjective character is tied to a point of view: this is what his stages, in 1974. Every reduction proceeds by moving away from the point of view in order to gain objectivity; applied to experience, the move removes precisely what had to be explained. From this he draws a refusal of , but not a : he maintains that we lack the necessary concepts, and that he cannot see how physicalism could be true, without declaring it false. His 1979 essay examines, without firmly endorsing it, the hypothesis of an intrinsic nature common to the mental and the physical, closer to a neutral monism than to an avowed property dualism; his 2012 book advances another conjecture, that of an oriented tendency inscribed in nature, which he himself offers as speculative.
I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat."What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", The Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4 (1974), p. 439
"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974) · "Panpsychism" (1979) · Mind and Cosmos (2012)
Anchors: Chalmers · Nagel
leads to: The enigma of consciousness (The philosophical zombie)