> Is this a reference to sex toys? Those can certainly make a person feel things, but the toy itself is inanimate and non-conscious....at least I think so!

No it's a reference to babies :) I realize calling a baby a "machine" is a little...odd. But I'm trying to point out that the line between artificial and natural life is a blurry one.

> Sure, but also not feeling, or conscious.

Are you saying that a baby created in an artificial womb wouldn't feel or be conscious?

> I don't think I catch your meaning?

I'm saying there are some very specific metaphysical scenarios (like a God who actively ensouls every new child) where my assumptions would break down. But under any kind of physicalist scenario (even weakly physicalist), there's a pretty clear (but long!) path to building an artificial brain.

The big question is, how will we know when we've done it? How will we be able to tell if that brain truly feels, even if it's functionally identical to a human brain? Can we rule out the possibility that God chose not to ensoul our artificial brain? Or that we haven't missed some crucial detail?

> From my vantage point, science seems to be not so interested in those sorts of questions, if not even sometimes downright hostile to them!

I agree. Most science-oriented people seem to think we'll have concrete answers to my questions above. I think we'll have concrete theories, but they'll rely on some big assumptions.

I mean, we already do it! We create feeling machines all the time. Sex is a pretty messy manufacturing process, but on the plus side it feels great.

Biotech has already started to encroach on this process. You don't need sex anymore, and fertilization can happen outside of the body. We still need a womb, but the road to an artificial womb seems pretty well-paved.

I do think there's an open question of how much we'll be able to wrap our arms around the process, and how fast we'll make progress. There's also a really interesting question around embodiment: do you have to make feeling machines out of meat? Or can you make them out of wires and metal?

Since we're in r/philosophy, I suppose I also have to admit the possibility that God endows each newborn with an immortal soul, and could choose not to ensoul children that were born of artificial processes. But barring a fairly extreme metaphysical scenario, it's only a matter of iteration.

Yeah agreed--I kind of slid over this one. To be fair, I did say "apparent" incompatibility :)

> The circuitry of intelligence and the circuitry of feelings are not the same.

I'm pretty sure this is true, but a lot of the scientifically-minded folks I talk to don't seem to agree. They especially don't think you can have feeling without a certain level of intelligence (e.g. a concept of selfhood).

A lot of emergentists I've debated with speak of feeling as something that arises in sufficiently sophisticated information processing systems. I suppose you could treat this as a necessary, but not sufficient condition--but that begs the question, what else is necessary? Any extra requirement seems to break the emergentist approach to consciousness.

I think you're right though--there are other ways of describing emergentism (e.g. a description that isn't based entirely on information processing) which are not in direct conflict with "intelligence that doesn't feel"

Not sure I follow--what are you getting at?

Yup--your brain!

Currently our only manufacturing process involves sexual intercourse, but hey, it's early days

Yup, this is 100% related to the Hard Problem.

> but as a coder, how could i write something that feels? It’s not possible.

What makes you so certain it's not possible?

We have a proof of concept that some configurations of matter feel--namely our brains. It's only a matter of time before we figure out how to reverse-engineer that system to create feeling machines. IMO, the question isn't if we will do this, but how will we know when we've done it?