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Searle and Dreyfus and Penrose are just naive about symbolic AI. It will ultimately succeed, to some extent, anyway. Their arguments are not really insightful. (For example, Lenat claims with some justice that CYC is already conscious, because it 'knows' that it's a computer program and not a human... but this knowledge is, of course, just a pointer in memory!) Pain and pleasure, though, may be a matter of analog neural 'hardware', and may not be replicable by conventional digital algorithms. (On the other hand, 'consciousness' itself may be a neurotic illusion - see Julian Jaynes, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", and compare it also to Zen Buddhism's mystical goal of transcending consciousness.)
The way to deal with human subjectivity is to observe it dispassionately, and describe it with the most precisely evocative language available. Coining new words for subjective distinctions is never a good idea - natural language will have dealt better with the problem, millennia ago!
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