>>11077650Well, I am a computer scientist. My entire field is about imagining thoughts without inner experience. If I write down an algorithm for, say, an ai neural net, I don't imagine that my algorithm has inner experience just because I've thought of it and written it down. If I then run that algorithm on a computer and have it control a robot, I don't see why it must necessarily have an inner experience any more than the algorithm sitting on paper did. And finally, I don't see why taking that ai algorithm and moving it to the realm of biology should mean it must have an inner experience either. Silicon and electricity or cells and electrochemistry, they are both just physical systems to make the robot - or the animal - move and act and think
To answer your last question, thoughts are not inner experiences, thoughts are the states of a mind. When a person dies, they stop thinking. We don't know this because we bring out our inner experience detector: there is no such thing. We know that dead people - and broken computers - don't think because their brain and body stops reacting to the world. It stops processing the world, changing itself, and directing the action of the body
The program state is the state of mind of a robot. A robot thinks when the state of its program in memory changes. The brain state is the state of mind of a human. A human thinks when the state of its brain changes
None of this requires inner experience: it could be there or it could not be. Inner experience is not necessary to imagine a healthy human walking around and doing all the things that humans do, including talking about their experiences. You could program a computer to talk about its vivid experiences if you wanted to, but it doesn't mean they actually exist. So yes, imagine a physical human who simply does not have the extra inner experience thing
