HOME TRUTHS ABOUT FEELING, DOING, EXPLAINING AND ROBOTS (Reply to Shikha Singh)
Doings are observable by anyone (via senses or senses plus measuring instruments).
Feelings are observable only to their feeler.
The only feelings a feeler can feel are his own.
That other people and animals feel is a safe guess, because they are related to and resemble us.
That today’s man-made robots feel is as unlikely as that a toaster or stone feels.
That a robot whose doings are Turing indistinguishable from the rest of us for a lifetime would feel would be almost as safe a guess as that other people and animals feel. (Perhaps a biorobot would be an even safer guess).
A robot is just an autonomous causal system that can do some things that people and animals can do.
Cognitive science is about discovering the causal mechanism that generates our capacity to do what we can do. (We can think of it as discovering what kind of robots we are.)
No one but the Turing robot can know whether its causal mechanism does generate feeling.
And even if it does, not even the Turing robot can explain or know how or why.