I certainly agree that there's a lot of low-quality debate around this and similarly open-ended questions. I think your objection can be made even within the ph

I certainly agree that there's a lot of low-quality debate around this and similarly open-ended questions. I think your objection can be made even within the philosophy of the mind (though you may not agree with me!) This is a significant branch of philosophy, and within it, hundreds if not thousands of papers have been written in attempting to prove that nothing operating by the laws of physics as we know them today, nor any future extension of them, could have a mind - yet those who have been trying to do this are no better off than anyone else in knowing what a mind is. Coming back to Dijkstra's aphorism, you will notice that I was objecting to interpreting it as ruling out, a priori, the question of whether machines could ever think. From your latest post, however, you seem to be saying it would be a reasonable question once we are equipped with an established and agreed-upon definition of thinking.