This is a question about Hilary Putnam's twin earth thought experiment. After I read this thought experiment I was not convinced that Oscar's and twin-Oscar's "water" concept have different meanings. But most of the philosophers' intuitions are similar to Putnam (i.e., they think that Oscar's and twin-Oscar's "water" concept have different meanings). I thought that there might be something wrong with me. So I told this thought experiment to different people with different origins but without exception all of them responded that both Oscar's and twin-Oscar's "water" concept have the same meaning. So I still do not understand, why do so many philosophers' intuitions work like Putnam's? Thank you, Deniz

If we built a computer that could analyse our minds, and it figured out how they work and explained it to us, would we be able to understand?

What, if anything, can you boil one's self down to, outside any notion of soul or essence?

Physically speaking, what is memory? What is a memory? If a memory is stored as a physical structure in the brain, is it possible that the human genome codes for the formation of one or more of these physical memory structures during brain development? In other words, could the genome, which we all share, include memories that are preloaded into the human brain during the brain's growth before birth? Could this be a physical manifestation of Jung's collective unconscious? EdHead