Artificial Intelligence Harnad responds Agreement is boring. New ideas arise from challenges to current ones.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
No, it wasn't obvious at all that a dynamic implementation of a purely syntactic system could not generate semantics. In fact, nothing is obvious in the area of semantics. Nothing faintly obvious here. Put even more bluntly, there's something it's like to think that the cat is on the mat, and the kind of thing that that is like is the essential feature of thinking, and meaning. Take time to mull it over.