Are there any Level 1's here?

[Darkstar]

True, a computer full of transistors and electrical wiring is more complex than a single light switch, but they are both just electrons and motion. Computers do not know things, they just move electrons around. This is why a sentient robot/computer is impossible.

But why would it be? If you continue piling on the electrical complexity until it resembles a human brain, why couldn't it know things in the same sense we do?

The brain is governed by electrical impulses; why couldn't a robot be built off of the same principles some day? (I'm not saying whether or not it should, just that it could).

The brain is governed by electrical impulses; the mind is not. The brain may be the connection between the mind and the body, but it also only moves electrons around. The mind knows things; electrons and motion are not knowledge. So the brain is not the mind.

The brain produces the mind. If you lose the brain, you lose the mind. If you damage the brain, you damage the mind. Unless you are positing that it is simply magic (which I am inclined to believe that you are).

To illustrate, let's think about your webpage example from earlier, except let's consider the webmaster of a site like this. He wouldn't be a very good webmaster if he did not know how to write code, or worse, if he did not have administrator access to his own servers. Why? Because you can't control something you don't have. A nonsentient being cannot control sentient beings for the same reason.

So...the laws of physics are sentient? Your analogy fails because you presuppose a sentient webmaster to begin with. If the webmaster was dead, the site would not change, but it wouldn't have to. It would already be governed by the implicit laws of physics. By contrast, the sentient webmaster's control is explicit. The laws of physics are mathematically predictable, but you won't know what the sentient webmaster is going to do to the site unless you ask him, and there need not be an pattern to the way s/he alters the site.