“My computer can process data pretty well, and it is unemotional.”
But that data means nothing to it. Its just another number. And there is nothing interesting about that PC. Its just a big calculator, just like all the other calculators.
Correct (what smiling bandit said).
More to the point, perhaps, your computer can process data according to (and only according to) routines that it is programmed to be able to utilize. If you have an Intel-standard PC, you could feed it an infinite number of binaries compiled for some other platform, and at no point will your PC start to recognize the patterns within that code and learn how to speak it as a “second language”.
Or, to express it another way, you can perform deductive operations without any reliance upon emotional processes–
All horses are mammals
Winged Victory is a horse
Winged Victory is a mammal.
– but not the inductive pattern-recognizing operations, without which you’d never get an opportunity to make any deductions:
Is Winged Victory a horse?
What does “horseness” consist of?
Does Winged Victory have four legs?
What are legs?
How do you know that you are seeing legs?
Under what circumstances do patterns of darker shapes existing at different focal ranges superimposed upon a lighter background, and much longer than they are wide, tend to imply that one is seeing legs?
What types and strengths of reminiscent similarity between current observation and remembered sensory input should lead you to think this event is akin to that other one?
If you could be programmed like a computer and the raw data “Winged Victory is a horse” were posited (not intuited, but “given”) along with the program that says “All horses are mammals”, you could deduce that Winged Victory is a mammal, but without at least rudimentary emotions you could no more recognize that Winged Victory is a horse than your computer could program itself.