[ExI] Sensory Reality (was: The symbol grounding problem in strong AI)

[Stathis Papaioannou]

2009/12/23 Ben Zaiboc <bbenzai at yahoo.com>:

> (I've changed the subject line, as I don't want it to get confused with that other, fruitless, argument)
>
> You're quite right.  I probably put it poorly. What I'm saying is just that we create our own reality within our heads, from the sensory feeds we get.  I'm not advocating solipsism.  Those sensory feeds obvously come from the real world, but as you say, we have no way of directly apprehending it, we have to build a representation that is consistent with our sensory inputs.
>
> This explains why different people seem to 'live in different worlds' (their internal representations are different in some way. To Degas, a river would be a completely different thing to the same river experienced by Tiger Woods, for example), and also why there is no 'symbol grounding problem', because the 'things' that our mental symbols represent are other mental 'things', built from scraps of sensory information that our eyes, ears etc., glean from the environment.

Yes, there is no special knowledge of the world created in your brain,
there is just a complex network of relationships between sensory
inputs.

-- 
Stathis Papaioannou