[ExI] The symbol grounding problem in strong AI

[Damien Broderick]

On 1/9/2010 1:54 PM, Gordon Swobe wrote:

> how can I say this without assigning some kind of strange non-computable aspect to natural brains.
> The answer is that I say it because I don't believe the brain is actually [a] computer.

Isn't that exactly saying that you assign some kind of non-computable 
aspect to natural brains? (No reason why it should be strange, though.) 
As I said several days ago, a landslide doesn't seem to me to compute 
the trajectories of all its particles--at least not in any sense that 
I'm familiar with. We can *model* the process with various degrees of 
accuracy using equations, but it looks like a category mistake to 
suppose that the nuclear reactions in the sun are *calculating* what 
they're doing. I realize that Seth Lloyd and others disagree (or I think 
that's what he's saying in PROGRAMMING THE UNIVERSE--that the universe 
is *calculating itself*) but the whole idea of calculation seems to me 
to imply a compression or reduction of the mapping of some aspects of 
one large unwieldy system onto another extremely stripped-down toy system.

That might be wrong, I know. I hope Gordon knows it might be wrong as well.

Damien Broderick