[ExI] Meaningless Symbols

Gordon Swobe gts_2000 at yahoo.com
Tue Jan 12 14:51:29 UTC 2010


--- On Tue, 1/12/10, Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> wrote:

> In any event, I assume one does not really have any idea of
> whether something has any understanding of anything, unless one has
> first a definition of what "understanding" would mean... 

It seems then that you want to understand the meaning of "understanding". But that shows me that you already understand it.

Someone here tried the other day to re-define understanding in such a way that brains do not really do this thing called "understanding" -- that they do something else instead that we only call understanding. 

I had trouble following his argument because it seemed to me that he wanted me to understand it, but I couldn't understand it according to the argument. :-)

Sometimes you just have to hang your hat on things. I hang my hat on, among other things, the common sense notion that healthy people with developed brains can understand the meanings of words and symbols. It seems pretty obvious that we do it even if I can't tell you exactly how we do it. If I did not think so, and if you also did not think so, then we would not be communicating with symbols right now on ExI.

-gts




      



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