[ExI] The digital nature of brains (was: digital simulations)

Stathis Papaioannou stathisp at gmail.com
Tue Jan 26 16:46:41 UTC 2010


2010/1/27 Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com>:
> To the argument that "association equals symbol grounding" as has been bandied about...
>
> Modern word processors can reference words in digital dictionaries. Let us say that I write a program that does only that, and that it does this automagically at ultra-fast speed on a powerful Cray software/hardware system with massive or even infinite memory. When the human operator types in a word, the s/h system first assigns that word to a variable, call it W, and then searches for the word in a complete dictionary of the English language. It assigns the dictionary definition of W to another variable, call it D, and then makes the association W = D.
>
> The system then treats every word in D as it did for for the original W, looking up the definition of every word in the definition of W. It then does same for those definitions, and so on and so on through an indefinite number of branches until it nearly or completely exhausts the complete English dictionary.
>
> When the program finishes, the system will have made every possible meaningful association of W to other words. Will it then have conscious understanding the meaning of W? No. The human operator will understand W, but s/h systems have no means of attaching meanings to symbols. The system followed purely syntactic rules to make all those hundreds of millions of associations without ever understanding them. It cannot get semantics from syntax.

But if you put a human in place of the computer doing the same thing
he won't understand the symbols either, no matter how intelligent he
is. The symbols need to be associated with some environmental input,
and then they have "meaning". Your claim is that the symbols have to
be associated with the environmental input *and* an extra process,
which is mysterious and scientifically superfluous, has to take place
as well for the understanding to occur. It is mysterious because you
haven't any way of explaining how something like a chemical reaction
could give rise to meaning, and it is scientifically superfluous
because everything would work perfectly well without this extra step.
So Occam's razor would suggest the more economic theory is that
meaning is simply that which occurs when symbols are grounded in
environmental input.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou



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