[ExI] The digital nature of brains.

Gordon Swobe gts_2000 at yahoo.com
Fri Jan 29 16:44:10 UTC 2010


--- On Fri, 1/29/10, John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net> wrote:

> Well that's all very well, but you still
> haven't answered my question. I don't know it for a
> fact but presumably you are not a computer program

I'll take that as a compliment. 

>, so why
> do YOU bother to read syntactic symbols as they are not only
> insufficient for meaning they are not even part of meaning?

English symbols have meaning to me just as they do you. For this reason our brains do not compare well with digital computers. We program digital computers to look only at the forms of symbols whereas natural selection engineered systems like you and me that can look not only at their forms but also at their meanings. 

> An even better question is why do you bother to produce
> syntactic symbols as you have done in such abundance on this
> list

The adjective "syntactic" describes the form-based nature of the rules for manipulating symbols as found in computer software. The word does not apply to the symbols themselves. 

-gts


      



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