[ExI] Understanding is useless (was: The digital nature of brains)

Stathis Papaioannou stathisp at gmail.com
Sat Jan 30 01:08:31 UTC 2010


2010/1/30 John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net>:

> Hey speak for yourself. I just input an ASCII sequence, process it
> syntactically, and then output a different ASCII sequence. The fact that I
> have no knowledge of the meaning of one bit of it I have never found the
> least bit inconvenient, as meaning never actually does anything so you can
> get along just fine without it. For example, the Turing Test is completely
> uninterested in meaning as is Evolution, and yet it managed to produce the
> human mind, so it's not much of a stretch to imagine somebody could write a
> good post without having any idea of what it means.
> Yes yes I know, I'm setting myself up perfectly for the retort "Haw, I
> always knew you didn't know what you were talking about", and it's true I
> don't have a clue what I'm talking about, but I don't consider that an
> insult. The fact that I'm lacking a fifth wheel called "understanding" has
> never been the slightest handicap to me, I can still produce a pretty good
> ASCII sequence. There is no concept more useless than meaning.

I think what you're saying is that meaning is nothing *over and above*
the ability to use words appropriately, just as walking is nothing
over and above putting one foot before the other in a coordinated
fashion.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou



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