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

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 30 January 2010 02:56, Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- On Fri, 1/29/10, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> You lost me there. Either DWAP has conscious
>>> understanding of W (in which case it 'has semantics'), or
>>> else DWAP does not have conscious understanding of W.
>>
>> It depends on whether DWAP is actually capable of natural
>> language.
>
> I explained DWAP's capabilities, but I will again:
>
> The human operator enters a word. DWAP assigns that word to variable W and then looks up its definition and assigns that definition to D. DWAP makes the association W=D, and then looks up the definition of each word in D and assigns those definitions to those words in the same way, and then does the same with those words, and so on and so on and so on until it exhausts all possible English words associated with W. To make it more interesting, let us say that DWAP runs this algorithm on every word in the complete English dictionary. Let us say also that DWAP holds all those hundreds of millions of associations live in its massive RAM storage (some people like to equate RAM to conscious mind, and so I humor them).
>
> Is the following sentence true? Or is it false?
>
> DWAP has conscious understanding of the meanings of English words.

It's false. What you describe by itself won't allow DWAP to use words
in a meaningful way.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou