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

Gordon Swobe gts_2000 at yahoo.com
Sat Jan 30 13:31:23 UTC 2010


--- On Fri, 1/29/10, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:

>> Is the following sentence true? Or is it false?
>>
>> DWAP has conscious understanding of the meanings of
>> English words.
> 
> It's false. 

Good, glad you think so.

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

Let's add a subroutine to the program to allow DWAP to use words in a meaningful way. The human types in a sentence of this form "Say, DWAP, what does x mean?" where x equals any English word. Accessing its vast database of word associations, DWAP responds in the form "x means..." and tells the operator the definition of x and the definition of every word in x's definition and the definitions of all the words in all those definitions, and so on. Surely that counts as a meaningful use of words. Does DWAP have conscious understanding of words now?

-gts


      



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