[ExI] Semiotics and Computability

Ben Zaiboc bbenzai at yahoo.com
Sat Feb 20 11:09:13 UTC 2010


Here's something I stumbled across that might throw more light on the subject (or maybe I should say more petrol on the fire):

http://www.alphadictionary.com/blog/?p=209

This is telling me that semantics is just another set of rules.  These rules apply to the symbols derived from our sensory inputs in a more direct way than the rules of syntax, which apply to the more abstract symbols we use for language processing.

In this view, Gordon may actually be right, in saying that syntax alone is not sufficient for understanding. You also need a set of semantic rules to make sense of your experience.  Of course, there's nothing magical or mysterious about it, just another set of rules, just as amenable to being implemented in any general-purpose computing substrate as are the syntactical rules.

Who knows, there may be other factors that are necessary too.  Other kinds of information processing that we haven't yet discovered in the brain.

So we have: 
Sensory Inputs (including sensorimotor feedback loops)
Semantic processing
Syntactical processing
Other stuff I don't know much about, that's involved in language processing
And possibly other kinds of processing nobody yet knows about.

But it's all data processing, all the way, and it *has to be that way* (because the universe is only made of 3 kinds of thing, etc., etc.).

So if we make something that can do general data-processing, we can do all those things.  The very same things that we do in our heads.

Hm, something that can do general data-processing...

I suspect it would be something with lots and lots of brass gear wheels, springs, rods...

Ben Zaiboc


      



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list