[ExI] Meaningless Symbols

[Stathis Papaioannou]

2010/1/10 Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com>:
> On 1/9/2010 5:41 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>>
>> More to the point, what is the difference between real understanding
>> and pseudo-understanding? If I can use a word appropriately in every
>> context, then ipso facto I understand that word.
>
> Not relevant. What you can do is exactly beside the point when discussing
> what robot systems can do. A good Google translation now can cough up a
> reliable translation from Hungarian (I know, I used it the other day to turn
> part of one of my human-translated papers back into English). It would be
> perverse to claim that the Google system understood the words being
> translated, even though the complex program was able to find appropriate
> English words and syntax. I understood it, the machine didn't.

I specified "use a word appropriately in every context"; Google can't
as yet do that. It is possible for a human to translate one language
into another language using a dictionary despite understanding neither
language. In order to understand it he has to have another dictionary
so he can associate words in the unknown language with words in a
language he does know, and in turn he associates words in the known
language with objects in the real world. The objects in the real world
are themselves only known through sense data, which is basically just
more symbols, not the object itself. So it's syntactical relationships
all the way down. What else could understanding possibly be?


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou