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Article 1827 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: fred@mole.cis.ufl.edu (Fred Buhl)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Dennett on Semantics
Summary: A quote from "The Intentional Stance" with commentary
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Date: 3 Dec 91 14:45:16 GMT
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Here's what Dennett has to say about solving the semantics problem:

     "Now how does the brain manage to get semanatics from syntax?
How could _any_ entity (how could a genious or an angel or God) get
the semantics of a system from nothing but its syntax?  It couldn't.
The syntax of a system doesn't determine its semantics.  By what
alchemy, then, does the brain extract semantically reliable results
from syntactically driven operations?  It cannot be designed to do an
impossible task, but it could be designed to _approximate_ the
impossible task, to _mimic_ the behavior of the impossible object (the
semantic engine) by capitalizing on close (close enough) fortuitous
correspondences between structural regularities -- of the environment
and of its own internal states and operations -- and semantic types.
     "The basic idea is familiar.  An animal needs to know when it has
satisfied the goal of finding and ingesting food, but it settles for a
friction-in-the-throat-followed-by-a-stretched-stomach detector, a
mechanical switch turned on by a relatively simple mechanical
condition that normally co-occurs with the satisfaction of the
animal's "real" goal."
      _The Intentional Stance_, p61

I quoted the passage above so that (a) We'd have Dennett's position
expressed in his own words (rather than mine or someone else's) and
(b) To open up this "explanation" of semantics for discussion.  

Are there any problems with the view expressed above?  I'd actually go
a little farther and say syntactical elements (neural pulses
emananting from the stretched-stomach detector) _mean_ "I'm full"
_because_ when the animal's stomach is full, it causes the
stretched-stomach detector to fire.  The _meaning_ comes from how the
inputs come into the system.  Similar arguments could be made for
sound and light (if you need a source external to the body as well as
external to the brain) based on current knowledge about lower-level
processing of those inputs.  NOTE: I haven't explored what this would
mean to the current high-level philosophical take on "cause" and
"meaning" but I'm sure somebody out there will. ;-)

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Fred Buhl, Grad Student        A proud member of the Union of
UF Computer Science Dept.      Unconcerned Scientists.       
fred@reef.cis.ufl.edu          "Ants are smart.  _Really_ smart." 
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