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Article 5692 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Subject: Re: Mean thoughts on what meaning means
Message-ID: <1992May16.030044.13157@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
References: <1992May14.164117.25016@psych.toronto.edu> <1992May14.221449.3721@spss.com> <1992May15.152549.13330@psych.toronto.edu>
Date: Sat, 16 May 1992 03:00:44 GMT
Lines: 45

In article <1992May15.152549.13330@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes:
>
>This is the Robot Reply.  The problem with it is that everything past
>the transducers are simply symbols.

  No.  You choose to interpret everything past the transducers as simply
symbols.  That doesn't mean they are symbols.  If a transducer has produced
a large conglomeration of data, and you consider each bit a symbol, what
does each symbol represent?  In fact the bit represents only its own
current value, and only because you choose to isolate it from all of the
other bits.  But the collection of all the bits does represent real
world information (i.e. semantics).

>                Is there any way to bootstrap yourself *solely* using
>the Chinese-Chinese dictionary?  No.     

  Probably correct.  This is why you need the transducers.  The dictionary
is unlikely to contain enough information.

>To take an alternate view on the issue, if one demands grounding of
>symbols through transducers, then one is denying that implementations
>such as SHRDLU, which has built into it its own artificial reality, can
>actually contain meaning, since the *entire universe* for that entity
>is run in a purely symbolic environment.

  One could use a system with transucers.  Once the semantics have
been captured by the transducers (perhaps after a long classical
education), the disks are copied to another system which just uses this
captured semantic information for its virtual reality.

>I don't know how problematic AI folks will find this result.  They may
>be quite willing to agree that a purely AR SHRDLU doesn't have semantics,
>but a SHRDLU connected to the outside world does.

 Personally I am inclined to suspect that a pure SHRDLU, depending on
manually prepared data, cannot succeed.  That doesn't mean that Searle
has proved it cannot succeed.  But when you get to the disk transplant
scenario from a transducer based robot generating the data, the
perspective must be quite different.

-- 
=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=
  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115                                   +1-815-753-6940


