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Article 5748 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: peter@sysnext.library.upenn.edu (Peter C. Gorman)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Grounding: Real vs. Virtual
Message-ID: <78417@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 19 May 92 17:27:03 GMT
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In article <60703@aurs01.UUCP> throop@aurs01.UUCP (Wayne Throop) writes:

> Consider a robot interacting and demonstrating competence against a
> virtual world, and another robot interacting and demonstrating
> competence against the real world.  The two robots will (by hypothesis)
> end up in identical physical states, yet one "has semantics" and the
> other doesn't.

It seems to me that a 'grounded' robot is necessarily more than the  
virtual-world robot with some transducers strapped on.  That is, your  
hypothesis seems to be that there would be two isomorphic 'cognitive'  
systems (one of which is connected to the real world through some  
transducers, the other connected to a virtual world by some means) whose  
internal states are potentially equivalent.  I would suggest that that  
kind of isomorphism of cognitive systems is not achievable - that the  
boundary between the real-world transducers and the cognitive system, if  
it exists at all, is fundamentally different from that between the  
virtual-world cognitive system and its input mechanisms (I hesitate to  
call them transducers).  If this is true, than the two systems could not  
have identical physical states because they're designed differently.

I'm not making any claims about semantics in either system; I just don't  
think the two systems are equivalent.

--
Peter Gorman
University of Pennsylvania
Library Systems Office
peter@sysnext.library.upenn.edu


