From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!ccu.umanitoba.ca!zirdum Tue Mar 24 09:57:45 EST 1992
Article 4637 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: zirdum@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Antun Zirdum)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Definition of understanding
Message-ID: <1992Mar21.032649.17545@ccu.umanitoba.ca>
Date: 21 Mar 92 03:26:49 GMT
References: <1992Mar11.185921.10347@psych.toronto.edu> <1992Mar16.233438.45463@spss.com> <1992Mar19.203226.18201@psych.toronto.edu>
Organization: University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Lines: 38

In article <1992Mar19.203226.18201@psych.toronto.edu> michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes:
>In article <1992Mar16.233438.45463@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>
>>I don't think this makes artificial intelligence unattainable.  But 
>>if a computer understands a term, it will be because it can relate it
>>to an enormous mass of information, experience, and procedures (much as
>>happens in a human being), and not because the variables it uses
>>have names that resemble English words.
>
>This is where we part company, simply because I don't see how adding more
>meaningless symbols is going to help things.  You can put in additional
>variables that represent *to you* the ductility of the material that a
>capacitor is made of, the weight of the capacitor itself, the level of pain
>that one would experience when you were shocked by a capacitor discharging
>at the given voltage, etc.  But the same argument as above still applies.  These
>are *still* just so many marks to the computer.  They may be marks that depend
>on other marks, but there's still no *meaning* for them *in* the computer.
>We as observers can *give* them meaning, but that's not the same thing.
>
I guess then that engineers should stop working on computing
devices, if you have one transitor, and it cannot compute
anything of interest - then there is not use in putting a
bunch of transistors together, the system will still be
unable to compute anything of interest.
	WHAT do you mean that there is no meaning???
The marks have plenty of meaning to the computer, if it
does not have the information then it would be unable to
function.
	(I am serious when I ask - WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY
NO MEANING?)
>- michael


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*   AZ    -- zirdum@ccu.umanitoba.ca                            *
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