On Monday 15 October 2007 01:57:18 pm, Richard Loosemore wrote: > AI programmers, in their haste to get something working, often simply > write some code and then label certain symbols as if they are > meaningful, when in fact they are just symbols-with-labels.
This is quite true, but I think it is a lot closer to McDermott's critique (Artificial Intelligence meets Natural Stupidity) than to Harnad's. Harnad shares the typical epistemologist's assumption that for a symbol to have meaning, it must have an "aboutness", i.e. it must refer to something in some external (although perhaps imaginary) world. I happen to think that Solomonoff's inductive formulation of AI more or less demolished this particular philosophical set of (often unstated) assumptions, which were after all responsible of 3 millennia of spectacularly unproductive pontification. Josh ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=53806349-fa774c
