This is in response to Josh Storrs Monday, October 15, 2007 3:02 PM post and Richard Loosemores Mon 10/15/2007 1:57 PM post.
I mis-understood you, Josh. I thought you were saying semantics could be a type of grounding. It appears you were saying that grounding requires direct experience, but that grounding is only one (although perhaps the best) possible way of providing semantic meaning. Am I correct? I would tend to differ with the concept that grounding only relates to what you directly experience. (Of course it appears to be a definitional issue, so there is probably no theoretical right or wrong.) I consider what I read, hear in lectures, and see in videos about science or other abstract fields such as patent law to be experience, even though the operative content in such experiences is derived second, third, fourth, or more handed. In Richard Loosemores above mentioned informative post he implied that according to Harnad a system that could interpret its own symbols is grounded. I think this is more important to my concept of grounding than from where the information that lets the system do such important interpretation comes. To me the important distinction is are we just dealing with realtively naked symbols, or are we dealing with symbols that have a lot of the relations with other symbols and patterns, something like those Pei Wang was talking about, that lets the system use the symbols in an intelligent way. Usually for such relations and patterns to be useful in a world, they have to have come directly or indirectly from experience of that world. But again, it is not clear to me that they has to come first handed. Presumably if the AGI equivalents of personal computers are being mass produced by the millions 10 to 20 years from now, and if they come out of the box with significant world knowledge that has been copied into their non-volatile memory bit-for-bit from world knowledge that came from the direct experience from many learning machines and indirectly from massive sophisticated NL readings of large bodies of text and visual recognition of large image and video data bases. I would consider most of the symbols in such a brand new personal AGI to be grounded -- even though they have not been derived from any experience of a particular personal AGI, itself -- if they had meaning to the personal AGI itself. It seems ridiculous to say that one could have two identical large knowledge bases of experiential knowledge each containing millions of identically interconnected symbols and patterns in two AGI having identical hardware, and claim that the symbols in one were grounded but those in the other were not because of the purely historical distinction that the sensing to learn such a knowledge was performed on only one of the two identical systems. Of course, going forward each system would have to be able to do its own learning from its own experience if it were to be able to respond to the unique aspects and events in its own environment. Edward W. Porter Porter & Associates 24 String Bridge S12 Exeter, NH 03833 (617) 494-1722 Fax (617) 494-1822 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- 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=53840000-4f4f95
