Dear EdFromNH,
Allow me to disagree with and correct you regarding your following
statement about Searle:
On 20/01/16 23:14, EdFromNH . wrote:
One of the major philosophical advancements in understanding cognitive
computing is that through grounding with massive experientially
connected experiential data syntax can, in fact, compute semantics.
The advances being made in deep learning strongly support this. For
example, deep learning indicates the visual meaning of a concept such
as "cat", with all of its rich possible visual variations can be
understood by what Searle calls a syntactical system. If deep
learning systems for vision were connected with deep learning systems
for hearing, touch, emotions, goals, behaviors, etc, the combined
system would have even a much richer understanding of the meaning of a
word such as "cat".
So Searle's thinking is deeply flawed.
I would like to add an argument that Searle's thinking is not deeply
flawed. I have two points at which I think that there is a flow in the
above argument:
1) A point of disagreement: As you correctly stated, deep learning
requires "massive experientially connected experiential data". But this
is not the case for humans. In contrast to deep learning, for human
learning a single example is often just enough. For example, a child may
play with one single toy car and after having played with that car, the
child can recognize other cars much better than deep learning. Moreover,
a child can easily recognize the following drawing as a car:
even if the child has never seen this type of drawing before.
The child has not been trained on thousands of examples of such
drawings. The child /understands/ that this is a car because it
understands the concept of the car and the relationships between the
concept and the drawing.
That is a huge difference to deep learning.
(For more drawings of what only humans can do, see here:
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/nikolic20160108)
2) A correction: Searle never said that that the following is not true:
"... data syntax can, in fact, address the problems of semantics". To
the contrary, the whole thought experiment of Chinese room is about
that: syntax doing the job of semantics. Also, if you watch the
mentioned talk at Google, you will see that he is also giving examples
of computer based applications in which syntax computes semantics. He
keeps pointing out over and over: computers do the job of semantics by
syntax.
What he says is something else. His point that this is /not the way/ how
biological mind/brain does it. Our minds/brains do it in a different way.
According to Searle, we do not yet understand how the brain does it.
(My opinion: We finally now have a theory to begin understanding how the
brain does semantics -- which is the theory of practopoiesis:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002251931500106X )
Best,
Danko
-------------------------------------------
AGI
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