Pei Wang wrote:
On 11/13/06, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
But....
Now you have me really confused, because Searle's attack would have
targetted your approach, my approach and Ben's approach equally: none
of us have moved on from the position he was attacking!
The situation is not that hopeless. ;-)
The key here is not whether an intelligent system uses "symbols", but
how these symbols get their meaning.
Both Searle and GOFAI assume Tarskian (model-theoretic) semantics,
where the meaning of a symbol is its "denotation" in the domain, and
the mapping ("interpretation") is independent of the activities of
system that actually using the symbol, but determined by an outside
observer.
This problem is gone if the meaning of a symbol is defined by, and
used as, the role the symbol plays in the system's experience, which
does not necessarily equal to human sensory experience.
A detailed discussion is in
http://nars.wang.googlepages.com/wang.semantics.pdf
Pei,
Oh, I hope I didn't give the impression that none of us have progressed!
What I meant by my remark is that from Searle's point of view, we all
lost the debate completely. If any of us think that a machine is a good
basis for a real thinking system (whatever he means by that) we are all
deluded.
As for your suggestion about the problem being centered on the use of
model-theoretic semantics, I have a couple of remarks.
One is that YES! this is a crucial issue, and I am so glad to see you
mention it. I am going to have to read your paper and discuss with you
where the idea of the distinction between a model-theoretic and a
system-centric semantics originated. I have been talking that way for
years, but I have not seen it discussed explicitly in print (I could
have sworn that Hofstadter said something like this, but maybe I dreamed
that).
But my other thought is that everyone interprets Searle in an orthogonal
way to everyone else, so I wouldn't have said that the model-theortic
semantics issue was the one he really was attacking. Damn his eyes, he
gets all of us to discuss a thousand different topics, and develop our
ideas in the process, while he sits at the center of all the discussion,
completely confused about what exactly he means, and confused about what
AI really is, but claiming to be the only person who is right, and
taking credit for undermining the entire AI program. Infuriating!
(He actually said as much, quite brazenly, at the consciousness
conference in Tucson earlier this year, to thunderous applause from the
800-odd people in the audience.)
Richard Loosemore.
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