Abram:There is one common feature to all chairs: They are for the purpose of
sitting on. I think it is important that this is *not* a visual
characteristic. There are several objections that you could raise, but I
think that
all of them will follow from the fuzziness of language, not the
fuzziness of the actual concepts.
Your bottom is "for the purpose of sitting on". How will your set of verbal
definitions be able to tell the difference between a "bottom" and a "chair?
How will it know that if "Abram sits on a table", it isn't also a chair?
(And how will it know that, actually, it *could* be a chair?)
And if "John hit Jack with a chair" , will your set of verbal definitions
not exclude this as truthful, if it has nothing about a chair being "for the
purpose of hitting people"?
Not only can a chair, like any other concept of an object , take an infinity
of forms, but it can be used for an infinity of functions and purposes.
Here's S. Kauffman on the purposes of screwdrivers [or chairs] -
"Do we think we can prestate all possible tasks in all possible environments
and problem situations such that we can construct a bounded frame for
screwdrivers? Do we think we could write an algorithm, an effective
procedure, to generate a possibly infinite list of all possible uses ...
some of which do not yet exist? I don't think we could get started."
Out of interest, is there one single domain, one area however small and
bounded, like, say, understanding sentences about "boxes" or "geometrical
objects", where ungrounded, purely symbolic reasoning has ever worked/ "got
started" at general intelligence level - i.e. been able to understand all
the permutations of a limited set of words? Just one.
-------------------------------------------
agi
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/
Modify Your Subscription:
https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=108809214-a0d121
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
