There is a difference *why* we use language and *how language (communication) works*. The ultimate goal why human used language is to enhance the probability to survive. If someone has found something to eat he could tell it his group. Further, language is useful for knowledge transfer from one generation to the other generation. Another reason for language is to communicate the intentions as you have already said.
But for all these reasons language works probably indeed as protocol to transfer patterns from one brain into another brain. Even if a baby only cries, we can assume that it has some patterns of pain in his brain. If the mother hears her baby crying she we feel painful too to a certain degree (mirror neurons). And I am pretty sure that if you read or hear the word *apple* your brain activates the pattern for this object. Of course language is no tool to transfer a complete brain dump from on brain to another brain. But if you communicate your goals to another person then the other person creates patterns in its brain that represent and probably resemble the patterns of your own goal-patterns. This does not imply that the other person adopts your goal. But this is no contradiction to my argument. If a computer transfers a fragment of its database via XML-language to another computer, then the other computer can reconstruct the original data structure by the XML-string. This does not necessarily imply that this data fragment is used in the second computer by the same algorithms as in the first computer. So even if we have some same patterns after communication then we will use these patterns differently and this is the reason why goals from one person won't be adopted by the other person. - Matthias Trent Waddington [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 12:32 PM, Dr. Matthias Heger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In my opinion language itself is no real domain for intelligence at all. > Language is just a communication protocol. You have patterns of a certain > domain in your brain you have to translate your internal pattern > representation to a sequence of words in order to communicate your patterns > to another person. I've seen this kind of comment on this list and elsewhere before.. and it's typically just accepted without question. Personally, I think it's pretty far from the truth. Language does not exist to get the ideas in my head into yours. Language exists so I can get you to do what I want. The baby cries not to tell you that it is unhappy with the world, but to get you to do something about it. As such, squeaking out noises is just the same as moving a limb. The machinery that controls it is not trying to translate mentalese into english so that it can be transformed back into mentalese in the recipient's head with the greatest accuracy. Sure, sometimes that'd be nice, but most the time the goal is simply to make you think want I want you to think so you'll do my bidding. That's why having a theory of mind is all tied up with language. If I don't know what you're thinking then I can't know what your intentions are and if I don't know what your intentions are then I don't know if I need to change them so you have intentions that serve my goals. Even if we had direct mentalese transfer between two AGIs (and in the neuromancer universe, between humans) we'd still need all that interesting stuff that we study language for.. because if I brain dump my current goals to you then it in no way implies that you're going to alter your goals to match mine. Trent ------------------------------------------- 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=117534816-b15a34 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
