On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 5:16 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> >> From examples in the physical world. You can give as many botanical >> definitions of the word "tree" as you want but it will just be a word >> defined by other words that are themselves defined by yet more words that >> are.... If you tried to dig for meaning all you'd find is a endless loop, >> it would just be a game where words are manipulated according to the rules >> of botany until somebody forgot about definitions and pointed to the ASCII >> string "t-r-e-e" and then pointed to a large photosynthesizing organism >> made largely of cellulose that exists in the physical world. Then even a >> martian would notice a correspondence between this game of manipulating >> symbols called "botany" that humans had invented and the way these large >> photosynthesizing organism made largely of cellulose live. >> > > > > What about a virtual world with trees and observers, and no I/O devices > connecting it to outside trees? > There would still be I/O devices connected to the virtual trees made by a computer that operated according to the laws of physics, if not the trees wouldn't even be virtual. And the books on both virtual botany and real botany would still be more than a just a symbol manipulation game, they would have semantic content because there would be a correspondence between the way the symbols are manipulated and the way the virtual (or real) large photosynthesizing organism live. Regardless of if they are virtual or real if you want to know how trees live studying those botany symbols in virtual (or real) books will help, so they must have semantic content . John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
