Hi Jason, I believe that you are alluding to what is known in Cognitive Science as the "Symbol Grounding Problem": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding_problem
My intuition goes in the same direction as yours, that of "procedural semantics". Furthermore, I am inclined to believe that language is an emergent feature of computational processes with self-replication. From signaling between unicellular organisms all the way up to human language. Luc Steels has some really interesting work exploring this sort of idea, with his evolutionary language games: https://csl.sony.fr/wp-content/themes/sony/uploads/pdf/steels-12c.pdf I have been working a lot with language these days. I and my co-author (Camille Roth) developed a formalism called Semantic Hypergraphs, which is an attempt to represent natural language in structures that are akin to typed lambda-calculus: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10784 Here's the Python library that implements these ideas: http://graphbrain.net/ So far we use modern machine learning to parse natural language into this representation, and then take advantage of the regularity of the structures to automatically identify stuff in text corpora for the purpose of computational social science research. Something I dream of, and intend to explore at some point, is to attempt to go beyond the parser and actually "execute the code", and thus try to close the loop with the idea of procedural semantics. Best, Telmo Am Mi, 31. Mär 2021, um 17:58, schrieb Jason Resch: > I was thinking about what aspects of conscious experience are communicable > and which are not, and I realized all communication relies on some > pre-existing shared framework. > > It's not only things like "red" that are meaningless to someone whose never > seen it, but likewise things like spatial extent and dimensionslity would > likewise be incommunicable to someone who had no experience with moving in, > or through, space. > > Even communicating quantities requires a pre-existing and common system of > units and measures. > > So all communication (inputs/outputs) consist of meaningless but strings. It > is only when a bit string is combined with some processing that meaning can > be shared. The reason we can't communicate "red" to someone whose never seen > it is we would need to transmit a description of the processing done by our > brains in order to share what red means to oneself. > > So in summary, I wonder if anything is communicabke, not just qualia, but > anything at all, when there's not already common processing systems between > the sender and receiver, of the information. > > Jason > > -- > 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 view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CA%2BBCJUhC%3Dq%3D1t6mQzo%2BLLZCOrpXFK9etNojhQ-hgb%2BZaE2wr0A%40mail.gmail.com > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CA%2BBCJUhC%3Dq%3D1t6mQzo%2BLLZCOrpXFK9etNojhQ-hgb%2BZaE2wr0A%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/60bab9c1-98a1-4001-830f-fd7a469b3a8d%40www.fastmail.com.
