Re: What does it mean for a machine to understand something?


"JGCASEY" <jgkjcasey@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1172952254.487529.248000@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Mar 4, 2:23 am, "r...@xxxxxxxxxxxx" <r...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
What is it for anyone or anything to understand? The answer can be
embroidered endlessly by men who are confused by education. But let us
not be carried away by the propositional calculus, or by Turing
Machines.

At root, we understand when we experience a patch of blue. We see it,
and we understand it. We know that it is blue, and not green. Can a
machine observe a patch of blue, and know that it is blue and not
green. Not by measuring a wavelength, but by simply experiencing the
blue as men do? Can it? Men answer in light of their own biases.

I simply say that we cannot know, anymore than I can know that a man,
who says he experiences blue, experiences it as I do. This is the well-
known zombie problem. Just a speculation to idly entertain sophomores
in a philosophy class.

There is a practical meaning to "understanding". If i ask for the blue
pencil and you give it to me I assume you understood what blue meant.
If I ask Robbie the robot to fetch a beer and it does so I assume it
understood what I meant. If you understand arithmetic is means you
can add and substract numbers. Understanding thus means being
able to do something. You show your understanding by what you
can do with it.

What you talk about above I see as being conscious of what you
understand and I have no answer to that.

Yet it also means that to be fully cognizant of what blue is, an experience
of such is necessary (but not sufficient - one needs the physics knowledge
etc too). Just like an experience of pain is necessary to be fully
cognizant of what pain is; I cannot know the badness of pain using simply
semantics that describe it as awful etc., because without some experience of
it there would be no point of reference for what awfulness is; circularity
of language would always trip you up.



--
JC







--
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