Re: Symbol Grounding Problem (attn: Vend)
- From: "Alpha" <OmegaZero2003@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 09:34:21 -0700
"Neil W Rickert" <phishing@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:mZJXh.2788$H_.232@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
HMSBeagle <jsbach@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Symbol_Grounding_Problem
A good article demonstrating how it serves as a pivot point in AI.
It's a misguided problem - really a pseudo-problem. It is a problem
that leads AI and philosophy astray.
Quoting from your cited link:
The Symbol Grounding Problem is related to the problem of
how words get their meanings, and of what meanings are.
However, symbol grounding is not a problem faced by most humans. When
was the last time you had to ground a symbol?
The real problem for humans is not grounding symbols. Rather it
is symbolizing the ground. We don't start with words and seek to
discover their meaning; we start with meanings and seek to usefully
attach words to that meaning.
Interesting point Neil! We have a phenomenal experience of a meaning that
some information (either from endogeneous or exogeneous sources ) elicits in
an entity. That information-caused meaning seems not to require a symbol or
symbol manipulation until *we* (somehow) "attach words" (I would say -attach
one or more symbols) to that meaning and thence can reason about the meaning
in a different way (linguistically) than we would have if we has no symbols
attached. For example, an animal with no language can react to information
from its environment (no symbol manipulation required); but if humans are
presented with the same stimulus we can either go with the meaning as
presented or translate/intepret the information into symbols (language
consctructs) and thence call up memories of similar "meaning", combine this
meaning with others, reason about the meaning using language constructs and
so forth. D. Hofstadter called it "triggering symbols" in his new book. It
seems that meaning-grounding in symbols (or in other artifacts/processes if
not symbols - what?), leads to a richer phenomenal experience the next time
a similar stimulus is presented? That is, if you know what you are looking
at (in terms of other things or even aspects of the thing itself), then you
incorporate information into the next translation/interpretation, and loop
around this process precessinally (each time getting a little richer
interpretation...)
..
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Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science, Northern Illinois Univ., DeKalb, IL
60115
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