Re: Symbol Grounding Problem (attn: Vend)

On Apr 26, 11:00 pm, forbisga...@xxxxxxx wrote:
On Apr 26, 7:41 pm, stevendaryl3...@xxxxxxxxx (Daryl McCullough)
wrote:

forbisga...@xxxxxxx says...

Both Neil and Daryl have been around long enough to
remember when Marvin and Stevan and many other
participated in this forum. I wonder if their memory is
like mine that Stevan didn't dismiss the System's
Reply so lightly years ago.

I'm a little hazy about what was said by whom, but
I seem to remember that StevanHarnadbelieved that
AI needed something like a robot in order to ground
symbols, and that a disembodied computer was not
enough. I'm not sure whether that's completely
compatible with the Systems Reply or not.

You're right. I'd forgotten about that. It's sort of half way.
The system grounds in the richness of it's interaction
with its environment.

But you're right, we used to have a lot of interesting
people posting who have disappeared, including my old
pal, David Chalmers.

--
Daryl McCullough
Ithaca, NY

Voice from the past: I never endorsed the System Reply when it was all
just symbols, crunching (i.e., when it was Searle plus the handwriting
on the wall, or, worse, when it was Searle, having memorized the
handwriting on the wall, and what would have been multiple personality
syndrome if anyone else were home in his head).

But there is a way of construing the (right variant of) the robot
reply, which is that without robotic capacity, the Turing Test is
incomplete, and with robotic capacity, the computational module (if
any) is just part of the system -- and the system would be the one
that was understanding. (But that still wouldn't be good news for the
computational module.)

For an update, see:

Harnad, Stevan (2001) What's Wrong and Right About Searle's Chinese
Room Argument?, in Bishop, M. and Preston, J., Eds. Essays on Searle's
Chinese Room Argument. Oxford University Press.
http://cogprints.org/4023/

Harnad, S. (2003) Symbol-Grounding Problem. Encylopedia of Cognitive
Science. Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/7720/

Harnad, S. (2006) Cohabitation: Computation at 70, Cognition at 20, in
Dedrick, D., Eds. Essays in Honour of Zenon Pylyshyn
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12092/

Harnad, S. (2006) The Annotation Game: On Turing (1950) on Computing,
Machinery and Intelligence. In: Epstein, Robert & Peters, Grace (Eds.)
The Turing Test Sourcebook: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in
the Quest for the Thinking Computer. Kluwer http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/7741/

See you again in 2027...

Stevan Harnad

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