Talk:Symbol grounding
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[edit] Recommending a little rework
In case I'm not the only one who would have this opinion, I want to mention that the article currently seems a little too biased in the direction of suggesting that proper consciousness identification in others is theoretically not doable and that this is relevant. Now, I shouldn't here want to contend the full implication of whatever might be precisely meant by the phrase containing "proper", but I think we can recognize that if consciousness were slightly reconceptualized, we'd attain a higher quality article.
'Meaning' itself is still a somewhat problematic notion in philosophy, so invoking consciousness as its co-operating associate is probably not contributing much to our understanding of symbol grounding. Consciousness only seems as important as it does – and not that it isn't important – because those of us claiming to have it don't currently possess in our experience repertoires that of other cognitive agents consistently making exact and seemingly uncanny predictions about our behaviors, not to mention our fates. In terms of our potential mercies or decision expectations, we're usually in full control of our robots, from start states to end states, and therefore we don't tend to attribute volitions to them. But suppose we attribute volitions to them anyway for a moment. Then, in terms of volition, the only significant difference that we might notice between them and us is that whereas we perceive their range of actions as strictly delimited, we don't perceive ours as such. Theoretical engineering barriers notwithstanding, we would likely re-evaluate how we currently regard ourselves as 'non-robotic with a mysterious consciousness' if suddenly other cognitive agents began exhibiting behaviors that would compel us to believe that they could predict us as well as we can predict that our microwaves will stop microwaving upon the duration of what we programmed in.
One possible objection to those hypothetical cognitive agents, I imagine, is that we can simply choose a set of acts different than the set we are told that we are predicted to perform. Crucially, however, no ultimate law requires that a puppeteer always tell us exactly what it knows at exactly appropriate times and thus could still know ever without error which set of acts we are to perform. Perhaps early-adopter atheists sometimes overlook this plausibility, so demonstrations involving another human would need to do the compelling. While one human subject is given the deviant role of whimsically either doing X or not doing X when told it will do X, a second human subject – preferably a skeptic – communicably apart from the first subject gets to witness the actual predictions Y made by the super-agent. Of course, the super-agent can't actually depend on mock predictions X to be error-free, especially since the first subject is probably geared to want so much to be "free" and never practically deterministic. (Hopefully, uncanny demonstrations in general will never get threatening, since then the so-called super-agents likely won't be any more interesting than human conspirators.) Appeals to the problem of consciousness, especially as it's associated with humans, can go only so far in explaining the problem of symbol grounding, and hence they're inadequate from the present perspective.
I should leave such a reworking for a later time if no one arrives interested in doing it, or else if it becomes that such a modification won't cause a big controversy. In what's hoped to be a contribution I made earlier today, I included the term 'metamodel', whose unpacking is possibly a heuristic in the proposed direction of trying to depart from consciousness concerns and perhaps going "more technical". Vbrayne 22:35, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
- Simply, if one accepts that there are varying degrees of consciousness, which would include human-level sentience as one particular segment of degrees, then when we say that the problem of meaning is related to the problem of consciousness, of the problem of consciousness we're not really referring to the problem of human-level sentience but instead a broader class of sentience. Some changes were made to achieve coherence. I studied Stevan's papers more thoroughly, then aimed to keep with and not contradict him. Valeria B. Rayne 21:59, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] The Non-Definition of Symbol
The definition of symbol given in the Formulation of Symbol Grounding Problem section is circular. We are told that a "symbol is any object that is part of a symbol system", and that a "symbol system is a set of symbols and syntactic rules for manipulating them...". Perhaps it would be better not to mention the 'definition' and to just delete that paragraph. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Spaecious (talk • contribs) 01:33, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
