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Well that was brainless. No link; no help. :-/
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Foundations.Cognitive.Science2001/0158.html
Thanks to Joshua Allen for pointing that out.
Just a note on Harnad's commentary and
we can take this private because this isn't
particular to XML. On the other hand, I think
the symbol grounding problem undergirds many
of the discussions of WFness and the utility
of schemas, the need to have a means to
declare semantics, and why in some applications,
predicate logic has to be augmented with other
means.
I think Harnad does not
want to make a simplifying assumption: it does not
matter to the Turing Test that we know if the
computer simulation "feels". It matters that it
can effectively use the symbols we recognize, the signs,
and provide the illusion. The Turing Test has
the problem of the grounding of the tester.
One can fool some of the people some of the time,
and empirical evidence with people who are not
already grounded in computer technology shows
this. Often, they react and expect human
behavior and are only surprised when they
don't get it. Competence in the simulation
cannot be judged independently of the tester.
I believe it is the layering of the simulation
that must be accounted for. Harnad makes the
mistake that for example, love is a thing
we feel. Love is a verb. It is also a thing
we do. Emotions are active but not necessarily
intelligent except insofar as they are sign
producing actions. They are not simply
reflexive, as Gudwin points out, but are
mediated by experience, by a local grounding in
episodic memory. In the Peircean model,
they are close to the real time interface
between the external and internal systems
of the environment and the semiote. If
we compare the human to the computer, we
make a mistake. If we compare the human
to a network, we are closer to the physical
reality of how humans process communications.
Emotions create the right amount of chaos
for the semiote to become creative. Those
who look for reductionist means to make
them predicatble will be disappointed. Those
who observe them to see if they can produce
novel behaviors will be delighted.
len
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