[pakl]

If you think about it, for embodied agents symbol grounding isn’t really the “problem”.

Rather, embodied agents start with reference and indices. The hard problem is actually ungrounding — which takes work — to eventually get to things that approach what people typically think of “symbols”.

[mikhailfranco]

It's metaphors all the way down, until you hit sensory grounding, space and time.

Discrete objects give integer arithmetic. Correspondence gives equality. Spatio-temporal behavior gives basic logic: concurrent AND, choice OR, inside/outside, under/over, up/down, more/less... Properties and behaviors cluster to give categories in a context. Action frames give role bindings for actors...

It's Lakoff&Johnson all the way down.