| > The universe does not have a finite symbolic description Why do you believe that? Have you mixed up the universe with Gödel's incompleteness theorems? Your past light cone is finite in current standard models of cosmology, and according to the best available models of quantum mechanics a finite light cone has a finite representation — in a quantised sense, even, with a maximum number of bits, not just a finite number of real-valued dimensions. Even if the universe outside your past light cone is infinite, that's unobservable. > Same is true for the arithmetic performed by neural networks to flash lights on the screen which people interpret as meaningful messages. This statement is fully compatible with the proposition that an artificial neural network itself is capable of attributing meaning in the same way as a biological neural network. It does not say anything, one way or the other, about what is needed to make a difference between what can and cannot have (or give) meaning. |