[srean]

That might only get to a point that there is an understanding that something called "chrome red" exists. But for a blind child who isn't exposed to the concept of vision, let alone color. It's just a name and relations with other names. That lacks semantics.

Without grounding in some form of experience one can learn grammar and syntax but not understanding. "Chrome red" is a whole lot easier to teach than say the concept of "jealousy" when that's not part of a shared world of experience.

It's possible to learn a dictionary without understanding any of what those words mean. Dictionary just gives relations among the dictionary words themselves. That's it.

It takes a sensory or emotional experience to ground those words for learning.

Nouns are easy because you can point and teach, that there is a correspondence with the word 'apple' and the physical object that you are experiencing now. Abstract concepts emotions are much harder. There the need for shared experience is much stronger.

There's quite a bit of recorded knowledge for these things. Experiences of Hellen Keller. There's a story of a deaf man who could use sign language, but had an overwhelming and tearful experience in his thirties when it finally clicked that the sign for a 'door' has a correspondence for a door that his teacher was pointing at. Till that point, signing was just some meaningless ritualistic ceremony that needed to be mastered for social acceptance.

[charcircuit]

I'm not sure what you are trying to argue. That it's impossible to translate between blind and sighted people because they don't "truley" experience color? That's clearly not the case. Even with emotions different languages independently came up with words for them and we can still translate between those languages.

[srean]

I elaborated here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43684124

> Even with emotions different languages independently came up with words for them and we can still translate between those languages.

Of course. That's a no-brainer that different human languages have come up with names for experiences they share.

The hard part is learning the correspondence between say two nouns in different languages that mean the same thing.

Its perfectly possible for an unsupervised ML to use the French word 'rouge' in a French sentence but the notion that 'rouge' corresponds to 'red' in English has to come from some shared grounded experience/emotion.

The French word x word relationship graph has to get connected to the English word x word relationship graph.

BTW for people born deaf and blind it's an enormous challenge just to get to the point where the person understand that things have names. For example for Hellen Keller, it was a very non-trivial event when it finally clicked that the wet sensation she was feeling had a correspondence with what her teacher was writing on her arm. They were lucky that wet was an experience that was common between her and her teacher, lucky that Hellen Keller could experience wetness. Someone or something has to play the same role for dolphins and us. Just a corpus will not suffice.