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by twitchard
358 days ago
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Why do you think that the human mind can contain semantics but a machine cannot? This argument needs some sort of dualism, or what Turing called "the objection from continuity" to account for this. FWIW I don't think that the "triangularity" in my head is the true mathematical concept of "triangularity". When my son e.g. learned about triangles, at first the concept was just a particular triangle in his set of toy shapes. Then eventually I pointed at more things and said "triangle" and now his concept of triangle is larger and includes multiple things he has seen and sentences that people have said about triangles. I don't see any difficulty with semantics being "a matter of image", really. Why do we believe that semantics can exist in the human mind but cannot exist in the internals of a machine? Really "semantics" I had come across this Catholic philosopher: https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/03/artificial-intellig... who seems to make a similar argument to this; i.e. that it's the humans who give meaning to things, "logical symbols on a piece of paper are just a bunch of meaningless ink marks" |
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Because I know human minds have semantic content (it would be incoherent to deny it, as the denial itself involves concepts), and because I know the definition of what a computer is, which is that it is a purely syntactic formalism. Anyone who knows the history of computer science will know that computation was intentionally defined as a purely syntactic process. And because it is syntactic, we can mechanize it using physical processes. And no amount of syntax ever amounts to semantics, just as so matter how many natural numbers you add, you'll never get a pineapple or even the number pi. How could it?
Whether this entails dualism or not depends on what you mean by "dualism". It does not entail Cartesian dualism, though a Cartesian dualist can accept this view as presented.
> seems to make a similar argument to this; i.e. that it's the humans who give meaning to things, "logical symbols on a piece of paper are just a bunch of meaningless ink marks"
We don't give meanings to things per se. The meaningless ink marks on a piece of paper mean just that: ink marks on a piece of paper. Those are still meanings. However, writing involves the instrumentalization of physical things to make conventional signs, and signs are things that stand in for something else. So, yes, we can make ink marks with which we associate certain meanings and agree to a convention so that we can communicate.
> FWIW I don't think that the "triangularity" in my head is the true mathematical concept of "triangularity".
What is the "true mathematical concept"?
Concepts can be vague (though triangularity per se is so crisp and simple that I reject the idea that you don't have a clear idea of "triangularity" as such), and we usually do not explicitly grasp all that's entailed by them. For example, people knew what triangles were before they learned that the sum of their angles is always 180 degrees. The latter falls out of an analysis of the concept. And this law applies to all triangles because it necessarily falls out of the concept of triangularity, not because we've empirically shown that all triangles seem to have this property, approximately.
> I don't see any difficulty with semantics being "a matter of image", really.
Your son, as he was learning, was abstracting from these individual examples. He realized that you don't mean this triangle, or that triangle, but something both have in common, and ultimately, that is triangularity, which is not just a property or feature of a given triangle, like "green" as in "green triangle", but the what of a triangle. But if you reduce concepts to images, you end up with problems and paradoxes. For example, why should a collection of these things, to the exclusion of those things, be triangles? Or the number three: you have never encountered the number three. Or the notion of similarity between images. There are well known issues with an imagist notion of the mind.