At 10:55 AM 6/15/2007, KCliffer@xxxxxxx wrote:
>Abdul's explanation (below) leads me to the following thoughts:
>
>No matter how "intelligent" the machines are, the symbolic code
>applied to signify some aspect of reality is applied by humans to
>represent that reality - based on the human's interpretation of what
>the represented or signified elements of reality are and do. I don't
>want to get into the fray of whether one should use the term
>"concept" or not - except here, the point is that the application of
>the system in a machine is mediated through human interpretation of
>reality - it is not direct from reality. If the machine "creates"
>its own signification "directly" from reality, it is still done
>through human-designed systems for making the correspondence based
>on human perceptions or rules for the correspondence with reality,
>and is interpreted by the humans assessing its appropriateness, or
>using the results.
>
>Humans have ways of assessing how "accurately" the significations or
>representations apply to or correspond with the represented reality
>- I've been in discussions in this forum previously related to such
>correspondence and its implications for "truth". But however
>divorced from human concepts or ideas the symbols are, we cannot
>escape the fact that they have been devised and are interpreted by
>some path through a human mind, and can only be assessed (so far,
>barring a new level of machine "intelligence") by a human assessment
>of the correspondence with a human interpretation of reality.
>
>To put it another way, the signs are "sensible" (Abdul's word) only
>by virtue of making sense to the human interpreter of them - which
>involves that human's perception of the reality to which they apply
>(dare I say concepts?). "Significance" can be theoretically
>independent of the human interpretation (Azmat's "symbols ... get
>their significance without the mediation of the conceptions of human
>intellect"), but practically speaking, one or more humans assign
>and/or interpret the significance - the correspondence with their
>perceptions of the signified reality. As long as humans are the ones
>using the symbols, we cannot escape the passing of the
>"signification" through the human mind, and therefore an inevitable
>"mediation of the conceptions of the human intellect," despite
>Abdul's indication that they get their significance without it.
> (01)
All of this is well and good. But then again, all use of symbols
involves the activation of brain signals, too. Does that mean that
when I use the word 'potato' I am in fact referring to a brain signal? (02)
I wear spectacles, which means that everything I see involves an
inevitable "mediation of the spectacles". Does that mean that what I
see is spectacles? And is it not odd that I can successfully
communicate with the non-bespectacled about what I see.
Compare, on all of this, the discussion of what David Stove calls
"The World's Worst Philosophical Argument" at:
http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/worst.html
BS (03)
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