[Wittrs] Re: The Meaning of Knowing Meanings
- From: Gordon Swobe <gts_2000@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2010 04:47:20 -0700 (PDT)
> The question on the table, though, is what does the
> associative process between inputted symbols and retained
> representations that we call "understanding" amount to?
No.
Just trying to help you understand and acknwoledge the 3rd axiom. Nothing else.
It's not complicated.
If you want to know what symbols mean, you will need to know more than their
shapes and more than some shape-based rules for manipulating those shapes.
Right?
Yes or no.
-gts
You don't
--- On Tue, 4/13/10, SWM <wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> From: SWM <wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: [Wittrs] Re: The Meaning of Knowing Meanings
> To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Date: Tuesday, April 13, 2010, 9:26 PM
> --- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
> Gordon Swobe <wittrsamr@...> wrote:
>
> > --- On Tue, 4/13/10, SWM <wittrsamr@...> wrote:
> >
> > > We certainly can understand symbols by knowing
> the shapes and rules
> > > for manipulating them according to their shapes.
> That's how we read and
> > > write, after all.
> >
> > No. The meanings of symbols don't inhere in their
> shapes or in the rules of manipulating them by shape.
> >
>
> I didn't say the meanings "inhere in their shapes or in the
> rules of manipulating them by shape". I said I learn the
> shapes and rules and thereby come to understand their
> meaning by learning this stuff. Yes, something more IS going
> on and that is what I have been asking you to explicate from
> your perspective. After all, a mindless mechanism doesn't
> learn, it is something entities like ourselves do.
>
> What is it to understand on your view?
>
> FYI, on my view, when I learn how to relate the shapes and
> rules of manipulation to my various internal representations
> including my mental images and other recollections, I have
> learned the meanings of those symbols.
>
> The question on the table, though, is what does the
> associative process between inputted symbols and retained
> representations that we call "understanding" amount to?
>
> What is it that the human brain qua machine does and how
> might it do it and why would that be any different, in type,
> from what some manufactured device of sufficient
> sophistication might be able to do?
>
> THIS is what the computationalist thesis is about and it is
> this thesis that Searle endeavors to attack with his CRA, an
> argument that relies on a mistaken intuition about what it
> means to understand anything.
>
> So would you now be kind enough to give us your account,
> Gordon, of what it means to understand if you don't agree
> with the account I have just given? Or, if you do, just say
> so and I will accept that.
>
>
> > If they did then you could understand this sentence
> written in a language you don't know merely from looking at
> the shapes of the symbols and the manner in which the shapes
> relate. But you cannot come to understand symbols in that
> fashion. Right, Stuart? Right?
> >
> > =gtd
> >
>
> Again you are missing the point, Gordon. I AM NOT CLAIMING
> TO UNDERSTAND BY LEARNING ABSTRACT RULES OF MANIPULATION. I
> am claiming that we learn to understand by learning the
> rules as part of a very deep associative process going on in
> our brains and that it is that associative process,
> understood as lots of mindless processes working together to
> produce the sense of having a mind that is what we mean by
> HAVING A MIND.
>
> Those processes are on a par with the various computational
> processes or operations on a computer, i.e., they are
> physically implemented, mindless and part of a highly
> complex system of connected and interactive operations.
>
> The process whereby each of us learns a language, learns to
> read and write, etc., is underlain by a vast and complex
> array of organic but still utterly mechanical processes on
> this view, each of which involves the mindless manipulation
> of information that carries no meaning comparable to the
> meaning we encounter on our level of comprehension and is
> thus functionally equivalent to the man in the CR who is
> just manipulating inputs to generate outputs without any
> awareness of the meanings of the inputs or the outputs.
>
> Your mistake here (I don't think Searle makes this one,
> though) is to confuse what we mean by manipulation of
> squiggles and squoggles on our level of operation with the
> manipulation implemented by a mindless entity on a much
> deeper level.
>
> You, Gordon, confuse the man in the machine with the
> machine itself whereas Searle, to his credit, recognizes
> that the man may not be a real CPU in and of himself but, in
> fact, he plays one on TV qua the CR.
>
> SWM
>
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