Harnad's symbol grounding paper has been criticized some times, but it remains a seminal idea. The problem faced by many tradicional artificial cognitions is the exclusive reliance on arbitrary symbols, such as linguistic inputs. That approach is appealing, and has fooled (it still fools) many researchers of the field. But it is very difficult to associate intelligent behavior with the manipulation of arbitrary (amodal) symbols. Another way of seeing this is by reading about Lawrence Barsalou's "perceptual symbol systems". Symbolic architectures could live if one thinks about using symbols that maintain some properties of the proximal sensory data captured by the agent. That will allow the "scaffolding" of such symbols with no danger of incurring in the problems reported by Harnad. And that also means that the architecture must have some kind of "statistical layer" capable of creating symbols (and fade to extinction inappropriate ones). This happens, for instance, with blind humans, which are living examples of this possibility.
So now commenting on Waser's question, one may be able to build a system that has "symbolic anchors" instead of real statistical experience (the ones that are directly derived from sensory inputs). However that doesn't preclude the use of statistical methods, latter in the architecture. This is because in order to *create* knowledge (and it's all about self-creation, not of "external insertion"), it is imperative to use statistical (inductive) methods of some sort. In my way of seeing things, any architecture based solely on logical (deductive) grounds is doomed to fail. Sergio Navega. ----- Original Message ----- From: Mark Waser To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2007 9:33 AM Subject: Re: [agi] Symbol Grounding >> a question is whether a software program could tractably learn language without such associations, by relying solely on statistical associations within texts. Isn't there an alternative (or middle ground) of starting the software program with a seed of initial structure and then letting it grow from there (rather than relying only on statistical associations -- which I believe will be intractable for quite some time). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.472 / Virus Database: 269.8.13/844 - Release Date: 6/11/aaaa 17:10 ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=e9e40a7e
