On 16/10/2007, Edward W. Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Josh, your Tue 10/16/2007 8:58 AM post was a very good one. I have just a > few comments in all-caps. > > "The view I suggest instead is that it's not the symbols per se, but the > machinery that manipulates them, that provides semantics." > > MACHINERY WITHOUT REPRESENTATION TO COMPUTE FROM IS OF AS LITTLE >VALUE AS > REPRESENTATION WITHOUT MACHINERY TO COMPUTE FROM IT.
Hmm, how then is a modern PC valuable? It has no representation of the type advocated by AI designers interested in that sort of things. The closest thing it has to a representation of that type is int and floats and how they interact with operators. Highly abstract, and by Turing completeness they are not necessary to make a system that can compute everything it can compute, you could go as highly abstract as a TM. However even lacking a high level representation it can still deal with folders/files, because machinery has been built on top of the abstract low level maths to give these concepts similar meaning to what humans make of them. So I would contend that representation of the world is fully dependent upon the machinery within the system. As I am interested in systems in which the machinery re-configures itself to some degree, there is no such thing as, "The Representation," merely changeable machinery and abstract data that can be viewed as representing things at a point in time. Will Pearson ----- 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=8660244&id_secret=54578761-71460b
