Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina) / quote 42 of 68
Breaking the circle of meaningless symbols
How can symbols ever be grounded by anything but other meaningless symbols? Part of the problem of ascribing meaning to a symbol requires that the circle of meaninglessness be broken. Harnard imagines a classical symbolic system sitting on top of a sub-symbolic connectionist system. Importantly, the connectionist system has inputs that are grounded in the outside world through sensors. In this way, symbolic representations are no longer defined in terms of other symbols, but are instead related to iconic representations which are directly linked to the sensory surfaces of the system.