Tags / 6 quotes from 1 source
#symbol-grounding
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
Connectionism as a way to ground symbols
Harnard views connectionism as a good candidate for achieving this grounding, especially when coupled with a symbolic system.
Learning Chinese from a Chinese-Chinese dictionary
First, imagine a native English-speaker learning Chinese, armed only with a Chinese-Chinese dictionary. Harnard likens this to a cryptologist cracking a code.
The symbol-symbol merry-go-round
Could you ever learn Chinese as a first language, with only the aid of a Chinese-Chinese dictionary? Harnard likens this to a symbol-symbol merry-go-round.
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…
Hybrid systems escape Searle's closed world of symbols
It is the connectionist system that supplies the sensory images. By combining symbolic and connectionist systems, Harnard believes we can begin to break out of the closed world of meaningless symbols that Searle discusses.
The Talking Heads experiment
The key insight of the Talking Heads experiment is that agents develop their own individual and internal way of categorising the world they see. While, at the same time, through external communication, they negotiate a shared lexicon. Different agents may be talking about the…