Tags / 13 quotes from 6 sources
#symbols
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
The mind as a symbol-manipulating machine
Since Turing’s time, cognitive science has also assumed the mind to be a symbol-manipulating machine, an analogy to the abstract mathematical Turing machine. But as the example of computers that can play chess illustrates, how a computer does math and how a human does math may…
Data - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Information vs data
Beynon-Davies uses the concept of a sign to distinguish between data and information; data is a series of symbols, while information occurs when the symbols are used to refer to something.[5][6] It is people and computers who collect data and impose patterns on it. These…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
Cognition as the manipulation of symbols
The classical approach to AI encompasses a set of principles and practices used to explore the validity of cognitivism, and specifically, to investigate the hypothesis proposed by Newell and Simon. Cognition is best understood as the formal manipulation of symbolic structures.
Thinking as calculation, from Hobbes onwards
The idea that knowledge can be formalized is not new. For centuries the act of thinking has been seen as calculation based on logical reasoning. Newell and Simon’s physical symbol systems hypothesis has its roots in the work of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679).
Can common sense be formalized?
The CYC project is entering its final phase, with Lenat predicting a 50% chance of success. Apart from the practical benefits of a successful CYC project, the theoretical objective is to test Newell and Simon’s hypothesis. Is commonsense something that we can formalize and…
Symbols by themselves are meaningless shapes
Searle’s argument concerns the inability of the symbols being manipulated to mean anything. By themselves, symbols are meaningless shapes realized by, in the case of a conventional computer, a pattern of electrical activity. Any meaning we confer to the symbols is parasitic on…
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.
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.
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Computers manipulate symbols without meaning
as far as human cognition is concerned, such achievements are simply irrelevant. And they are irrelevant for a deep reason: the computer operates by manipulating symbols. Its processes are defined purely syntactically, whereas the human mind has more than just uninterpreted…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Huxley's chair like the Last Judgment
Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgment—or, to be more accurate, by a Last Judgment which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair—I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
We notice only what we can name
It seems that we notice through a double process in which the first factor is a choice of what is interesting or important. The second factor, working simultaneously with the first, is that we need a notation for almost anything that can be noticed. Notation is a system of…