From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: grounding and the entity/environment boundary
Date: 6 Jan 93 00:26:43 GMT
Organization: SPSS Inc.

In article <C0D7qA.LML@iat.holonet.net> ken@iat.holonet.net (Ken Easlon) writes:
>My view (subject to change when countered by a good argument) is that HBSME
>shapes the sensory equipment early in life, and our developing and mature
>consciousness only receives highly filtered narrow band information.  

I would contest this statement-- *my* brain, for instance, provides my
consciousness with extremely high resolution visual input-- but I'm not
sure it matters, because I don't know that groundedness can be attributed 
to parts of systems (e.g. "consciousness") as opposed to whole systems
(e.g. the brain).  To put it another way, we readily call brains grounded,
and brains have high-bandwidth sensorimotor experience.  I think these two 
facts are related-- I suspect "meaning" resides in that mass of experience,
and the amount of information available to one's consciousness is simply
irrelevant to this.

>It could be that I'm still not tracking you on exactly what you mean by
>grounding, but I'm tentatively defining it as the ability to project the
>appearance of knowing what one is talking about.  To get around the
>limitations of the Turing test here, you are allowed to specify additional
>tests other than conversation.  If you've administered the tests of your
>choice and the individual still appears (to you) to know what he's talking
>about, then he passes your grounding test.

Your definition is recursive-- it amounts to saying groundedness is the
ability to look grounded... this is why you should never offer definitions
in comp.ai.philo. :)  

>Suppose it seems to you that I don't know what I'm talking about today, but
>in a few months I come back after having read Searle, Harnad and Lakoff and
>sound thoroughly "grounded".  Do I require high bandwidth sensorimotors
>to read, or to think about what I've read?

Sure: you couldn't possibly understand Searle et al. without the huge mass
of sensorimotor experience you already possess.  

I don't deny that you can acquire new knowledge by purely conceptual means,
such as by reading a book.  Perhaps we're simply disagreeing on the relative
importance of the two ways of acquiring knowledge.  If I seem to weight
sensorimotor experience very highly, it's because that's where I think many of
the interesting questions for AI lie.  Implementation of the other approach, 
conceptual learning and reasoning, strikes me as pretty straightforward
(thanks to 40 years of AI, of course).

>>But go ahead, explain color to a blind man, or sex to a virgin, or poverty
>>to a Republican, so that they know what you're talking about as well as
>>you do, using language alone.  Good luck... 
>
>BLIND MAN.  [...] A blind person would stand as good a chance of
>convincing me as a sighted person simply by SAYING he was once sighted, and
>by saying red is the color of apples and green is the color of... green
>apples.
>
>VIRGIN. There's really no way for the outside observer to tell, is there? 
>I understand hymen reconstruction is big business in Japan.  I would
>venture that more than once a man has bedded one when he thought she was
>the other.

Your responses address the question of testing for understanding.  That's the 
easy part, relatively.  I was asking how you *produce* that understanding, 
simply by verbal means, which should be possible if "the bulk" of groundedness
is acquired by conceptual means.

>>>I think the proof is in the pudding.  If the AI does it's job, then it's 
>>>grounded enough.   
> 
>>Nonsense.  The job of the top chess programs is to play chess, and they do
>>it very well; are they grounded?  Obviously the job has to have something
>>to do with tasks for which humans need to be grounded-- and even there
>>effective performance is no proof; a computer might be able to execute
>>those tasks in a different way, without needing to be grounded at all. 
>
>It seems to me that the requirement for grounding is simply a matter of
>adding one more detail to the job description, "in addition to primary
>duties, the candidate must be able to project (to Mark Rosenfelder) the
>appearance of knowing what he or she is talking about."

That's not exactly a detail.  It's a very different thing to write a program
to play chess, vs. writing one to play chess and project to a human being
the appearance of knowing what it's talking about.  
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy