From: marky@quip.eecs.umich.edu (Mark Anthony Young)
Subject: Re: grounding and the entity/environment boundary
Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept., Ann Arbor
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 07:35:54 GMT

%r justin@cybernet.cse.fau.edu (Justin Davila)
>There exist intrinsic philosophical problems with the notion of relating 
>the "correctness" or even "accuracy" of computer-attained notions of the 
>universe with any human notions.
>[...]
>However, should a computer disagree, your conclusions would seem to 
>suggest that that computer simply did not have a wide enough bandwidth to 
>ground itself effectively in reality, or possibly the human assistance in 
>the grounding process of a system with limited bandwidth was at fault.  
>Yet there exists another possibility, however counterintuitive and even 
>unsettling it may be: a computer that disagrees with human evaluation of 
>reality may "actually" be right.

This is "actually" what I meant.  The universe decides who is right by
differentially feeding the people who are wrong to the tigers (so to
speak).  I specifically defined grounding in terms of correspondance 
with the world, not with human notions of the world.  If the human cannot
tell that the machine is correct, it does not in any way detract from the
fact that the machine _is_ correct.
>
>This, of course, harkens back to the philosophical problem of "other 
>minds".  If you say the sky is green, even though I and everyone I know 
>agrees that it is blue, how can I really argue?  [...]
>
>[...]               No matter how closely we try to design them according 
>to human standards, who's to say that a computer will be "experiencing" 
>anything close to what we experience (not to mention that I have no idea, 
>really what you "experience").

Whether the experience of the other mind is the same as mine is moot.  We
use the term "blue" to describe the sky, not the experience of seeing the
sky.  If you say the sky is green because you cannot distinguish blue from
green, you are less complete than I am.  If you say it is green because you
can see further into the spectrum than I can, and the mix of colours makes
the experience equal to that you have for other green objects, then I am
less grounded than you.

(More precisely, if we say that experiences are drawn from a set E, then
it does not matter whether person 1 experiences "blue" as "e-235435" and
person 2 as "e-1237658".  When person 1 experiences "e-235435", they say
"blue", which person 2 hears, and infers that person 1 has experienced
something that person 2 would experience as "e-1237658" -- all without
knowing exactly which experience person 1 had.  We can thus abstract over
the set of experiences and speak of the experience of "blue".)
>
>What if a computer tells us it can see auras surrounding humans?  What if 
>it says it sees ghosts mulling about the world among us?  Certainly there 
>would be a blurb in _Omni_ and the embarrassed programmers would set upon 
>reparing the problem.  But... well, you think about it.  This accuracy 
>thing may not be the pinnacle of design.  We may come to the point where 
>we try to fix something that really might not be broke.

If no one thought to investigate _why_ they saw these auras or ghosts, then
the computers would be victims of our ignorance.   The humanity/machinity
system would become less grounded if the machines were "actually" correct.

...mark young
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy