Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning. Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not treat of dashes on a bit of paper. Frege's ideas could be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life. And the same, of course, could be said of any propositions: Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would be an utterly dead and trivial thing. And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs can make the proposition live. And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs.
But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we have to say that it is its use.
If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method we just described of replacing this mental image by some outward object seen, e.g. a painted or modelled image. Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead? -- In fact, as soon as you think of replacing the mental image by, say, a painted one, and as soon as the image thereby loses its occult character, it ceased to seem to impart any life to the sentence at all. (It was in fact just the occult character of the mental process which you needed for your purposes.)
The mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign. (One of reasons for this mistake is again that we are looking for a "thing corresponding to a substantive.")
The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.
As a part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever accompanied it would for us just be another sign. — Witt
Derrida, from the outset, will call into question the assumption that the formation of concepts (logos) somehow escapes the primordiality of language and the fundamentally metaphorical-mythical nature of philosophical discourse. In a move which goes much further than Ricoeur, Derrida argues for what Guiseseppe Stellardi so aptly calls the “reverse metaphorization of concepts.” The reversal is such that there can be no final separation between the linguistic-metaphorical and the philosophical realms. These domains are co-constitutive of one another, in the sense that either one cannot be fully theorized or made to fully or transparently explain the meaning of the other. The result is that language acquires a certain obscurity, ascendancy, and autonomy.
It is assumed, not without good reason, that computers are all syntax and no semantics and this fact has very disturbing implications - we pride ourselves at being able to do logic & math, these skills we've decided define us, but this is hard to reconcile with the fact that not another life-form but actually inanimate machines can beat as hands down in both math and logic. — Agent Smith
Semantics is under assault, it's losing the battle - a point in time may come when people will ignore it completely like how computers do today. — Agent Smith
Our gift is not crunching through possibilities. Our gift is the initial abductive leap. We are also radically enworldled. It's very hard to give computers the near infinite background knowledge required for disambigulation. For instance, computers have struggled with 'the box is in the pen.' We humans can guess that 'pen' must refer to something one might keep pigs in rather than a writing utensil. — Pie
If we now believe we are embodied, situated sense-makers, you can be sure we will soon produce machines that echo this. They may be wetware rather than silicon, closer to living things than to inanimate parts. — Joshs
Our machines will always be able to approximate what we do , since they are but practical models influenced by our best explanations of how we think. — Joshs
The book I mentioned shows an awareness of the problem, but this does not mean we will soon have the solution. Can we circumvent or simulate millions of years of evolution? — Pie
The evolution of our thinking machines doesnt simulate a past natural evolutionary process. — Joshs
Our machines dont have to be algorithmic and mathematical. They are that way because we used to assume human cognition was that way. — Joshs
The problem is that we are smarter than are machines still. They can crush us at narrowly specified tasks, yes, but we haven't been able to breath life into them. One might naturally ask how life (our general intelligence) was breathed into us. Evolution (which some describe as an algorithm) created us from something simpler, step by painful step by step — Pie
How do we know that we’re smarter than machines? Machines are texts translated into material processes. — Joshs
The 'phonocentrism' in the philosophical privileging of phonetic over idiographic scripts (as in Hegel) might be explained in terms of hiding from the implications of the hieroglyphic roots of human cognition. — igjugarjuk
I think the experts in the field can be trusted that they haven't achieved the dream — Pie
Perhaps our own species will in the future. — Pie
I welcome all kinds of tangents on this theme, but I continue to be fascinated by the individual's grip or lack thereof on the concepts/hieroglyphs employs. Is knowing what one is talking about more than a practical mastery of token trading? In what sense, if any, is meaning present? — igjugarjuk
In short, that computers have an IQ comparable to a bumble bee says more about us than computers themselves. — Agent Smith
If only. I wouldnt even compare computer intelligence favorably to a virus — Joshs
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