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. As Derrida famously noted, it's easy to understand the voice to have a special relationship with meaning. Sound is as invisible as the spectral entities understood to ride 'inside' words (another metaphor, another picture.) It's hard to believe that a sequence of banal pictures can deliver the perfect presence of an non-pictorial 'content,' as Wittgenstein points out in the quote above. Philosophy understands himself to transcend myth. Metaphors may be acceptable in their proper, subordinate place. Once they escape, though, we have chaos and sophistry.
https://iep.utm.edu/met-phen/#SH1c

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.

Personally I don't want language to run away with us, and I don't want reason flood by ambiguity. But, just as knowing that passion distorts reason isn't the end of our responsibility for inferences, it's also the case that an awareness of the pictorial roots of our thought doesn't abolish our need to maintain discipline and avoid being misled by analogy. As Wittgenstein put, there's war to be fought against bewitchment, which may include avoiding being bewitched by talk of witches. Language on holiday and flies in bottles are of course metaphorical. So the cure is made from the poison. A series of metaphors, a series of crowbars, each used to jam in the crust of the others.

This maybe off-topic, so in advance, a thousand apologies.

Mathematics & Logic seem to be reducible to algorithms of such low intelligence index that even mechanical machines and their successors electronic computers can perform them, not only that these contraptions can do it orders of magnitude faster, they do so with zero errors (re calculators & computer-generated proofs).

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.

In short, semantics, our forte, our strong suit, feels so small and insignificant compared to syntax, every computer's schtick!

Add to that the fact that semantics/meaning is a controversial subject in philosophy. 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.

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

I just read Erik Larson's The Myth of Artificial Intelligence. He makes a strong case that computers are doomed to stupidity, unless a necessarily unpredictable conceptual revolution changes the scene entirely. He unveils what in retrospect looks like an absurdity at the heart of the 'theology' of The Singularity.

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.

We must be fair though. With the internet and advances in hardware, enough data and compute became available for brute-force-ish statistical methods to succeed to a practical level at simple translation. This is certainly a triumph, but I'm not holding my breath for the HAL-9000's insightful review of A Spirit of Trust.

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

Perhaps the reverse is true. Semantics is central, and computers may only reveal that by contrast.

Somehow our heiroglyphs (metaphors) gather a meaning not originally there...a new abstract sense. The original image can fade completely.

'Life' emerges from the PIE root *leip- "to stick, adhere."
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=life

Life sticks around, a pattern that endures by self-replication. It's as if life doesn't want to go away.

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

It makes sense that a machine we call a ‘computer’ will be expected to interact with us via symbolic computation. As long as a representational, symbolic calculative model continues to ground our understanding of our thinking machines, we have no reason to expect that faster speed and greater memory capacity will achieve embodiment and adductive leaps.

The fact that we now see our own cognitive functioning differently than we did when we relied on computational metaphors to explain human mentation means we that we ready to move beyond the era of computing machines. 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. As such they are our appendages , and what they can do , and how they do it , evolves along with our understanding of what we do and how we do it.

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.

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

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?

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

AI has had several heartbreaking winters. The most recent 'thaw' was the success at deep learning at task like translation and image recognition. With mountains of data, fast hardware, and efficient algorithms, very narrow tasks now have famously brittle solutions.

Our self-knowledge seems more 'semantic' or linguistic that algorithmic and mathematical, even if we can of course model ourselves that way too.

Our self-knowledge seems more 'semantic' or linguistic that algorithmic and mathematical, even if we can of course model ourselves that way too. — Pie

Our machines dont have to be algorithmic and mathematical. They are that way because we used to assume human cognition was that way.

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

This sounds like an example of treating history ( in this case natural history) as the ‘weight’ of the past. Technology , as human cultural evolution in general, was never about simulating a past, but rather constructing a future that moves further and further away from its past. The evolution of our thinking machines doesnt simulate a past natural evolutionary process.

The evolution of our thinking machines doesnt simulate a past natural evolutionary process. — 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. So far as I know, that's our only hint.

Note that AI started with grand plans for a human-like Turing-test-passing conversationalist. It was forced to settle for less. It's not that we just realize that we should ask for more. We always wanted to play God and create the ADAM-9000.

Our machines dont have to be algorithmic and mathematical. They are that way because we used to assume human cognition was that way. — Joshs

What else do you have in mind if not life itself ? We are the semantic computers that we'd like to be able to build out of something else than our own flesh. The easy route for generating general intelligible is just parenthood. This brings an ethical issue to mind. If we succeed too well, we might be guilty of attempted slavery. What do we want these things for ? Probably to work, possibly also as pets.

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. If we are smarter than machines than we are smarter than the texts we create. But wait a minute. Who is this ‘we’ that I am referring to? We only know about this ‘we’ who is smarter than the text describing our machines by virtue of another text that represents our understanding of what ‘we’ can do that machines can’t.

So it looks like a competition between two kinds of texts, one of which uses a symbolic computational language and the other a language we haven’t clearly articulated yet. That is to say, this second text hasnt been clearly enough articulated in order to render it as a new kind of machine text that functions comparably to the ‘we’ text.

The problem with generating a satisfying new machine text (and material machine) isn’t due to our current machine models not being ‘alive’. They are very much alive in the sense that they express an objectively causal metaphysics that we have traditionally relied upon to articulate both our understanding of the living and the non-living.
The problem lies in our dualistic causal model of the living that makes it necessary to split it off from the non-living via some kind of gap or gulf, the ‘breath’ or spirit of life, and encourages us to talk of natural history in terms of algorithmic processes. An algorithmically generated history is not a genuine history , it is what post-structuralists call a ‘historicism’ , which is no history at all , and no temporalization at all. It is the attempt to arrest time and change by enclosing it within a scheme.

The problem is not that we don’t know how to create life out of the inanimate , our machine texts are already animate in that they are interactive texts. The problem is that we don’t have an adequate enough understanding of what it means to be animate. Our machines will ‘come to life’ as we continue to progress in our understanding of the life we and our machine appendages already are. Our technological advances will provide this insight by transforming our living engagements with our machines, not by recapitulating earlier steps in our own evolution, but by inventing new steps. That is precisely what our machines are and do. They contribute to the creation of new steps in natural evolution, just as birds nests, rabbit holes , spiders webs and other niche innovations do. Saying our machine are smarter or dumber than us is like saying the spider web or birds nest is smarter or dumber than the spider or bird. Should not these extensions of the animal be considered a part of the living system? When an animal constructs a niche it isnt inventing a life-form, it is enacting and articulating its own life form. Machines, as parts of niches , belong intimately and inextricably to the living self-organizing systems that ‘we’ are.

How do we know that we’re smarter than machines? Machines are texts translated into material processes. — Joshs

Turing machines are very limited kinds of texts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine

I think the experts in the field can be trusted that they haven't achieved the dream. I did low-level research in this field myself (so I'm neither expert nor total outsider.) It's demystifying. SGD is just a crude but surprisingly effective search through parameter space, glorified curve fitting.

Perhaps some alien species already has managed something more exciting. Perhaps our own species will in the future.

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

'Might be explained' might be reduced to a one dimensional string. Each atom computed one at a time. And then knitting rebuilds the world as interlocking network - the screen refreshed in the blink of an eye - almost as if more than one thought can be entertained at the same time.

Meanwhile, the world has changed everything, all at once, and I cannot hope to keep up; I can barely walk and chew gum at the same time. That's how single minded I am.

I think the experts in the field can be trusted that they haven't achieved the dream — Pie

What exactly does this dream consist in? I would
think those most likely to break through to new dimensions of thinking concerning what machines can do would not be experts within the field as it currently defines itself, but instead be located OUTSIDE the field.

Perhaps our own species will in the future. — Pie

Why ‘perhaps’? What sort of mysterious barrier are you erecting in your imagination to technological innovation in this area? Maybe the dream is caught up within its own algorithmic prison . Rorty once described progress in thinking as more a matter of changing the subject than of elaborations of a theme, more a matter of dissolving problems rather than solving them, making the old ways ‘not even wrong’. The problem with both realism and its counterpart, anti-realism, is it believes ‘the way things really are’ is a metaphysical rather than a contingently , historically relative constraint. This is true of Popperian falsificationism , and even Hegel’s relativism was trapped within an algorithmic dialectical cage.

What you say is true of course - computers are, to put it bluntly, dumb but do remember they're showcased as the ultimate human invention. Odd that, oui monsieur? In short, that computers have an IQ comparable to a bumble bee says more about us than computers themselves.

Anyway, do Wittgenstein's language games have any bearing on the issue? On such a view, playing a different language game (meaning is use) could be conflated with stupidity.

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

I've been reading several books that seem relevant to the issues you've raised." By "been reading" I mean that I've started them and they're sitting on my table gathering dust.

• "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” by Julian Jaynes - This is an odd book presenting an odd idea that I don't really buy. Even so, Jaynes has a really interesting section upfront where he describes how consciousness is built on a foundation of metaphor.
  
  
• “Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking” by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanual Sander - As you can see from the title, this book has a similar view, although the book has a broader scope than just consciousness.
  
  
• "Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson - This book has a similar idea, but focuses on metaphors that are built into language rather than those which we create ourselves to connect ideas that might not seem connected, but which have personal meaning for each of us.

Looking at my own thought and memory processes introspectively, I have always noted a metaphorical component. I have noticed that my ideas, memories, feelings generally have imaginary tags attached. The tags might be feelings, moods, or images. An idea with a particular tag tends to bring to mind those with similar ones. Letters and numbers tend to have colors associated with them. I'm not proposing that is how it works for everyone. It is my idiosyncratic way of seeing things, but I think it's consistent with what the authors are talking about.

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.

If only. I wouldnt even compare computer intelligence favorably to a virus — Joshs

Did a quick google search. There's no consensus on what the IQ of a computer is. Some even say it's 0. I wonder what Garry Kasparov (lost to Deep Blue) and Lee Sedol (lost to AlphaGo) have to say about this. :chin: