Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!cbnewse!rhb
From: rhb@cbnewse.att.com (richard.h.bradley)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: You can't get semantics by playing with syntax.
Message-ID: <1990Nov19.215824.7547@cbnewse.att.com>
Date: 19 Nov 90 21:58:24 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 26


The argument can be suggested by considering an analogy used elsewhere.
As digestion requires chemical interaction with a substrate, so thought
requires semantical interaction with some object.  Formal simulation -
incremental description of the process - will not digest an apple or
create an idea.

This is of course not a logical argument.  Nevertheless, it is a statement
that may be true or false, and perhaps deserves attention.

Through I/O devices, models of formal systems are able to interact with
external physical objects.  Thus internal syntactical operations
are able to affect and be affected by external things.  This critical I/O
interface introduces all the semantics that should be relevant.  (Of course
a typewriter interface will not produce the same semantics as a rod/cone/
muscle/sinew interface.)

The correctness or error of the subject statement may turn out to be
unimportant.  If the output of the entire system is best explained as an
interaction of thoughts, ideas, and circumstances, then it seems practical
to ascribe thoughts and ideas to the system.  Although to affect the world
an idea must have substance, the particular substance would seem not to be
significant.  (Perhaps a dualist will disagree.)

Dick Bradley
att!cbnewse!rhb