Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!markh
From: markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William Hopkins)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Where might CR understanding come from (if it exists)
Message-ID: <1860@csd4.milw.wisc.edu>
Date: 5 Apr 89 22:33:27 GMT
References: <3637@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <820@htsa.uucp>
Sender: news@csd4.milw.wisc.edu
Reply-To: markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William Hopkins)
Organization: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
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In article <820@htsa.uucp> fransvo@htsa.UUCP (Frans van Otten) writes:
>Greg Lee writes:
>
>>These things don't exist ... the effort to program meaning into a
>>machine can never be successful ... because there's simply no such
>>thing in the world to be found in us or to be put into a machine.
>
>The same holds for "understanding".  I define "understanding" as
>"represented in internal symbols".

... and let me add here.  Those "symbols" are the symbolic operations that
control the body's muscular/skeletal functions.  For example, we "understand"
the verb to "move" by relating it to the control we exercise over our muscles;
the verb to "eat" by our ability to eat and digest food and so on.
     These are biological universals of the human race that, in effect, create
a universal semantic formalism for all human languages; which, in turn, gives
us all a common basis for learning our first (and second and ...) language.
     Understanding a *human* language is intimately related to experiencing our
biological condition.
     BTW, just what is CR anyway?