Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!ucla-cs!smcnet!byoder
From: byoder@smcnet.UUCP (Brian Yoder)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Can Machines Think?
Summary: Symbols in programs
Message-ID: <515@smcnet.UUCP>
Date: 9 Jan 90 11:39:27 GMT
References: <83367@linus.UUCP> <1989Dec18.014229.18058@athena.mit.edu> <GILHAM.90Jan3110834@cassius.csl.sri.com>
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Organization: Santa Monica College Telecom, Santa Monica, CA.
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In article <GILHAM.90Jan3110834@cassius.csl.sri.com>, gilham@csl.sri.com (Fred Gilham) writes:
 
> Brian Yoder writes:
 
> | Consider the real implementation of most programs though.  THey are written
> | in a high-level language like C, Pascal, FORTRAN, or COBOL. That's what the
> | programmer knew about.  The Compiler turns those symbols into symbols
> | that no human (usually) ever looks at or understands.  The end user sees
> | neither of these, he sees the user interface and understands what the 
> | {{program is doing from yet another perspective.  What is the intelligence
> | that understands the machine language symbols?
> 
> I'm pretty sure that you are using the word `symbol' here in different
> ways.  In the case of a programmer writing in some programming
> language, I would say that symbols (at various levels of abstraction)
> are being used.  However, when the program is compiled, the symbols
> disappear.  To say that the compiler turns the symbols into other
> symbols is, I believe, to speak metaphorically.  The point is that
> symbols only exist when there is someone to give them a meaning.
 
> I envision the process in this way:
 
 
>    meaning (in the mind)
>      |                                          computerized
>      |====>symbol==>(some physical pattern)==>syntactic transformation
>                                                      |
>                                                      |
>    meaning<==symbol<==(some physical pattern)<=======|
>    (back in
>     the mind)
 
> It seems to me that the computer starts and ends with the physical
> patterns.  Everything else happens in our heads.
 
> The fact that the transformations themselves can be described
> symbolically tends to fool people into thinking that the computer is
> actually using and manipulating symbols, or even manipulating meaning.
> This has been described as a ``hermeneutical hall of mirrors'', where
> we project onto the computer our own thought processes.  The computer
> manipulates the patterns in ways that are meaningful to us; therefore
> the computer must be doing something involving meaning.  But it isn't,
> any more than the Eliza program actually understood the people that
> talked to it, even though THEY thought it did.

The point I was trying to make was that the information loaded in the memory
of the computer IS a set of symbols.  If anyone bothered to look in there
with a debugging tool they'd see the symbols in there (the machine
language) even though it was never in anyone's head before.  Would
you maintain that in this example they pattern in memory does not 
consist of symbols, then it does after it has been probed by the 
debugger?  That seems a bit odd.  Do they go back into being non-symbols
when the debugger is removed?  Are the words on this screen symbols
when you stop looking at them? When you forget them? When they disappear 
from the screen?  I say that they are carriers of information and exist 
in whatever medium they are expressed in.  Thus, symbols exist all the time
(though perhaps they cannot be translated into certain forms with the
available equipment:

Brain containing      Paper containing     Disk containing 
Symbols         =====>Symbols         ====>Symbols        ===+
                                                             |
                                                        Memory containing
                                                        translated symbols
                                                        (Object Code)
                                                             | 
Brain Containing      Screen containing     Computations     | 
Symbols         <=====Symbols          <====Express Symbols==+

If we had a book written in chinese and all people able to read chinese
suddenly dropped dead wouldn't the things in the book still be symbols?
Would they not still express information?

I don't think a symbol needs to be read for it to be a symbol any more
than a boat needs to float before it's a boat.  What do you think?


Brian Yoder

-- 
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