Daemon

A fly in a fly-bottle has no understanding of bottles. But it does at least exist as an entity, which is a prerequisite for understanding. A machine (...

Extracting "almost" from those three sentences is a good example of something a computer couldn't do! If you asked a human to identify what the senten...

Interesting thing about definitions: in order to know if you have the correct definition, you need to already understand the thing you are defining.

So for a computer to understand "almost" it has to somehow extract it from that load of drivel? Come on man. Do you think because you don't know anyth...

What's the referent of "almost"?

Not entirely. I apply some logic. I don't think "identity" is important to me...not national identity or any group identity...

I did start my own religion on the internet, years ago. I attracted some adherents! Can't remember much about it but it was called "The New Religion"....

You can't just pick and choose though, can you? I mean if the scepticism is justified, then it doesn't matter if you embrace it or not.

I don't know what you're on about. But oddly enough I do. Oh good.

From what you said previously though, we can't know if we are asserting the same proposition?

I Googled the phrase "Can computers think". I got 21,000 hits, including this, from Oxford University's Faculty of Philosophy (my italics): It seems i...

Tomorrow

Is that "transcending any particular speaker" just a metaphor, a fiction?

But you still think that propositions are special, and the world issues utterances, even though you don't think the world is alive??

That's interesting about Quine. How absolute is his scepticism about communication? (I think the curly c is much prettier than the kicking k in the wo...

I agree that I don't know for sure that my translations can be correctly understood, that's part of my own philosophical position, and I also believe ...

I was kinda hoping you'd realise you couldn't answer the question. In other words, you'd realise that you can't get a computer to understand things in...

What are you still wondering?

Well there are at least two in this discussion, and I was attempting to apply the Principle of Charity, which asks us to: "Assume that the opponent is...

So do I Srap! It seems to have caused nothing but confusion above though. According to my theory the artificial system would need to be able to experi...

This is just a waste of everybody's time. I mean, come back to us when there's a camera that can see and we'll have something to talk about.

That doesn't affect the point of the example. If there were such a place, the computer wouldn't have access to that external set of circumstances. The...

You still aren't getting the point Tim. The two sentences are there solely to provide an example of the limits of machine translation.

Because I was responding to something TheMadFool said, which I quoted at the very start of this thread: We could of course talk about a single languag...

Well, for example, there are sometimes mistakes in the source text. Maybe somebody writes "the saw blade must be touched with the fingers while it is ...

A. The councillors refused to give the protestors permission for their demonstration as they advocated violence. B. The councillors refused to give th...

No you can't. You're missing the point completely.

Not a very clear question Frank. But in 20 years of full time work as a translator I've translated around 10 million words, I very rarely receive comp...

Well, in my translation memory, in my computer, I would have a Dutch word, "banaan", and an English translation, "banana". Can you tell me how I could...

I did not write those sentences, I am not offended, they are not poorly written, and you are still completely missing the point.

It's not a better example, it's just a slightly less interesting example. No, that completely misses the point of my example! The point was to show ho...

I don't know where you got your "rule" from but that isn't how language works. The point of the example, which it seems is rather wasted on you, is th...

You have misunderstood the sentences!

I've done it for you: Understand: perceive the intended meaning of (words, a language, or a speaker).

If you want a dictionary definition, Google it. I'm using the word in the standard way.

But why not? As Wittgenstein famously observed "meaning is use". You can tell what I mean by "understanding" by the way I use it in my examples. I'm u...

No, I think you're not correct Tim. You can take the comma out of both sentences or add parentheses to both if you wish, without affecting the meaning...

Mapping is not understanding, as illustrated by my examples.

I'm not interested in discussing hypotheticals. The Cambridge Dictionary says hypothetical means "imagined or suggested, but perhaps not true or reall...

In science fiction?

But computers don't have sensations, they don't make associations, they don't use representations.

They aren't doing things, we are using them to do things. It's the same with an abacus. You can push two beads to one end of the wire, but the abacus ...

But if you read that article, you can see that bacterial chemotaxis is entirely reducible to chemistry!

My examples were intended to illustrate what understanding is.

We can't, but this is science fiction, not philosophy. I love science fiction, but that's not what I want to talk about here.

But this can't be done without using the brain!

Bacteria can swim up or down what is called a chemical gradient. They will swim towards a source of nutrition, and away from a noxious substance. In o...

A camera does not see. A thermometer does not feel heat and cold. A pressure sensor does not feel pressure.

The examples I gave were intended to illustrate that semantics isn't simply mapping! Mapping is possible with computers, that's how my CAT tool works....

You are speaking rather loosely here. Exaggerating.