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The Symbol Grounding Problem (1990)
arXiv:cs/9906002v1 [cs.AI] 1 Jun 1999Harnad, S. (1990) The Symbol Grounding Problem.
The patterns change according to internal network constraints governing how the activations and connection strengths are adjusted on the basis of new inputs (e.g., the generalized "delta rule," or "backpropagation," McClelland, Rumelhart et al. 1986). In any case, when we interpret our sentences, mathematical formulas, and chess moves (and perhaps some of our perceptual judgments and motor strategies) as having a systematic meaning or content, we know at first hand that that's literally true, and not just a figure of speech. The fact that formal symbol systems and their interpretations are not the same thing is hence evident independently of the Church-Turing thesis (Kleene 1969) or the Goedel results (Davis 1958, 1965), which have been zealously misapplied to the problem of mind-modeling (e.g., by Lucas 1964) -- to which they are largely irrelevant, in my view.
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