CF Debate

Intentionality Problem

Overview

Computers simply manipulate symbols, they do not know what those symbols actually mean. Whereas our conscious experience imbues symbols with a grounded meaning.

Responses

  1. Symbolic meaning can be grounded in repeated access to sufficiently consistent input data that embeds those symbols in a web of consistent meanings. Potentially this requires real-world interactions, but this could be incorporated by placing the algorithm in a robot and is in any case an imperfect distinction (input data that we provide in bits to an algorithm is not meaningfully distinct from sensory data from our external environment to the brain).

Further reading