Connectionists: Statistics versus Understanding in Generative AI.

[Prof Leslie Smith]

Can I suggest that there's a deep philosophical disjunction here.

I'd say that it hinges on whether "Understanding" implies grounded-ness or
not. Does it require the understanding entity to have a model of the
environment into which the information can be placed, or can understanding
be achieved in an abstract system that only has access to a world of
textual data?

One one hand, there's a danger that we imply that understanding only
becomes possible in living systems, whatever the capability of the
synthetic system, and on the other hand there's a danger that we ascribe
understanding to systems that we really shouldn't. Does a thermostat
understand temperature?

This is a difficult question altogether: at what point to we ascribe
understanding to animals? They all behave in ways appropriate to their
environment, from the single celled Paramecium upwards, but we don't tend
to consider them to understand their environment until we consider much
higher animals (like mice or rats).

--Leslie Smith

Gary Marcus wrote:


-- 
Prof Leslie Smith (Emeritus)
Computing Science & Mathematics,
University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA
Scotland, UK
Mobile: +44 7913 219013
Web: http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~lss
Blog: http://lestheprof.com