There's much more meaning than can be loaded into statements, thoughts, etc. And conscious will is a post-hoc after effect.
Any computer has far less access to the meaning load we experience since we don't compute thoughts, thoughts aren't about things, there is no content to thoughts, there are no references, representations, symbols, grammars, words in brains.
Searle is only at the beginning of this refutation of computers, we're far more along now.
It's just actions, syntax and space. Meaning is both an illusion and fantastically exponential. That contradiction has to be continually made correlational.
meaning is an illusion? That's absurdly wrong, it's a performative contradiction to even say such a thing, you might not like semantic meaning but it, like information, physically exists, and even if you're a solipsist you can't deny state change, and state change is a meaning primitive, meaning primitives are one thing that must exist.
this isn't woo, this is just empirical observation, and no one is capable of credibly denying state change.
The idea of meaning is contradictory, it's not strictly an illusion. There's a huge difference. State changes mean differences, they don't ensure meaning. This is an obvious criteria. We have tasks and the demands are variable. We can assign meaning, but where is the credibility? Is it ever objectively understood? No. That's contradictory.
You have to look at mental events and grasp not only what they are, both material and process, how the come to happen, they're both prior and post-hoc, etc.
I study meaning in the brain. We are nit sure if it exists and the meaning we see in events and tasks are at a massive load. Any one event can have 100s even 1000s of meaningful changes to self, environment and others. That's contradictory. Searle is not even scratching the surface of the problem.
If that's your position, that's where we disagree, state changes in isolation and state changes in sequence are all meaning.
State change is the primitive of meaning, starting at the fermion, there is no such thing as meaninglessness, just uncomplex, non-cohered meaning primitives, the moment they start to be associated through natural processes you have increasing complex meaning sequences and structures through coherence.
We move up the meaning ladder, high entropy meaning (rng) is decohered primitives, low entropy meaning is maximally cohered meaning like human speech or dna.
Meaning interactions (quantum field interactions) creates particles and information. Meaning is upstream, not downstream.
Now people hate when you point out semantic/structural meaning is meaning, but it's the only non fuzzy definition I've ever seen, and with complexity measures we can reproducably examine emissions objectively for semantinc complexity across all emitter types.
The reason everyone has such crappy and contradictory interpretations of meaning is because they are trying to turn a primitive into something that is derive or emergent and it's just simply not, and you can observe the chain of low to high complexity without having to look at human structures.
This meaning predates consciousness, even if you are a dualist you have to recognize that dna and rna bootstrap each "brain reciever" structure.
Meaning exists without an interpreter, the reason so many people get caught up in the definition is because they can't let go of anthropocentric views of meaning, meaning comes before consciousness, logic, rationality, in the same way the atom comes before the arrangement of atoms rockwise.
Even RNG, the rng emissions from stars lets say, which is maximally decohered meaning, has been made meaningful to the point of extreme utility by humans via encryption.
Now, you may be a dualist, and that's fine, the physical reality of state change doesn't preclude dualism, it sets a physical empirical floor, not an interpretive ceiling.
Even some very odd complaints about human interpretation, like still images being interpreted as movement some how being a problem, in the viewing frame you are 100% seeing state changes and all you need for meaning are state changes, each frame is still but the photon stream carried to our eyeballs is varying, and that's all you need.
Anyway, you make meaning, you are a unqiue write head in the generation of meaning, we can't ex ante calculate how important you are for our causal survival because the future stretches out for an indeterminate time, and we haven't yet ruled out that entropy can be reversed in some sense, so you are an important meaning generator that needs to be preserved, our very species, the very universe may depend on the meaning you create in the network (is reversing entropy even locally likely? I doubt it, but we haven't ruled it out yet, it's still early days.)
Without being a dualist, we can say from neurobiology, ecological psych, coord dynamics, neural reuse that meaning isn't simply upstream.
Technically it can't be because of the language problem is post-hoc.
You're an engineer so you have a synthetic view of meaning, but it has nothing to do with intelligence. I'd study how you gained that view of meaning.
A meaning ladder is arbitrary, quantum field dynamics can easily be perceived as Darwinism, and human speech isn't meaningful, it's external and arbitrary and suffers from the conduit metaphor paradox. The meaning is again derived from the actual tasks, scientifically no speech act ever coheres the exact same mental state or action-syntax.
Sorry you're using a synthetic notion of meaning that's post-hoc. Doesn't hold in terms of intelligence. Not even Barbour (who sees storytelling in particles) et al would assign meaning to Fermions or other state changes. It's good science fiction, but it's not science.
In neuroscience we call isolated upstream meaning "wax fruit." You can see it is fruit, but bite into it, the semantic is tasteless (in many dimensions).
You really seem to be conflating a lot of different things.
I understand you want to make this personal, making unfounded assertion about my training and background, but that's quite weak and also incorrect I think we should expect better of ourselves in discourse.
You seem to confuse semantic and structure with synthetic. Where do respected scientists in the field agree to draw the line between synthetic and meaning? Cite a non woo paper? These are clearly orthogonal concepts.
Barbour is a telling appeal. I don't want to be uncharitable to a new throw away green account but I think you fundementally don't understand what is being said.
You cite these fields as your base but even as fields they are downstream. You seem to be working backwards.
I'd like to see your definition of meaning. You seem to reject semantic meaning as a true form of meaning. So far your definition sounds very fuzzy and possibly confused.
DNA is not synthetic nor posthoc.
I'd really like to see you say something that actually says anything, the non applicable appeals to authority make it seem like you're unable to directly engage with the issue.
Personally I don't think you have shown any evidence of being a neuroscientist which is likely why you are posting on a green account.
Also, it's very common for people who are in a downstream field to view everything through their fields lens and miss the larger picture, a kind of anthropocentric and vocational blindness.
I speculate that you have very strong, poorly defined, metaphysical biases and I'd love to see some counter evidence.
Scientists hacking engineers who pretend meaning is in fermions is one of the great experiences here. Don't sell it short, engineer. Science is coming to overtake binary. And if you ever get to sign a paper for a presidential session at a top-level conference, you'll know what it's like to practice science and not debate ideas merely in social media.
We're probably post-narrative and post-lexical (words) but haven't become aware of what to possibly update these tools with. Post-truth is an abstraction rooted in the arbitrary.
Reality is specific. Actions, materials. Words and language are arbitrary, they're processes, and they're simulations. They don't reference things, they represent them in metaphors, so sure they have "meaning" but the meanings reduce the specifics in reality which have many times the meaning possibility to linearity, cause and effect. That's not conforming to the reality that exists, that's severely reducing, even dumbing down reality.
There is a reality which exists. Words have meaning. Words are more or less true as the meaning they convey conforms more or less well to the reality that exists. So no, truth is not rooted in the arbitrary. Quite the opposite.
Or at least, words had meaning. As we become post-lexical, it becomes harder to tell how well any sequence of words corresponds to reality. This is post truth - not that there is no reality, but that we no longer can judge the truth content of a statement. And that's a huge problem, both for our own thought life, and for society.
Words are merely wax fruit metaphors for meaning, they aren't meaningful in and of themselves. That's how dictionaries exist. Any reality understood from words is mere simulation.
> They respond in much smarter ways than traditional multi-layer perceptrons or traditional RNNs like LSTM networks because their attention mechanisms helps them to make much better sense of the input they were provided by selectively paying more or less attention to different parts of the input (including their output generated so far). This is similar to what humans do.
Was a mistake from the beginning to use language as the basis for tokens and embedded spaces between them to generate semantics. It wasn't thought out, it was a snowball trial and error that went out of control.
Action patterns in syntax? They already exist, the binary chose to forgo that level emulation for arbitrary words, in arbitrary symbols, predicted, geometrically arranged in space as "meaning" as tokens.
I'd suggest comp sci caught the low fruit, whatever comes out of thekeyboard as a basis, non too smart.
Certainly not the best, just the most practical / commercially sell-able. And once a pattern, like LLM text embedding is established as the way to "AGI", it takes years for other more realistic approaches to gain funding again. Gary Marcus wrote about this extensively how legitimate AGI research is actually being put back years due to the LLM superficial AGI hype.
I think the best way would have been to assume thought is wordless (as the science tells us now), and images and probability (as symbols) are still arbitrary. That was the threshold to cross. Neither neurosymbolic, nor neuromorphic get there. Nor will any "world model" achieve anything as models are arbitrary.
Using the cybernetic to information theory to cog science to comp sci lineage was an increasingly limited set of tools to employ for intelligence.
Cybernetics should have been ported expansively to neurosci, then neurobio, then something more expansive like eco psychology or coodination dynamics. Instead of expanding, comp sci became too reductive.
The idea a reductive system that anyone with a little math training could A/B test vast swaths of information gleaned from existing forms and unlock highly evolved processes like thinking, reasoning, action and define this as a path to intelligence is quite strange. It defies scientific analysis. Intelligence is incredibly dense in biology, a vastly hidden, parallel process in which one affinity being removed (like the emotions) and the intel vanished into zombiehood.
Had we looked at that evidence, we'd have understood that language/tokens/embedded space couldn't possibly be a composite for all that parallel.
Thought is wordless. It's made in action-spatial syntax. As these are the defined states of intelligence, this would have been a far better approach to emulate. Words and images are the equivalent of junk code. Semantics can;t be specifically extracted from them.
The effect is easy to grasp, we're moving away from Pleistocene communication technology, which is benchmarked in dated tools like reading, math, SAT/ACT scores. Human intelligence isn't going away, another form of expression that measures intelligence that isn't text or numbers based is arriving, we simply don't have the capability to measure that, though, here clearly are markets for that intelligence.
Any computer has far less access to the meaning load we experience since we don't compute thoughts, thoughts aren't about things, there is no content to thoughts, there are no references, representations, symbols, grammars, words in brains.
Searle is only at the beginning of this refutation of computers, we're far more along now.
It's just actions, syntax and space. Meaning is both an illusion and fantastically exponential. That contradiction has to be continually made correlational.