Now I’m stuck trying to distinguish a grounding from a labeling. I thought of a grounding as being something like “atom G234 is associated with objects reflecting visible light of wavelengths near 650nm most strongly”, and a labeling as being “the atom G234 has the label red”.
But this grounding is something that could be expressed within the knowledge base. This is the basic symbol-grounding problem: Where does it bottom out? The question I’m facing is whether it bottoms out in a procedural grounding like that given above, or whether it can bottom out in an arbitrary symbol-mapping. If the latter, then I’m afraid there is no distinction between labelings and groundings if the grounding is intensional rather than extensional/referential.
If I say a grounding is procedural, the argument falls apart, because then you can inspect the system and determine its grounding! But if I don’t, I’m back to having people object that you can swap qualia without changing truth-values.
Qualia are giving me a headache.
BTW, the treatment of truth-value in this outline is shoddy. It’s not really observer-independent, but it takes paragraphs to explain that.
I think the answer lies in drawing two rather arbitrary boundaries: One between the world and the sensory system, and one between the sensory system and the mind. The actual grounding g is implemented by the sensory system. A spurious grounding g’ is one that is not implemented, but that would produce the same propositions in K; so that the mind of K does not know whether it uses g or g’.
Does it matter if K could, in theory, dissect itself and observe its g? Would that in fact be possible; or is the fact that it needs to observe the implementation of its grounding g as viewed through g mean that it cannot distinguish between g and g’, even by “autosection”?
Now I’m stuck trying to distinguish a grounding from a labeling. I thought of a grounding as being something like “atom G234 is associated with objects reflecting visible light of wavelengths near 650nm most strongly”, and a labeling as being “the atom G234 has the label red”.
But this grounding is something that could be expressed within the knowledge base. This is the basic symbol-grounding problem: Where does it bottom out? The question I’m facing is whether it bottoms out in a procedural grounding like that given above, or whether it can bottom out in an arbitrary symbol-mapping. If the latter, then I’m afraid there is no distinction between labelings and groundings if the grounding is intensional rather than extensional/referential.
If I say a grounding is procedural, the argument falls apart, because then you can inspect the system and determine its grounding! But if I don’t, I’m back to having people object that you can swap qualia without changing truth-values.
Qualia are giving me a headache.
BTW, the treatment of truth-value in this outline is shoddy. It’s not really observer-independent, but it takes paragraphs to explain that.
I think the answer lies in drawing two rather arbitrary boundaries: One between the world and the sensory system, and one between the sensory system and the mind. The actual grounding g is implemented by the sensory system. A spurious grounding g’ is one that is not implemented, but that would produce the same propositions in K; so that the mind of K does not know whether it uses g or g’.
Does it matter if K could, in theory, dissect itself and observe its g? Would that in fact be possible; or is the fact that it needs to observe the implementation of its grounding g as viewed through g mean that it cannot distinguish between g and g’, even by “autosection”?