Ah, don’t get me wrong: I agree that understanding interoperability is the thing to focus on. Indeed, I think perhaps “understanding” itself has something to do with interoperability.
The difference, I think, is that in my view the whole game of interoperability has to do with translating between 1st person and 3rd person perspectives.
Your magic box takes utterances and turns them into interoperable mental content.
My magic box takes non-interoperable-by-default[1] mental content and turns them into interoperable utterances.
The language is the interoperable thing. The nature of the interoperable thing is that it has been optimized so as to easily translate between many not-so-easily-interoperable (1st person, subjective, idiosyncratic) perspectives.
“Default” is the wrong concept here, since we are raised from little babies to be highly interoperable, and would die without society. What I mean here is something like, it is relatively easy to spell out non-interoperable theories of learning / mental content, EG solomonoff’s theory, or neural nets.
Ah, don’t get me wrong: I agree that understanding interoperability is the thing to focus on. Indeed, I think perhaps “understanding” itself has something to do with interoperability.
The difference, I think, is that in my view the whole game of interoperability has to do with translating between 1st person and 3rd person perspectives.
Your magic box takes utterances and turns them into interoperable mental content.
My magic box takes non-interoperable-by-default[1] mental content and turns them into interoperable utterances.
The language is the interoperable thing. The nature of the interoperable thing is that it has been optimized so as to easily translate between many not-so-easily-interoperable (1st person, subjective, idiosyncratic) perspectives.
“Default” is the wrong concept here, since we are raised from little babies to be highly interoperable, and would die without society. What I mean here is something like, it is relatively easy to spell out non-interoperable theories of learning / mental content, EG solomonoff’s theory, or neural nets.