To make my own point that may be distinct from ACP’s: the point isn’t that neural networks don’t know anything. The point is that the level of description I’m operating on when I say that phrase is so imprecise that it doesn’t allow you to make exact demands like knowing “everything the NN does” or “exactly what the NN does,” for any system other than a copy of that same neural network.
If I make the verbal chain of reasoning “the NN can know things, I can know things, therefore I can know what the NN knows,” this chain of reasoning actually fails. Even though I’m using the same English word “know” both times, the logical consequences of the word are different each time I use it. If I want to make progress here, I’ll need to taboo the word “know.”
To make my own point that may be distinct from ACP’s: the point isn’t that neural networks don’t know anything. The point is that the level of description I’m operating on when I say that phrase is so imprecise that it doesn’t allow you to make exact demands like knowing “everything the NN does” or “exactly what the NN does,” for any system other than a copy of that same neural network.
If I make the verbal chain of reasoning “the NN can know things, I can know things, therefore I can know what the NN knows,” this chain of reasoning actually fails. Even though I’m using the same English word “know” both times, the logical consequences of the word are different each time I use it. If I want to make progress here, I’ll need to taboo the word “know.”