🚀 go-pugleaf

Brian Yoder writes:

| Consider the real implementation of most programs though.  THey are written
| in a high-level language like C, Pascal, FORTRAN, or COBOL. That's what the
| programmer knew about.  The Compiler turns those symbols into symbols
| that no human (usually) ever looks at or understands.  The end user sees
| neither of these, he sees the user interface and understands what the 
| {{program is doing from yet another perspective.  What is the intelligence
| that understands the machine language symbols?

I'm pretty sure that you are using the word `symbol' here in different
ways.  In the case of a programmer writing in some programming
language, I would say that symbols (at various levels of abstraction)
are being used.  However, when the program is compiled, the symbols
disappear.  To say that the compiler turns the symbols into other
symbols is, I believe, to speak metaphorically.  The point is that
symbols only exist when there is someone to give them a meaning.

I envision the process in this way:


   meaning (in the mind)
     |                                          computerized
     |====>symbol==>(some physical pattern)==>syntactic transformation
                                                     |
                                                     |
   meaning<==symbol<==(some physical pattern)<=======|
   (back in
    the mind)

It seems to me that the computer starts and ends with the physical
patterns.  Everything else happens in our heads.

The fact that the transformations themselves can be described
symbolically tends to fool people into thinking that the computer is
actually using and manipulating symbols, or even manipulating meaning.
This has been described as a ``hermeneutical hall of mirrors'', where
we project onto the computer our own thought processes.  The computer
manipulates the patterns in ways that are meaningful to us; therefore
the computer must be doing something involving meaning.  But it isn't,
any more than the Eliza program actually understood the people that
talked to it, even though THEY thought it did.

-Fred Gilham      gilham@csl.sri.com