I completely agree that Searle believes in magic (aka "intentionality"), which is not useful. But this does not mean the Chinese Room problem isn't real.

I agree that Searle believes in magic, but "intentionality" is not magic (see: almost anything Dennett has written).

When you study human language use empirically in natural contexts (through frame-by-frame analysis of video recordings), it turns out that what we think we do with language and what we actually do are rather divergent. The body and places in the world and other agents in the interaction all play a much bigger role in the real-time construction of meaning than you would expect from introspection.

This sounds interesting. Could you expand on this?

Well, I certainly agree that there are important aspects of human languages that come out of our experience of being embodied in particular ways, and that without some sort of model that embeds the results of that kind of experience we're not going to get very far in automating the understanding of human language.

But it sounds like you're suggesting that it's not possible to construct such a model within a "disembodied" algorithmic system, and I'm not sure why that should be true.

Then again, I'm not really sure what precisely is meant here by "disembodied algorithmic system" or "ROBOT".

For example, is a computer executing a software emulation of a humanoid body interacting with an emulated physical environment a disembodied algorithmic system, or an AI ROBOT (or neither, or both, or it depends on something)? How would I tell, for a given computer, which kind of thing it was (if either)?

Welcome!

Without embodiment to ground meaning, you get into problems of unsearchable infinite regress, and you can easily hypothesize internally consistent worlds that are nevertheless not the real world the body lives in. This can lead to religions and other serious delusions.

Yeah. This, and the "existential angst" thing, seem to be common problems on LW, and I've never been sure why. I think that keeping yourself busy doing practical stuff prevents it from becoming an issue.

When you study human language use empirically in natural contexts (through frame-by-frame analysis of video recordings), it turns out that what we think we do with language and what we actually do are rather divergent. The body and places in the world and other agents in the interaction all play a much bigger role in the real-time construction of meaning than you would expect from introspection.

That's fascinating! What research has been done on this! I would totally be interested in reading more about it.

Hi, everyone. My name is Teresa, and I came to Less Wrong by way of HPMOR.

I read the first dozen chapters of HPMOR without having read or seen the Harry Potter canon, but once I was hooked on the former, it became necessary to see all the movies and then read all the books in order to get the HPMOR jokes. JK Rowling actually earned royalties she would never have received otherwise thanks to HPMOR.

I don't actually identify as a pure rationalist, although I started out that way many, many years ago. What I am committed to today is SANITY. I learned the hard way that, in my case at least, it is the body that keeps the mind sane. Without embodiment to ground meaning, you get into problems of unsearchable infinite regress, and you can easily hypothesize internally consistent worlds that are nevertheless not the real world the body lives in. This can lead to religions and other serious delusions.

That said, however, I find a lot of utility in thinking through the material on this site. I discovered Bayesian decision theory in high school, but the texts I read at the time either didn't explain the whole theory or else I didn't catch it all at age 14. Either way, it was just a cute trick for calculating compound utility scores based on guesses of likelihood for various contingencies. The greatest service the Less Wrong site has done for me is to connect the utility calculation method to EMPIRICAL prior probabilities! Like, duh! A hugely useful tool, that is.

As a professional writer in my day job and student of applied linguistics research otherwise, I have some reservations about those of the Sequences that reference the philosophy of language. I completely agree that Searle believes in magic (aka "intentionality"), which is not useful. But this does not mean the Chinese Room problem isn't real.

When you study human language use empirically in natural contexts (through frame-by-frame analysis of video recordings), it turns out that what we think we do with language and what we actually do are rather divergent. The body and places in the world and other agents in the interaction all play a much bigger role in the real-time construction of meaning than you would expect from introspection. Egocentric bias has a HUGE impact on what we imagine about our own utterances. I've come to the conclusion that Stevan Harnad is absolutely correct, and that machine language understanding will require an AI ROBOT, not a disembodied algorithmic system.

As for HPMOR, I hereby predict that Harrymort is going to go back in time to the primal event in Godric's Hollow and change the entire universe to canon in his quest to, er, spoilers, can't say.

Cheers.

I'd suggest adding separate columns for actual WORK TIME versus total ELAPSED TIME after email turnaround, task switching, sleep, etc.

Prepare kettle of chili from scratch: 40 min work time, 3 hr elapsed time

Read a 350-page novel: 6 hr (work & elapsed)

Read 690 pages of economic history excluding references: 52 hrs (work time), 3 months (elapsed)

Let's see if I can take your college example and fit it to what Freakonics is investigating.

Before you roll the dice, you are asked how confident you are that if the dice roll 6, you will in fact enroll and pay the first semester's tuition at school X and still be attending classes there two months from now. You can choose from:

(a) Very likely

(b) Somewhat likely

(c) Somewhat unlikely

(d) Very unlikely

Then you're asked to give a probability estimate that you will not show up, pay up, and stick it out for two months.

Let's say you're highly motivated to do school and all three school choices are equally wonderful to you. But you don't have the tuition money and all three schools have turned you down for a scholarship. You are determined to work your way through school, but you know that the odds are against you being able to work full time and go to school full time at the same time.

So you estimate the odds against paying the first chunk of tuition and carrying a full load of classes and performing well enough to keep your job at 75%. You know it's going to be pretty damned hard.

All the same, you are confident that you are more likely than not to succeed anyway. You pick "somewhat likely" as your confidence of success.

These two estimates are logically incongruent. What interested me about the Freakonomics study is that the software challenged me on the mismatch. It popped up a dialog that said, in effect, you said you're more likely to succeed than not, but you estimated a 75% chance of failure. It sounds like you've already decided to quit. Are you sure you want to roll the dice?

You can end it there or go on with the roll.

Now doesn't that challenge change the whole feel of the decision for you? It sure does for me.

It's my understanding that, in a repeated series of PD games, the best strategy in the long run is "tit-for-tat": cooperate by default, but retaliate with defection whenever someone defects against you, and keep defecting until the original defector returns to cooperation mode. Perhaps the prisoners in this case were generalizing a cooperative default from multiple game-like encounters and treating this particular experiment as just one more of these more general interactions?

Telms, it seems you are looking to tread in the path of the logical positivists where they sought to sort this out within a context of early Wittgenstein. Taken to the logical extreme with regard to a logical epistemic foundationalism, they tend to be generally dismissed, but in the context of an semantics relavant to general, meaningful discourse, i thought they tended to make a lot of good sense. Ironically, i keep going back to positivism. The irony being in the potential paradoxes of me seeing my self as essentially an epistemic nihilist. lol... I see it all metaphorically as an epistemology modelled visually to appear as ever expanding circles of reasoning, looking like an outward moving psychedelic spiral. If we try to deconstruct that psychedelic, perpetually moving spiral, we reach further and further towards an propositional foundation, but find we can only approach it as an infinitessimal, proposed, but not actually realizable, absolute beginning.

Speaking for a moment as a discourse analyst rather than a philosopher, I would like to point out that much talk is social action rather than reasoning or argument, and what is said is rarely all, or even most, of what is meant. Does anyone here know of any empirical discourse research into the actual linguistic uses of semantic "stopsigns" in conversational practice?