From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Jun 19 2001 - 17:35:27 MDT
Hm, I personally would say that the sentence is not the words. In other
words, a thought, under the human cognitive architecture and the GISAI
architecture as well, is made up a set of concepts aligned within a
targeting structure; the concepts fire, load their prototypes
(nouns/verbs), modify previously loaded concepts (adjectives/adverbs), and
sometimes reach out to incorporate other current mental imagery
(anaphora), and the result is a thought. If I were to try and communicate
unambiguously, I'd try to do it using direct importation and exportation
of finished thoughts using a very *low-level* encoding, as close to the
modality level as possible, rather than trying to come up with an
unambiguous definition for each of the component concepts. In other
words, export pixels from the visual cortex rather than trying to use a
common dictionary referent for "green". My basic take would be that
thoughts are experiences, even if they're experiences that start out as
sentences, and that trying to unambiguously communicate a thought between
posthumans should be done the same way that experiences would be
communicated between posthumans.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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