The only advantage Python has as a beginner language is the interactive mode. I'd go with BASIC or Logo instead -- they have the same advantage without the drawbacks. (The former on an old early 80's micro [real hardware, not an emulator] to add a bit of novelty.)
"User-replaceable" had a different definition then, when a large number of computer hobbyists were perfectly comfortable servicing electronics themselves, iron in hand.
I very seriously doubt that I'm the only one who predicted this more than a decade ago, back in the PDA era.
Still, being Android, I don't expect this to take off. While I'm a huge RIM supporter, the only player I can really see winning in this market would be Microsoft. A shame, really.
Dedicated keyboards on smartphones are never again going to lead the market. It's over.
Outside of "flagship" phones, phones with slide-out keyboards are becoming increasingly popular, especially among women.
Sort of stunning how you blithely ignore the empirical evidence of people voting with their dollars.
Touch screens are just the current fashion. Remember pen computing? That lost out to RIM's brilliant screen+keyboard smart phones. Touch screens were in, out, now they're in again -- just like every other fashion.
Current touch screens, as others have pointed out, have serious short-comings. They're not the future, they're the present. 10 years from now, we'll have something better and we'll all wonder what collective insanity made us want to use an all-touch interface in the first place.
Two recent innovations that attempt to overcome the usability nightmare that is the capacitive touchscreen include the Galaxy Note and the Bold 9900. The Bold keeps the incredibly good physical keyboard and trackpad for tasks that are better served by those input methods and offers a touchscreen on top for the few tasks that are well served by finger-fondling. The Galaxy Note gives users a stylus for precision work; absolutely brilliant for jotting quick notes and tasks that require precision (think working with text, hitting small targets on websites, etc.) The Note is optimized for two-handed use, the Bold for single-handed use.
I expect both approaches to find their way in to competing handsets over the next few years. I'll make my prediction to counter yours: The all-touch UI fad will be dead in 5 years and replaced with interfaces that don't sacrifice usability for the illusion of 'ease of use' -- they'll actually be easier to use.
Whereas Palm actually assembled a team and put in a decent last ditch effort to make a revolutionary new product, RIM has done nearly nothing.
Except migrate to a new, best-in-class, operating system, revamp their management tools (which were already the most sophistocated on the market), dramatically improve their developer tools (providing numerous ways for devs to build apps, including an NDK) update their UI completely (they've redefined the touch-interface -- it makes Apple's UI look like a joke from 1994). Oh, and created brilliant solutions to new problems like BlackBerry Balance.
Really, they were never resting on their laurals. The much-loved Pearl line made the transition from feature-phone to smartphone simple for users used to the form-factor, sure-press turned users off but was undoubtedly innovative, the style never took off, but the clamshell style smartphone was just one of many dramatically different from-factors that RIM offered to the consumer market while they were still undeniably the #1 smartphone manufacturer in the world.
They weren't slow to change, they did nothing but change!
Their new technology is well ahead of the competition both technically and in terms of UI. Tools like Bridge take integration to a whole new level. Balance and Fusion set new standards for managed devices -- and that's an area where they were already the unquestioned leader-of-the-pack. Now their users can get freedom and security, something you'll never get from Apple.
RIM has made radical changes from top to bottom. Their new UI is a generation ahead of iOS and Android as is their OS -- Multitasking, notifications, messaging in the mobile space are redefined in their new revolutionary platform.
Try to keep up. You're embarrassing AC's everywhere!
Don't you think that state-level governments are just as capable of making incompetent decisions based on marketing bullshit as upper-level managers?
Remember IBM's problems with BYOD? Yeah, none of those are issues with RIM's platforms. BlackBerry Balance keeps personal and business use separate. You can't drop corporate data into the personal side, for example. The user gets to use the device how they see fit, without compromise, and the business gets all the benefits of a locked-down device with best-in-class device management just like before.
Maybe some day other mobile platforms will catch up. As it stands now, there is only one enterprise ready mobile solution.
It's not letting me put greater than and less than symbols around 'xterm', it just removes it. Quotation marks don't help, dumb.
Try < and >
<xterm> The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
I'm not worried about RIM going under. They've been supposedly dying for years, but they just now posted their first quarterly loss. (Even with non-competitive handsets, they were still profitable. The 9900 is amazing, but you get my meaning.) Their customer base is growing and they've got plenty of cash on hand. They've got a fantastic suite of new development tools, best-in-class new remote management software, business friendly features like Balance, and a new operating system that is, by any metric, a cut above the rest Their app library is also growing like crazy and they're doing a fantastic job of recruiting new developers with a fantastic and varied suite of development tools. The handsets out this fall running their new OS look to be exceptionally high-end, with a brilliant UI.
RIM is hardly dying. They're a popular whipping-boy, but there are other companies doing far worse than RIM that don't get the same media bashing. When is the last time you heard that Sony is dying? They're worse off than RIM, and don't appear to have a strategy moving forward.
RIM is in no danger of "going under any day". That's been the line everyone's been chanting for the past year or so, sure, but that whole time their customer base was growing at an alarming rate and they were posting profits every quarter.
Good can't do half of what RIM's management software can do. Their new Fusion software can also manage other platforms in addition to BlackBerries -- including iOS and Android. Good is okay, but it doesn't compare to RIM's best-in-class tools.
Even cooler, with BlackBerry Balance, you can seamlessly separate work and personal use on the device. No worries about copying corporate data to personal accounts.
Add to that the above-par remote management features and it's not even a choice -- there is only one enterprise-ready mobile platform.
. $60 for that AAA game which gets a total of 5-10 hours of play
Really? Admittedly, I don't play a lot of games, but that seems outrageous. What has happened to games in recent years?
I remember a piece by John Stossel that claimed some kids spent 20+ hours a week playing "Doom". If all you're getting is 5-10 hours out of a $60 game, I'd stop buying games!
Indeed. The "invisible hand of the free market" doesn't reach out to correct markets, it reaches out to touch you in the butthole.
Re:It's not just specialization, there is also fea
on
Where's HAL 9000?
·
· Score: 1
Of course, this is not going to influence your position, because you believe that it is self-evident that syntax is insufficient for semantics
Indeed, your belief that Searle inadequately defends the assertion is irrelevant to me. "Searle didn't do a very good job of defending the claim" would be a very silly reason to reject for me to reject the premise! I'd need a real reason as the claim to me seems obvious on its face.
I don't see it as self-evident at all, since, again, semantics is an association between a sign and the signified, and those associations are one kind of thing a syntactic system can compute.
That's because you're confusing syntax with semantics. Redefining semantics in terms of syntax doesn't get you anywhere as we're no longer talking about the same thing. Relationships between symbols are indeed syntactic -- and as the dictionary example I offered you illustrates, can not give rise to semantics.
In the argument, the man in the Chinese room is a substrate for the computation, just part of the machine. We don't expect individual neurons to understand Chinese, or individual transistors, so we should also not expect the man in the room to understand Chinese.
Had you read a little further, you'd know that this was addressed already by Searle in the 1980 paper . Imagine now that our victim in the room get's so good at his job that he's memorized the rule book and can carry out his shuffling without reference to the book. Here, the entire process happens "inside his head". Still, the mere application of the rules is still not sufficient for meaning even though the whole operation is taking place inside a living brain!
If you need a simpler example, consider if he internalized a Chinese version of Weizenbaum's ELIZA program (which passes the Turing test to some degree -- ask his secretary) Add additional complexity to the rules slowly and you'll see that at no point can we introduce something new from which semantics can arise -- it's just more of the same meaningless manipulation of symbols.
Replies like the robot reply try to sneak semantic content "through the back door" as it were, by trying to trick us into introducing phenomenal experience. In the robot case, we have a camera in which our prisoner can see the external world. It fails, of course, when we replace the camera with an analog to what our brain gets -- more meaningless symbols. Now the situation is worse, not only can we see that the man won't learn Chinese, he can't even tell which slot introduces questions and which introduces visual information! (It's equally clear in the original that the man had no way to determine even something as simple as that he was getting questions and producing answers. Semantics at the very highest level of description are still unavailable to him!)
The only way out appears to be to introduce a non-computational component to "bridge the gap". Hence, syntax alone is insufficient for semantics.
(It doesn't take much of a leap here to make the claim that phenomenal experience is the missing piece requisite for semantic content. From which we can conclude that phenomenal experience can't be computational.)
And with this, I will conclude my participation in this discussion.
Wait... are you saying to ignorance is prerequisite to innovation?
Re:It's not just specialization, there is also fea
on
Where's HAL 9000?
·
· Score: 1
Aha! here's the issue. Searle specifically does not take that claim as axiomatic in the argument proper. From page 422 of Behavioral and Brain Sciences Vol 3 No. 3:
What a pointless thing to argue. In the 1980 paper, he does indeed spend a great deal of time defending the proposition -- he doesn't provide the formal argument everyone is familiar with until later (1990), where it is indeed taken as axiomatic. However, as early as 1983 Searle writes "2. Syntax is not sufficient for semantics. That proposition is a conceptual truth. It just articulates our distinction between the notion of what is purely formal and what has content." from Minds, Brains, and Science pp. 28-41
So, yes, I stand by my assertion that the illustration is indeed a waste of time to argue about -- all that matters to the argument is the proposition.
We get semantics from the visual system because the visual system provides a mental state (the sign) that corresponds with or represents something in the real world (the signified).
To the computer, there is no "real world" there is no distinction between data pulled into memory from a video camera or a stack of Hollerith cards nor from data already in memory or data being gathered at the time it's accessed -- there is no distinction. The computer is just manipulating meaningless symbols (and even that's a stretch, as the computer can't make such a distinction!) Meaningless symbols in relation to one another are... meaningless symbols, being manipulated meaninglessly.
Even given relationships between the symbols (as you would expect from a program at a particular level of description), all you manage is a syntactic relationship! I hate to use this example, but it's the best I can think of right now: Given a chinese-chinese dictionary, you have very clear relationships between the various symbols, from which you can't ascribe meaning. The best you could hope to come up with is a grammar -- which is still purely syntactic.
The temptation to define semantics comes from incorrectly attributing the semantics extrinsically attributed as being intrinsic to the program at a particular level of description. Chalmers uses this confusion to argue that "sub symbolic computation" is not subject to Searle's Chinese Room argument. (He does not deny the premise in question outright)
Chalmers assumes that the function of a program is objective and that it applies to all levels of description of the program. This is wrong. Any interpretation of the function of a program, like the inputs passed to it, are extrinsically applied. What a program does is a matter of interpretation, there is way to objectively determine what a program is intended to do. Obviously, merely changing the level of description in no way affects the program.
[ Chalmers denies that subsymbolic computation applies to "real-world" implementations of programs (which have immediately identifiable lower levels of description, for example, in hardware) as the individual constituents of the higher level symbols are operated upon as a group and can be interpreted as distinct (they are still atomic). His mistake, of course, is that the same applies to any subsymbolic computational system as can be seen from the initial higher level description of the program. ]
Of course, no level of description of a program or symbol set is privilaged above another. Symbols are only atomic as they apply to a particular level of description. However, Chalmers assumes a different level of description for the symbols and the program as to discriminate the internal representation of the symbols in the lower-level description of the program with the description of the symbols in a higher level description of the program.
At the lower level Chalmers uses, the program manipulates a different set of symbols even though groups of those lower-level symbols can be interpreted as being identical as the programs are computationally
Re:It's not just specialization, there is also fea
on
Where's HAL 9000?
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· Score: 1
I don't know that I've ever seen the other two disputed. Still, if you want to take a shot at them, give it a go.
Re:It's not just specialization, there is also fea
on
Where's HAL 9000?
·
· Score: 1
But then all we have are some misguided conclusions based on easily-refuted axioms.
Well, the axiom carrying the most weight has stood for the past 30 years. Still, as you seem to think that it's easy to refute, I'd love to see you take down this particular giant -- as would a good bit of the AI community: "Syntax by itself is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics"
Good luck, you'll need it.
Re:It's not just specialization, there is also fea
on
Where's HAL 9000?
·
· Score: 1
I give up. Twice now some mysterious gesture that I apparently don't know about has refreshed the page and destroyed my reply. Here's the short, "type what I remember writing before a stray movement inexplicably eliminates it" version.
You seem to be hung up on the illustration, which I agree has caused more confusion that clarity. Again, the illustration has nothing to do with the argument, the claim in question "syntactic content is insufficient for semantic content" is taken as axiomatic in the argument proper. The room, the paper, etc., is completely irrelevant. Clearly, it's caused you some confusion, as you seem inexplicably focused on language.
Meanwhile, the visual system will perform syntactic operations on bundles of visual percepts to identify objects, providing the semantics for the cross-situational word-learning system.
This is the only bit of your explanation that is really relevant. See, this is where you introduce semantics seemingly out-of-nowhere. If you can get semantics from a computational system, you don't need to say anything else. The problem, of course, is how do you get semantics from the "visual system"? Can congenitally blind people have intentional states? "It just happens" isn't much of an argument!
Of course, this is all a very young field, and I'm open to evidence either way.
In another post I mention Jacoby, take a look at his research. To kill computationalism, check out Fetzer and then Bringsjord.
Re:It's not just specialization, there is also fea
on
Where's HAL 9000?
·
· Score: 1
Okay... so... you do you dispute the actual claim?
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The only advantage Python has as a beginner language is the interactive mode. I'd go with BASIC or Logo instead -- they have the same advantage without the drawbacks. (The former on an old early 80's micro [real hardware, not an emulator] to add a bit of novelty.)
"User-replaceable" had a different definition then, when a large number of computer hobbyists were perfectly comfortable servicing electronics themselves, iron in hand.
Indeed. It's rare to see a politician, let alone a Republican, taking a stand to help protect freedom.
I very seriously doubt that I'm the only one who predicted this more than a decade ago, back in the PDA era.
Still, being Android, I don't expect this to take off. While I'm a huge RIM supporter, the only player I can really see winning in this market would be Microsoft. A shame, really.
Wrong meme.
Dedicated keyboards on smartphones are never again going to lead the market. It's over.
Outside of "flagship" phones, phones with slide-out keyboards are becoming increasingly popular, especially among women.
Sort of stunning how you blithely ignore the empirical evidence of people voting with their dollars.
Touch screens are just the current fashion. Remember pen computing? That lost out to RIM's brilliant screen+keyboard smart phones. Touch screens were in, out, now they're in again -- just like every other fashion.
Current touch screens, as others have pointed out, have serious short-comings. They're not the future, they're the present. 10 years from now, we'll have something better and we'll all wonder what collective insanity made us want to use an all-touch interface in the first place.
Two recent innovations that attempt to overcome the usability nightmare that is the capacitive touchscreen include the Galaxy Note and the Bold 9900. The Bold keeps the incredibly good physical keyboard and trackpad for tasks that are better served by those input methods and offers a touchscreen on top for the few tasks that are well served by finger-fondling. The Galaxy Note gives users a stylus for precision work; absolutely brilliant for jotting quick notes and tasks that require precision (think working with text, hitting small targets on websites, etc.) The Note is optimized for two-handed use, the Bold for single-handed use.
I expect both approaches to find their way in to competing handsets over the next few years. I'll make my prediction to counter yours: The all-touch UI fad will be dead in 5 years and replaced with interfaces that don't sacrifice usability for the illusion of 'ease of use' -- they'll actually be easier to use.
They will never beat iOS or Android in terms of apps, features, or interface
Not apps, yet. On features and interface, however, RIM already has the competition "beat".
Whereas Palm actually assembled a team and put in a decent last ditch effort to make a revolutionary new product, RIM has done nearly nothing.
Except migrate to a new, best-in-class, operating system, revamp their management tools (which were already the most sophistocated on the market), dramatically improve their developer tools (providing numerous ways for devs to build apps, including an NDK) update their UI completely (they've redefined the touch-interface -- it makes Apple's UI look like a joke from 1994). Oh, and created brilliant solutions to new problems like BlackBerry Balance.
Really, they were never resting on their laurals. The much-loved Pearl line made the transition from feature-phone to smartphone simple for users used to the form-factor, sure-press turned users off but was undoubtedly innovative, the style never took off, but the clamshell style smartphone was just one of many dramatically different from-factors that RIM offered to the consumer market while they were still undeniably the #1 smartphone manufacturer in the world.
They weren't slow to change, they did nothing but change!
Their new technology is well ahead of the competition both technically and in terms of UI. Tools like Bridge take integration to a whole new level. Balance and Fusion set new standards for managed devices -- and that's an area where they were already the unquestioned leader-of-the-pack. Now their users can get freedom and security, something you'll never get from Apple.
RIM has made radical changes from top to bottom. Their new UI is a generation ahead of iOS and Android as is their OS -- Multitasking, notifications, messaging in the mobile space are redefined in their new revolutionary platform.
Try to keep up. You're embarrassing AC's everywhere!
Not conspiracy, just stupidity.
Don't you think that state-level governments are just as capable of making incompetent decisions based on marketing bullshit as upper-level managers?
Remember IBM's problems with BYOD? Yeah, none of those are issues with RIM's platforms. BlackBerry Balance keeps personal and business use separate. You can't drop corporate data into the personal side, for example. The user gets to use the device how they see fit, without compromise, and the business gets all the benefits of a locked-down device with best-in-class device management just like before.
Maybe some day other mobile platforms will catch up. As it stands now, there is only one enterprise ready mobile solution.
Repeating this for the terminally incompetent (with a few minor edits):
X = Number of jobs in economy.
Y = Population eligible to work.
Z = Unemployed.
X < Y (There's a global recession.)
Z = Y-X
If everybody in the country were motivated as hell and tried their best to get a job, there would still be Z unemployed.
It's not letting me put greater than and less than symbols around 'xterm', it just removes it. Quotation marks don't help, dumb.
Try < and >
<xterm> The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
I'm not worried about RIM going under. They've been supposedly dying for years, but they just now posted their first quarterly loss. (Even with non-competitive handsets, they were still profitable. The 9900 is amazing, but you get my meaning.) Their customer base is growing and they've got plenty of cash on hand. They've got a fantastic suite of new development tools, best-in-class new remote management software, business friendly features like Balance, and a new operating system that is, by any metric, a cut above the rest Their app library is also growing like crazy and they're doing a fantastic job of recruiting new developers with a fantastic and varied suite of development tools. The handsets out this fall running their new OS look to be exceptionally high-end, with a brilliant UI.
RIM is hardly dying. They're a popular whipping-boy, but there are other companies doing far worse than RIM that don't get the same media bashing. When is the last time you heard that Sony is dying? They're worse off than RIM, and don't appear to have a strategy moving forward.
RIM is in no danger of "going under any day". That's been the line everyone's been chanting for the past year or so, sure, but that whole time their customer base was growing at an alarming rate and they were posting profits every quarter.
Good can't do half of what RIM's management software can do. Their new Fusion software can also manage other platforms in addition to BlackBerries -- including iOS and Android. Good is okay, but it doesn't compare to RIM's best-in-class tools.
Even cooler, with BlackBerry Balance, you can seamlessly separate work and personal use on the device. No worries about copying corporate data to personal accounts.
Add to that the above-par remote management features and it's not even a choice -- there is only one enterprise-ready mobile platform.
Logic gates? Pshaw - anyone can see they're a natural extension of a transistor
The transistor came much later...
. $60 for that AAA game which gets a total of 5-10 hours of play
Really? Admittedly, I don't play a lot of games, but that seems outrageous. What has happened to games in recent years?
I remember a piece by John Stossel that claimed some kids spent 20+ hours a week playing "Doom". If all you're getting is 5-10 hours out of a $60 game, I'd stop buying games!
Indeed. The "invisible hand of the free market" doesn't reach out to correct markets, it reaches out to touch you in the butthole.
Of course, this is not going to influence your position, because you believe that it is self-evident that syntax is insufficient for semantics
Indeed, your belief that Searle inadequately defends the assertion is irrelevant to me. "Searle didn't do a very good job of defending the claim" would be a very silly reason to reject for me to reject the premise! I'd need a real reason as the claim to me seems obvious on its face.
I don't see it as self-evident at all, since, again, semantics is an association between a sign and the signified, and those associations are one kind of thing a syntactic system can compute.
That's because you're confusing syntax with semantics. Redefining semantics in terms of syntax doesn't get you anywhere as we're no longer talking about the same thing. Relationships between symbols are indeed syntactic -- and as the dictionary example I offered you illustrates, can not give rise to semantics.
In the argument, the man in the Chinese room is a substrate for the computation, just part of the machine. We don't expect individual neurons to understand Chinese, or individual transistors, so we should also not expect the man in the room to understand Chinese.
Had you read a little further, you'd know that this was addressed already by Searle in the 1980 paper . Imagine now that our victim in the room get's so good at his job that he's memorized the rule book and can carry out his shuffling without reference to the book. Here, the entire process happens "inside his head". Still, the mere application of the rules is still not sufficient for meaning even though the whole operation is taking place inside a living brain!
If you need a simpler example, consider if he internalized a Chinese version of Weizenbaum's ELIZA program (which passes the Turing test to some degree -- ask his secretary) Add additional complexity to the rules slowly and you'll see that at no point can we introduce something new from which semantics can arise -- it's just more of the same meaningless manipulation of symbols.
Replies like the robot reply try to sneak semantic content "through the back door" as it were, by trying to trick us into introducing phenomenal experience. In the robot case, we have a camera in which our prisoner can see the external world. It fails, of course, when we replace the camera with an analog to what our brain gets -- more meaningless symbols. Now the situation is worse, not only can we see that the man won't learn Chinese, he can't even tell which slot introduces questions and which introduces visual information! (It's equally clear in the original that the man had no way to determine even something as simple as that he was getting questions and producing answers. Semantics at the very highest level of description are still unavailable to him!)
The only way out appears to be to introduce a non-computational component to "bridge the gap". Hence, syntax alone is insufficient for semantics.
(It doesn't take much of a leap here to make the claim that phenomenal experience is the missing piece requisite for semantic content. From which we can conclude that phenomenal experience can't be computational.)
And with this, I will conclude my participation in this discussion.
Okay... I had forgotten all about it days ago!
Wait ... are you saying to ignorance is prerequisite to innovation?
Aha! here's the issue. Searle specifically does not take that claim as axiomatic in the argument proper. From page 422 of Behavioral and Brain Sciences Vol 3 No. 3:
What a pointless thing to argue. In the 1980 paper, he does indeed spend a great deal of time defending the proposition -- he doesn't provide the formal argument everyone is familiar with until later (1990), where it is indeed taken as axiomatic. However, as early as 1983 Searle writes "2. Syntax is not sufficient for semantics. That proposition is a conceptual truth. It just articulates our distinction between the notion of what is purely formal and what has content." from Minds, Brains, and Science pp. 28-41
So, yes, I stand by my assertion that the illustration is indeed a waste of time to argue about -- all that matters to the argument is the proposition.
We get semantics from the visual system because the visual system provides a mental state (the sign) that corresponds with or represents something in the real world (the signified).
To the computer, there is no "real world" there is no distinction between data pulled into memory from a video camera or a stack of Hollerith cards nor from data already in memory or data being gathered at the time it's accessed -- there is no distinction. The computer is just manipulating meaningless symbols (and even that's a stretch, as the computer can't make such a distinction!) Meaningless symbols in relation to one another are ... meaningless symbols, being manipulated meaninglessly.
Even given relationships between the symbols (as you would expect from a program at a particular level of description), all you manage is a syntactic relationship! I hate to use this example, but it's the best I can think of right now: Given a chinese-chinese dictionary, you have very clear relationships between the various symbols, from which you can't ascribe meaning. The best you could hope to come up with is a grammar -- which is still purely syntactic.
The temptation to define semantics comes from incorrectly attributing the semantics extrinsically attributed as being intrinsic to the program at a particular level of description. Chalmers uses this confusion to argue that "sub symbolic computation" is not subject to Searle's Chinese Room argument. (He does not deny the premise in question outright)
Chalmers assumes that the function of a program is objective and that it applies to all levels of description of the program. This is wrong. Any interpretation of the function of a program, like the inputs passed to it, are extrinsically applied. What a program does is a matter of interpretation, there is way to objectively determine what a program is intended to do. Obviously, merely changing the level of description in no way affects the program.
[ Chalmers denies that subsymbolic computation applies to "real-world" implementations of programs (which have immediately identifiable lower levels of description, for example, in hardware) as the individual constituents of the higher level symbols are operated upon as a group and can be interpreted as distinct (they are still atomic). His mistake, of course, is that the same applies to any subsymbolic computational system as can be seen from the initial higher level description of the program. ]
Of course, no level of description of a program or symbol set is privilaged above another. Symbols are only atomic as they apply to a particular level of description. However, Chalmers assumes a different level of description for the symbols and the program as to discriminate the internal representation of the symbols in the lower-level description of the program with the description of the symbols in a higher level description of the program.
At the lower level Chalmers uses, the program manipulates a different set of symbols even though groups of those lower-level symbols can be interpreted as being identical as the programs are computationally
I don't know that I've ever seen the other two disputed. Still, if you want to take a shot at them, give it a go.
But then all we have are some misguided conclusions based on easily-refuted axioms.
Well, the axiom carrying the most weight has stood for the past 30 years. Still, as you seem to think that it's easy to refute, I'd love to see you take down this particular giant -- as would a good bit of the AI community: "Syntax by itself is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics"
Good luck, you'll need it.
I give up. Twice now some mysterious gesture that I apparently don't know about has refreshed the page and destroyed my reply. Here's the short, "type what I remember writing before a stray movement inexplicably eliminates it" version.
You seem to be hung up on the illustration, which I agree has caused more confusion that clarity. Again, the illustration has nothing to do with the argument, the claim in question "syntactic content is insufficient for semantic content" is taken as axiomatic in the argument proper. The room, the paper, etc., is completely irrelevant. Clearly, it's caused you some confusion, as you seem inexplicably focused on language.
Meanwhile, the visual system will perform syntactic operations on bundles of visual percepts to identify objects, providing the semantics for the cross-situational word-learning system.
This is the only bit of your explanation that is really relevant. See, this is where you introduce semantics seemingly out-of-nowhere. If you can get semantics from a computational system, you don't need to say anything else. The problem, of course, is how do you get semantics from the "visual system"? Can congenitally blind people have intentional states? "It just happens" isn't much of an argument!
Of course, this is all a very young field, and I'm open to evidence either way.
In another post I mention Jacoby, take a look at his research. To kill computationalism, check out Fetzer and then Bringsjord.
Okay ... so ... you do you dispute the actual claim?