By this reasoning no AGI beginning from English could ever know French either, for similar reasons. (Note that every language has sentences that cannot be rendered in another language, in the sense that someone who knows the truth value of the unrendered sentence can know the truth value of the rendered sentence; consider variations on Godel-undecideable sentences.)
By this reasoning no AGI beginning from English could ever know French either, for similar reasons.
This is true only if this...
Note that every language has sentences that cannot be rendered in another language
is true. But I don’t think it is. English and French, for instance, seem to me to be entirely inter-translatable. I don’t mean that we can assign, for every word in French, a word of equivalent meaning in English. But maybe it would be helpful if I made it more clear what I mean by ‘inter-translatable’. I think language L is inter-translatable with language M if for ever sentence in language L, I can express the same thought using an arbitrarily complex expression in language M.
By ‘arbitrarily complex’ I mean this: Say I have a sentence in L. In order to translate it into M, I am allowed to write in M an arbitrarily large number of sentences qualifying and triangulating the meaning of the sentence in L. I am allowed to write an arbitrarily large number of poems, novels, interpretive dances, etymological and linguistic papers, and encyclopedias discussing the meaning and spirit of that sentence in L. In other words, two languages are by my standard inter-translatable if for any expression in L of n bits, I can translate it into M in n’ bits, where n’ is allowed to be any positive number.
I think, by this standard, French and English count as inter-translatable, as are any languages I can think of. I’m arguing, effectively, that for any language, either none of that language is inter-translatable with any language we know (in which case, I doubt we could recognize it as a language at all), or all of it is.
Now, even if I have shown that we and an AGI will necessarily be able to understand each other entirely in principle, I certainly haven’t shown that it can be done in practice. However, I want to push the argument in the direction of a practical problem, just because in general, I think I can argue that AGI will be able to overcome practical problems of any reasonable difficulty.
By this reasoning no AGI beginning from English could ever know French either, for similar reasons. (Note that every language has sentences that cannot be rendered in another language, in the sense that someone who knows the truth value of the unrendered sentence can know the truth value of the rendered sentence; consider variations on Godel-undecideable sentences.)
This is true only if this...
is true. But I don’t think it is. English and French, for instance, seem to me to be entirely inter-translatable. I don’t mean that we can assign, for every word in French, a word of equivalent meaning in English. But maybe it would be helpful if I made it more clear what I mean by ‘inter-translatable’. I think language L is inter-translatable with language M if for ever sentence in language L, I can express the same thought using an arbitrarily complex expression in language M.
By ‘arbitrarily complex’ I mean this: Say I have a sentence in L. In order to translate it into M, I am allowed to write in M an arbitrarily large number of sentences qualifying and triangulating the meaning of the sentence in L. I am allowed to write an arbitrarily large number of poems, novels, interpretive dances, etymological and linguistic papers, and encyclopedias discussing the meaning and spirit of that sentence in L. In other words, two languages are by my standard inter-translatable if for any expression in L of n bits, I can translate it into M in n’ bits, where n’ is allowed to be any positive number.
I think, by this standard, French and English count as inter-translatable, as are any languages I can think of. I’m arguing, effectively, that for any language, either none of that language is inter-translatable with any language we know (in which case, I doubt we could recognize it as a language at all), or all of it is.
Now, even if I have shown that we and an AGI will necessarily be able to understand each other entirely in principle, I certainly haven’t shown that it can be done in practice. However, I want to push the argument in the direction of a practical problem, just because in general, I think I can argue that AGI will be able to overcome practical problems of any reasonable difficulty.