What do you mean by ‘endowed meaning’? If a cognitive object has no physical referent, to me, that is the definition of meaningless. It fails to correspond to reality.
This is the heart of the matter. You are saying that the only relevant properties of a cognitive object are its referents. Thus, no referents = no relevant properties = null object.
I say that, on the contrary, a cognitive object has other relevant properties. One such property is its place on the code of a brain.
Imagine an AI with a set of objects that it marks as either “true” or “false”. These objects have no referents, but they influence the formation of objects with referents. I think it’s fair to say that:
Such an Ai could exist, with the objects having referents/no referents as appropriate.
These objects are not just the null object.
The AI is thinking irrationally.
Now imagine an AI with a set of objects that it marks as either “true” or “false”. These objects have no referents, but they influence the AI’s choices. I think it’s fair to say that:
Such an Ai could exist, with the objects having referents/no referents as appropriate.
I think that the meaning of “The AI could be thinking rationally” is that it could turn out to be the case that the objects labeled true and false have a correspondence to physically existing things and that correspondence allows the A.I. to construct decision rules which correspond to reality within some computable range of uncertainty.
If we are unable to map the inputs to the A.I.’s decision process (in this case objects labeled true or false and whose referents, if any, are unknown to us at the start) back to physical reality, then it is still mysterious to us and we can’t claim that it’s rational in any sense other than pure statistical experience (it could just be that when asked to make a series of decisions using the true/false labeled objects, the A.I. got incredibly lucky).
In order to conclude (in any more than a superficial way) that the A.I. is rational, there must be an explicit correspondence between the labeled objects and the physics world, and hence we would have found their referents. If this is, in principle, an impossible task (as you claim), then the concept of rationality doesn’t apply to the A.I. In what sense would it be said to actually be rational, rather than just produce a sequence of outputs that appear to be rational to us for mysterious reasons?
I think that the meaning of “The AI could be thinking rationally” is that it could turn out to be the case that the objects labeled true and false are integral components of a program that provably calculates rational decisions every time.
A proof that a program calculates rational decisions every time necessarily provides the physical referents of its calculation. There’s no difference between knowing that a program calculates rational decisions every time and knowing how it is that it calculates rational decisions every time. If you don’t know the explicit correspondence between its calculations and reality then your state of knowledge cannot include the fact that the program always yields rational conclusions. You can have degrees of certainty that it is rational without having full knowledge of its referents, but not factual knowledge as in a mathematical proof.
It may be that a slick mathematical argument reduces the connection to symbols that don’t readily convey the physical connection, but
don’t tell me that knowledge is “subjective”. Knowledge has to be represented in a brain, and that makes it as physical as anything else. For M to physically represent an accurate picture of the state of Y, M’s physical state must correlate with the state of Y. You can take thermodynamic advantage of that—it’s called a Szilard engine.
Or as E.T. Jaynes put it, “The old adage ‘knowledge is power’ is a very cogent truth, both in human relations and in thermodynamics.”
And conversely, one subsystem cannot increase in mutual information with another subsystem, without (a) interacting with it and (b) doing thermodynamic work. Otherwise you could build a Maxwell’s Demon and violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics—which in turn would violate Liouville’s Theorem—which is prohibited in the standard model of physics.
Which is to say: To form accurate beliefs about something, you really do have to observe it. It’s a very physical, very real process: any rational mind does “work” in the thermodynamic sense, not just the sense of mental effort.
If your state of knowledge (brain chemistry) is updated to include special knowledge of the rationality of an agent, then there is entanglement between you and that agent, for that is what knowledge is. You can’t know that an agent is rational without knowing the physical connection between its cognitive objects and reality. To whatever degree you lack knowledge about the physical referents of its cognitive objects, that is the degree to which you lack knowledge about whether or not it is rational.
This is the heart of the matter. You are saying that the only relevant properties of a cognitive object are its referents. Thus, no referents = no relevant properties = null object.
I say that, on the contrary, a cognitive object has other relevant properties. One such property is its place on the code of a brain.
Imagine an AI with a set of objects that it marks as either “true” or “false”. These objects have no referents, but they influence the formation of objects with referents. I think it’s fair to say that:
Such an Ai could exist, with the objects having referents/no referents as appropriate.
These objects are not just the null object.
The AI is thinking irrationally.
Now imagine an AI with a set of objects that it marks as either “true” or “false”. These objects have no referents, but they influence the AI’s choices. I think it’s fair to say that:
Such an Ai could exist, with the objects having referents/no referents as appropriate.
These objects are not just the null object.
The AI could be thinking rationally.
I think that the meaning of “The AI could be thinking rationally” is that it could turn out to be the case that the objects labeled true and false have a correspondence to physically existing things and that correspondence allows the A.I. to construct decision rules which correspond to reality within some computable range of uncertainty.
If we are unable to map the inputs to the A.I.’s decision process (in this case objects labeled true or false and whose referents, if any, are unknown to us at the start) back to physical reality, then it is still mysterious to us and we can’t claim that it’s rational in any sense other than pure statistical experience (it could just be that when asked to make a series of decisions using the true/false labeled objects, the A.I. got incredibly lucky).
In order to conclude (in any more than a superficial way) that the A.I. is rational, there must be an explicit correspondence between the labeled objects and the physics world, and hence we would have found their referents. If this is, in principle, an impossible task (as you claim), then the concept of rationality doesn’t apply to the A.I. In what sense would it be said to actually be rational, rather than just produce a sequence of outputs that appear to be rational to us for mysterious reasons?
I think that the meaning of “The AI could be thinking rationally” is that it could turn out to be the case that the objects labeled true and false are integral components of a program that provably calculates rational decisions every time.
A proof that a program calculates rational decisions every time necessarily provides the physical referents of its calculation. There’s no difference between knowing that a program calculates rational decisions every time and knowing how it is that it calculates rational decisions every time. If you don’t know the explicit correspondence between its calculations and reality then your state of knowledge cannot include the fact that the program always yields rational conclusions. You can have degrees of certainty that it is rational without having full knowledge of its referents, but not factual knowledge as in a mathematical proof.
It may be that a slick mathematical argument reduces the connection to symbols that don’t readily convey the physical connection, but
If your state of knowledge (brain chemistry) is updated to include special knowledge of the rationality of an agent, then there is entanglement between you and that agent, for that is what knowledge is. You can’t know that an agent is rational without knowing the physical connection between its cognitive objects and reality. To whatever degree you lack knowledge about the physical referents of its cognitive objects, that is the degree to which you lack knowledge about whether or not it is rational.