Saturday, October 08, 2005
Meaning as a Social Phenomenon
onintelligence.org :: View topic - Meaning as a Social Phenomenon: "Meaning as a Social Phenomenon"
"But the main point of the model was to show that a community of communicating individuals could create a structured system of shared symbol-world relationships where no system had previously existed. This implies that the creation of meaning is a social phenomenon that occurs through the interaction of multiple agents in a shared environment. Interestingly, in their simulations, each of the agents developed different internal representations of the visual scenes. This indicates that agents need not have the same internal representations in order to be able to communicate with each other. "
"Well, we have a common system called the physical world and the structure of our bodies. The original quote starts with too basic of an assumption. If you wanted to develop a robot for exploring a planet where we didn't know the range of visible light, atmosphere, gravity, terrain, behavour of "life" forms, etc, then the problem posed in the quote is (almost) valid. Even then, you would program a "go out and explore" subroutine into the robot.
The author is quite correct with the qualification "the creation of meaning is a social phenomenon that occurs through the interaction of multiple agents in a shared environment." However, he does not assume a common brain structure, so internal representations of the world, and therefore meaning, may be very different from agent to agent.
In my opinion, there's no point developing an agent that has no built-in assumptions of it's intended environment or co-agents. You might have to wait the same amount of time since the first cell formed on earth. In which case, read the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, for some theories on that.
To me the most facinating aspect isn't that internal representations and meaning are different, but that they're so much the same across time and cultures."
"But the main point of the model was to show that a community of communicating individuals could create a structured system of shared symbol-world relationships where no system had previously existed. This implies that the creation of meaning is a social phenomenon that occurs through the interaction of multiple agents in a shared environment. Interestingly, in their simulations, each of the agents developed different internal representations of the visual scenes. This indicates that agents need not have the same internal representations in order to be able to communicate with each other. "
"Well, we have a common system called the physical world and the structure of our bodies. The original quote starts with too basic of an assumption. If you wanted to develop a robot for exploring a planet where we didn't know the range of visible light, atmosphere, gravity, terrain, behavour of "life" forms, etc, then the problem posed in the quote is (almost) valid. Even then, you would program a "go out and explore" subroutine into the robot.
The author is quite correct with the qualification "the creation of meaning is a social phenomenon that occurs through the interaction of multiple agents in a shared environment." However, he does not assume a common brain structure, so internal representations of the world, and therefore meaning, may be very different from agent to agent.
In my opinion, there's no point developing an agent that has no built-in assumptions of it's intended environment or co-agents. You might have to wait the same amount of time since the first cell formed on earth. In which case, read the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, for some theories on that.
To me the most facinating aspect isn't that internal representations and meaning are different, but that they're so much the same across time and cultures."
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