SYMBOL GROUNDING PROBLEM: TURING-SCALE SOLUTION NEEDED

摘要

The symbol grounding problem is the problem of causally connecting symbols inside an autonomous system to their referents in the external world without the mediation of an external interpreter. The only way to avoid triviality, however, is to ensure that the symbols in question, their referents in the world, and the dynamic capacities of the autonomous system interacting with the world are nontrivial. Otherwise a toy robot, with exactly two symbols - go/stop - is "grounded" in a world where it goes until it bumps into something and stops. From the very outset, the symbol grounding problem -which was inspired and motivated by Searle's Chinese Room Argument - was based on the Turing Test, and hence on a system with full, human-scale linguistic capacity.