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Do humans understand things, or does our inner voice merely tell us we do? Without more concrete answers to some very vague/often infuriating questions, it's a

Do humans understand things, or does our inner voice merely tell us we do? Without more concrete answers to some very vague/often infuriating questions, it's a very bold and unsupported position to suggest that computers cannot understand something. To me, it's still up in the air whether we understand things, or if we're just applying a lot of simple, low level, information processing networks. Recognizing objects in vision, for example, turns out to be a serious of clever organizational and optimization tricks around simple mathematics.

jbob2000 9y ago
That's a fair point! Part of understanding something is being able to explain it in different terms. We tend to create metaphors to display our understanding of things. Merely rearranging the words in a sentence does not mean you understand it, my grade school teacher would dock me marks for that. So in order for a computer to understand something, it has to also understand something else, otherwise it can only regurgitate back what you've given it. If I tell a computer "there is snow covering a hill" and it responds "a hill is covered in snow" I am not sure it really understand what I said. But if it responds "snow blankets the hill"... Ohh! Now it understands! This begs the question, what was the first thing we understood? I don't know! Maybe we're born with a certain level of understanding? Maybe our biology imparts a baseline understanding-of-things? If that's the case, then computers can never understand something; they have nothing to build off of, only what we tell it to regurgitate.
- anfilt 9y ago
  Assuming we can't structure a computer with your hypothetical required base-line. Then it may be impossible, but if our understanding is a physical process that means we should be able construct an other physical entity with your required base-line. I don't see any reason to think we have some unreplicable physical process. Perhaps complicated, but that's anything but unreplicable.
- tinymollusk 9y ago
  So, if I understand you correctly, being able to generate context-aware comparisons from similar knowledge is understanding? (I promise I'm not trying to trap you -- I think this is interesting and would like to explore more.) What do you think about the classic example from computational linguistics[0]? Is that approaching understanding? That seems like a neat trick, not actual comprehension, but I don't know why. [0] King + Women = Queen, see https://cacm.acm.org/news/192212-king-man-woman-queen-the-marvelous-mathematics-of-computational-linguistics/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/news/192212-king-man-woman-queen-the-ma...

jbob2000 9y ago

That's a fair point! Part of understanding something is being able to explain it in different terms. We tend to create metaphors to display our understanding of things. Merely rearranging the words in a sentence does not mean you understand it, my grade school teacher would dock me marks for that. So in order for a computer to understand something, it has to also understand something else, otherwise it can only regurgitate back what you've given it. If I tell a computer "there is snow covering a hill" and it responds "a hill is covered in snow" I am not sure it really understand what I said. But if it responds "snow blankets the hill"... Ohh! Now it understands! This begs the question, what was the first thing we understood? I don't know! Maybe we're born with a certain level of understanding? Maybe our biology imparts a baseline understanding-of-things? If that's the case, then computers can never understand something; they have nothing to build off of, only what we tell it to regurgitate.

anfilt 9y ago
Assuming we can't structure a computer with your hypothetical required base-line. Then it may be impossible, but if our understanding is a physical process that means we should be able construct an other physical entity with your required base-line. I don't see any reason to think we have some unreplicable physical process. Perhaps complicated, but that's anything but unreplicable.
tinymollusk 9y ago
So, if I understand you correctly, being able to generate context-aware comparisons from similar knowledge is understanding? (I promise I'm not trying to trap you -- I think this is interesting and would like to explore more.) What do you think about the classic example from computational linguistics[0]? Is that approaching understanding? That seems like a neat trick, not actual comprehension, but I don't know why. [0] King + Women = Queen, see https://cacm.acm.org/news/192212-king-man-woman-queen-the-marvelous-mathematics-of-computational-linguistics/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/news/192212-king-man-woman-queen-the-ma...