3 ms·

I'd agree with you, but I have yet to come across a salient, non-circular definition of "meaning" in this context that makes it somehow unobtainable by robots.

• mxkopy 4y ago
  I think of meaning in terms of Saussure's sign and signified. "The Earth orbits around the sun" for example, is literally a string of characters. As a sign, however, its correspondent signifier could be a diagram of the solar system or something like that. In general meaning is the parts of an experience that are salient to its representation as a sign. It's a sign's signified. Robots lack an embodied experience that would be necessary for them to understand human meanings. They don't know what it feels like to step on a Lego, so a whole class of memes and meanings are unavailable to them as a result. There are probably things that we, as humans, don't know that we feel but still impart meaning. It would be very hard to get a robot to say something like "as the blood rushed to my ears" in a truly meaningful way. Most who end up using that phrase in a sentence don't use its full meaning when thinking about it (so there's higher than normal pressure in the head, etc) but if pressed can expound on it in a way that would be obviously different than a robot's (GPT3 would say, the meaning of this sentence is [0.5435, 24.2352, 1.3245], nearby sentences I've seen have embeddings [1.5532, 0.3552, 4.2442])