3 ms·

Ok, I'll bite. What does she have to do with this?

• morninglight 4y ago
  The paper questioned whether meaning and understanding require sensory grounding. During her life, Helen Keller demonstrated a grasp of both meaning and understanding despite her severe sensory deprivation. This doesn't prove anything, but it does add human context to the question. ....she lost her sight and her hearing after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller
  • andrewprock 4y ago
    She was not deprived of all sensory input though. In fact, it was through her working senses that she learned and communicated.
    • morninglight 4y ago
      In order to develop "understanding", at least one input channel must be available to provide something to understand. In order to ascertain that development, we require at least one output channel. Anything less and we are describing a pet rock. Language can be thought of as the rules of the communication. The root question seems to be whether a machine can learn to communicate meaning and understanding over a bidirectional binary channel without previous training. I suspect that such communication can evolve. Some might look around and remark that it already has.