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You are right that I am gliding between meaning qua meaning and meaning qua communication -- i'm taking the latter as necessary for the former. Ie., if you cann

You are right that I am gliding between meaning qua meaning and meaning qua communication -- i'm taking the latter as necessary for the former. Ie., if you cannot say X and mean it, you cannot understand the meaning of X. I havent argued for that position, but it's very plausible -- since the former requires you be in possession of what it would be to mean something. I understand why you might opt for modal saftey conditions around meaning -- this again separates out 'apprehending meaning' without an ability to mean qua communication --- which i would dispute. But even if you seperate these out, and say to 'apprhend the meaning of X' is to safely 'emit X' on all the occasions across all possible worlds in which X -- that isn't the question. I think the relevant question is whether an agent can mean what they say --- not whether a tool can serve as a model of meaning. No one disputes the latter. A dictionary is a model of meaning in this inert sense. What fanatics of this technology want to do is say 'because the dictionary collelate words with the definitions, therefore the dictionary means what it says' -- and so on. Thinking, reasoning, communicating, meaning -- these are all highly specific processes that involve agents in a very particular way. You can model any of them with twigs and clay if you like, as one can model anything likewise. You can model the solar system with ping pong balls. This just isnt the question. The question is whether this particular sort of modelling relation implies the ability to 'mean what one says'. Whether a pingpong ball on a string orbiting a melon is really experiencing gravitational force -- in the relevant sense, it isnt -- its on a string. Consider the children playing hte imitation game, and imitating what their parent say. If the parents are reliably able to mean what they say, then the children will not err --- they will not violate your modal conditions. And so clearly, these modal conditions are insufficient. It matters that the parents can mean 'the sun is a nuclear reaction' but the children cannot. It matters that the parents are the mechanism by which these words have meaning, and the children are not. It does not matter, in the relevant sense, that the children will reliably reproduce the parent's words. The capacity for meaning is not obtained via modelling it. As with children, actors, LLMs, and all other forms of imitation -- this should be obvious to anyone not religiously obsessed with the converse belief

gjm11 2y ago
I think an entity might be unable to mean things (or some things) but still able to understand what they mean. Kinda-trivial example: I cannot say and mean "I have a pain in the sixth finger on my right hand" because like most people I have only five fingers on my right hand, but I can understand reasonably well what it means. Using indexicals like this is a bit of a cheat, but you did the same in your very first example so I don't feel too bad about it. It's not so clear whether this can happen without them, but arguably it could; e.g., you might take some view along the lines of "statements are only meaningful when they occur within some sort of community" and then an entity isolated from such communities couldn't say-and-mean things, but might still understand what things mean. Anyway: you say (if I understand you right) that if those concepts diverge the only one you actually care about is agents meaning things. I think that's a mistake, because a lot of the questions we have reason to care about with today's AIs are not about that. Will AIs be able to do all our jobs better and cheaper than we can? That's about their external behaviour and how it relates to the world. Will AIs gain vast power and use it in ways that are very bad for us? Ditto. Will AIs enable new technological innovations that make us all much better off? Ditto. No one will be saying as the killbots destroy their cities "well, this isn't so bad; at least the machines don't really know what it is they're doing". No one will be saying as they enjoy the fruits of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism "you know, this whole thing feels empty because the machines that make all this possible don't really understand, they just behave as if they do". If a melon+string+ball arrangement is a faithful enough model of the solar system and it somehow enables me to send spaceships to Uranus, or to discover that orbits are elliptical when I hadn't known it before, or something, then that's a thing of great value. Your comment about children imitating adults sounds as if you haven't actually taken in the conditions I proposed, because children imitating what their parents say cannot in fact have the property I called "richness". If I talk to a child and they have learned to say some things about stars by listening to their parents, it will not help them when I ask them about something they haven't heard their parents say. (One can imagine a situation where the child "passes" this test by just relaying everything I say to the parent and then imitating what they say back to me. But the point there isn't that the child is imitating, it's that the child is not really part of the conversation at all, I'm just talking to the parent. And it is clear that nothing like that is happening with AI systems.) You may imagine that you make your argument more convincing by finishing it up with "anyone to whom this is not obvious is obviously religiously obsessed with some converse belief", but to me at least the opposite is the case.

gjm11 2y ago

I think an entity might be unable to mean things (or some things) but still able to understand what they mean. Kinda-trivial example: I cannot say and mean "I have a pain in the sixth finger on my right hand" because like most people I have only five fingers on my right hand, but I can understand reasonably well what it means. Using indexicals like this is a bit of a cheat, but you did the same in your very first example so I don't feel too bad about it. It's not so clear whether this can happen without them, but arguably it could; e.g., you might take some view along the lines of "statements are only meaningful when they occur within some sort of community" and then an entity isolated from such communities couldn't say-and-mean things, but might still understand what things mean. Anyway: you say (if I understand you right) that if those concepts diverge the only one you actually care about is agents meaning things. I think that's a mistake, because a lot of the questions we have reason to care about with today's AIs are not about that. Will AIs be able to do all our jobs better and cheaper than we can? That's about their external behaviour and how it relates to the world. Will AIs gain vast power and use it in ways that are very bad for us? Ditto. Will AIs enable new technological innovations that make us all much better off? Ditto. No one will be saying as the killbots destroy their cities "well, this isn't so bad; at least the machines don't really know what it is they're doing". No one will be saying as they enjoy the fruits of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism "you know, this whole thing feels empty because the machines that make all this possible don't really understand, they just behave as if they do". If a melon+string+ball arrangement is a faithful enough model of the solar system and it somehow enables me to send spaceships to Uranus, or to discover that orbits are elliptical when I hadn't known it before, or something, then that's a thing of great value. Your comment about children imitating adults sounds as if you haven't actually taken in the conditions I proposed, because children imitating what their parents say cannot in fact have the property I called "richness". If I talk to a child and they have learned to say some things about stars by listening to their parents, it will not help them when I ask them about something they haven't heard their parents say. (One can imagine a situation where the child "passes" this test by just relaying everything I say to the parent and then imitating what they say back to me. But the point there isn't that the child is imitating, it's that the child is not really part of the conversation at all, I'm just talking to the parent. And it is clear that nothing like that is happening with AI systems.) You may imagine that you make your argument more convincing by finishing it up with "anyone to whom this is not obvious is obviously religiously obsessed with some converse belief", but to me at least the opposite is the case.