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Comment by goatlover | Hacker News Reader

All of it. It has no idea that it's playing a board game, or even what a board game is.

That it's even playing Go is a human interpretation of what the machine is doing. Granted, we gave it that interpretation in the form of software instructions. But to the machine, it makes no difference.

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Within the context of Go there is no board game, its just sets of possible states and transitions between valid states. Any feature of the game Go is encoded within this state space. The "meaning" of pieces, moves, captures, win, loss, etc are all encoded here. The go playing machine may not capture these concepts explicitly at a high level, but I'm not sure that's an important distinction.

Concepts like board games, people, ancient Chinese culture, etc are all external to Go.

Well, actually the human context of Go includes something entirely unavailable to our mechanical constructs, yet very much an aspect of the human conscious experience: pleasure.

Yeah, but the encoding of the possible states, etc are all based on the actual board game. We made an abstract version of the game and fed it to a learning algorithm.

At least with regards to the original question, your point isn't a rebuttal. That we can make an abstraction of the game and then operate on that abstraction just means the meaningful/informative portions of the game (within the context of playing the game) are contained in the abstraction. In fact, that just is what an abstraction is: taking only the necessary features for some particular context.

hackinthebochs:

Right, but the parts of the abstraction only have meaning because they are given meaning by us from the reality we abstract from.

You seem to be defining meaning just as what conscious entities endow something with, and so our abstract notion of Go necessarily receives its meaning from us. I don't agree with this.

At its most basic, meaning just is the set of concepts and behaviors that allow correct manipulation as judged by some standard. So in this case the rules of the game have meaning within the context of a game of Go as they allow for correct manipulation of the game state. That what constitutes valid board states was derived from conscious entities isn't relevant here. The rules of Go have meaning (allow for proper manipulation) within the context of the system of valid board states and transitions between them.

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Concepts are something minds create to make sense of the world. Correct manipulation as judged by standard is also a mental judgement. The rules of Go are rules because human beings defined them. That there is a context for valid board states is because we created a game that had a context.

>The rules of Go are rules because human beings defined them.

But this says nothing about meaning within this framework. "Concepts"/entities/units within the framework have meaning precisely because of the relations inherent between the entities and states within the framework. The ultimate source of the framework is not relevant.

The entities in the system do not "get" meaning because of a conscious observer, they get meaning because of the relational properties between the entities. If every person in the universe suddenly died, those meaningful relationships would still be valid. After all, the relationships entailed by math is true regardless if anyone is there to recognize them.

How would I prove to you that the assembly of neurons and synapses that compose me are sentient?

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