Lindstrom 1 Nathan W.

Lindstrom Professor Strozier Minds and Machines June 22, 2010 Associating Meaning with Formal Systems Stephen Hawking begins his book A Brief History of Time with an anecdote. A well-known scientist, Bertrand Russell, was giving a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room stood up and said, What you have just told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise. Russell replied, And what is the tortoise standing on? The old lady smiled. Youre very clever, young man, she said, but its turtles all the way down. In his paper Paradigms Lost John Casti says that for a computer to think it mustmake the [the] transitional step from syntax to semantics (Casti). He gives an example of assigning meaning to a formal system which uses only two symbols by interpreting them under the ordinary rules of arithmetic. But is not arithmetic a formal system in and of itself? What if meaning is not an abstract concept but rather a state one eventually reaches by transitioning from one formal system to another, each system bringing an increasing level of specialized and fine-grained detail, until we realize that its just formal systems all the way down? When were hungry and see a fresh apple, we know that consuming it will at least partially sate our hunger. Vastly simplified, our visual processing has assigned a symbol from a

Lindstrom 2 top-level formal systems alphabet, for example, A, to the shiny red semispherical object. In addition, we have an end-goal that is in no way (yet) associated with A, and that is to stop being hungry. How we get from A to putting it in our mouth could be described through a series of formal systems that begin with the broadly-defined entity A, and through a series of transformations, end with a formal system that invokes the eat action. We can get from here to there without once ever truly knowing what an apple is; for example, I have on hundreds of occasions happily eaten apples without once ever being able to describe what an apple is beyond very high-level classifications such as fruit, food, living-thing, and object. I could go down the path of using other formal systems to describe it in terms of chemical properties, cellular structure, or even go as far down the chain as to try and describe the apple in terms of its atomic structure. And even if I did tell you in painstaking detail how an apple is constructed, all the way down to protons, electrons and neutrons, do I really know what an apple is, or am I merely reciting a list of transformational formal systems, ad nauseum? That I can start with A and work my way to satisfying my hunger is more than sufficient from an evolutionary perspective. If I were to do otherwise; for example, to try and hammer in a nail using an apple, people would interpret that failure in my formal systems as a so-called lack of knowledge, a sin which is readily forgiven in a two-year-old but would cause strange looks if seen in a twenty-year-old. The difference is not that the mother somehow imparts the almostmagical quality of knowing what an apple is to the two-year-old after she sees him pounding away at one but rather that she assists the child in developing a formal system (or more accurately, hundreds of such systems) that eventually permit the child to transform A to food-nothammer. This nurture approach is no doubt aided by the perhaps-accidental addition of knowledge brought on by shoving the apple in his mouth; an occurrence made all the more likely

Lindstrom 3 by the inherited knowledge that bright things often contain large concentrations of energy in the form of carbohydrates, and the inherited reflex of wanting to taste as many things as possible. Someday later in life, perhaps while in high school, a teacher assists the child in developing yet more formal systems which also permit the transformation of A to things like cellular structure. Its just formal systems with transformative abilities connecting to more formal systems, as many nested (or stacked) as the present level of knowledge permits; and if we someday discover, for example, what ingredients go into electrons, protons, and the like we can add yet another formal system to the near-infinite pile upon which our cognitive abilities rest.

Lindstrom 4 Works Cited

Casti, John L. Paradigms Lost: Images of Man in the Mirror of Science. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1990. Hofstadter. Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: Norton, 2009.