>Von Uexkull has a very interesting idea that he calls "Umwelt", or in
>other words "sensible environment". Strictly speaking, the "Umwelt" is
>the world a simple animal is able to sense, and so it is the world that
>effectively exist for such animal.
This "Umwelt" seems very close to the more colloquial idea I described in
an earlier message as "context." In other words, for sensory data to have
meaning it must be referenced to some environmental context (or Umwelt)
which must exist within the mind, because the mind is the only place where
the comparison can take place. Hence we have an image of our external
environment based on present and prior experience which is represented as a
contextual background to further inputs, which then obtain meaning by
virtue of the comparison. While this seems to support the idea that AI
systems need to have similar sensory devices to that which is being
simulated in order to establish the "Umwelt", it also indicates that the
similarity requirements are flexible. It is well known that humans do not
share the exact same "Umwelt" in our image of the world (context) even
though we are the same species. That causes communication problems, but
there is still much in common (enough similarity between Umwelts) to serve
as a basis for communication. Establishing the needed context or Umwelt
virtually seems possible and then the question is only the degree to which
it corresponds to context or Umwelt of other "organisms," which is an issue
in any case. I am actually quite surprised to read from Ricardo's comments
that AI programmers have not incorporated this need for context or "Umwelt."
>One of the main problems in Artificial Intelligence
>so far is that there is no such ground. This is what people use to talks as
>the "Symbol Grounding Problem".
Is it true that AI hasn't embraced this requirement? If so, what is the
alternative philosophy?
-----------------------------------------------
John J. Kineman, Physical Scientist/Ecologist
National Geophysical Data Center
325 Broadway E/GC1 (3100 Marine St. Rm: A-152)
Boulder, Colorado 80303 USA
(303) 497-6900 (phone)
(303) 497-6513 (fax)
jjk@ngdc.noaa.gov (email)
(303) 497-6513 (fax)