04:05 Can robots emulate human brains? |
Language is more than a process through which meaning is attached to words. Language is described as the ability to take a finite set of elements such as words, combine them with rules to create infinite combinations of expressions each of which is comprehensible and deliver a meaning. Human brain capacity to produce, reproduce, mix words and expressions, change their structure, split sentences to their units – nouns, verbs, adjectives. The catalogue of human actions is infinite. We use our common sense. We correct wrong formulations, understand broken sentences and even complete missing parts. We learn from past actions and predict about the future, translate and borrow words used in other languages, but still deliver a content with a context and meaning. We uncover hidden words and understand implicit meaning. Our language production capacity is not limited to sonic elements. We can associate our speech production to gestures, we stretch, bend, and kick. We perform an endless variety of dance routines. We make complex actions. We use a complex system combining actions with the sonic systems to produce a non-finite set of knowledge. In 1951, the cognitive psychologist Karl Lashley proposed a link between language and action. "Not only speech” What is language, then, if it can describe the way we can process actions as well as the way we manipulate words? Understand from this perspective, language is not a method of communication, Per Se, but a rather method of computation. What makes human language a unique set of sonic production is that it does not only allows us to communicate with each other, but it also allows us to do so with infinite variety, we can scream to warn of an approaching danger, alert of a coming event. We interact in a community, we read, we listen, and we differentiate between true, false and nonsensical elements and we understand well that a “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously” is a nonsensical set of combined words. Human continued the development of the language capacity. The 20th century was an era of human machine interaction. In 1950 human has discovered another way of communication and exchange. It is an exchange between human a Chat-bot. All started with the English computer scientist, Alan Turing, when this latter threw down the gauntlet by publishing an article entitled “Computer Machinery and Intelligence.” Since then, scientists are in an endless research and experiments endeavouring to make machine understand and react like humans do. My question here is, will human win this experiment, be successful in creating a machine that thinks and stimulates human behaviour without deviation and distortion? i - Is language unique to humans? Animals communicate with each other, and sometimes with us. But that’s where the similarity between animals and us ends, as Jason Goldman explains, Jason G Goldman17th October 2012 ii - Idem iii -Turing, Alan, 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)', in B J Copeland (ed.), The Essential Turing (Oxford, 2004; online edn, Oxford Academic, 12 Nov. 2020), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198250791.003.0017, accessed 27 Feb. 2023. |
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