marshfarm
Technically it can't be because of the language problem is post-hoc.
You're an engineer so you have a synthetic view of meaning, but it has nothing to do with intelligence. I'd study how you gained that view of meaning.
A meaning ladder is arbitrary, quantum field dynamics can easily be perceived as Darwinism, and human speech isn't meaningful, it's external and arbitrary and suffers from the conduit metaphor paradox. The meaning is again derived from the actual tasks, scientifically no speech act ever coheres the exact same mental state or action-syntax.
Sorry you're using a synthetic notion of meaning that's post-hoc. Doesn't hold in terms of intelligence. Not even Barbour (who sees storytelling in particles) et al would assign meaning to Fermions or other state changes. It's good science fiction, but it's not science.
In neuroscience we call isolated upstream meaning "wax fruit." You can see it is fruit, but bite into it, the semantic is tasteless (in many dimensions).
You have to look at mental events and grasp not only what they are, both material and process, how the come to happen, they're both prior and post-hoc, etc.
I study meaning in the brain. We are nit sure if it exists and the meaning we see in events and tasks are at a massive load. Any one event can have 100s even 1000s of meaningful changes to self, environment and others. That's contradictory. Searle is not even scratching the surface of the problem.
https://arxiv.org/vc/arxiv/papers/1811/1811.06825v2.pdf
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39282373/
https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...
Any computer has far less access to the meaning load we experience since we don't compute thoughts, thoughts aren't about things, there is no content to thoughts, there are no references, representations, symbols, grammars, words in brains.
Searle is only at the beginning of this refutation of computers, we're far more along now.
It's just actions, syntax and space. Meaning is both an illusion and fantastically exponential. That contradiction has to be continually made correlational.
I'd suggest comp sci caught the low fruit, whatever comes out of thekeyboard as a basis, non too smart.
Reality is specific. Actions, materials. Words and language are arbitrary, they're processes, and they're simulations. They don't reference things, they represent them in metaphors, so sure they have "meaning" but the meanings reduce the specifics in reality which have many times the meaning possibility to linearity, cause and effect. That's not conforming to the reality that exists, that's severely reducing, even dumbing down reality.
Using the cybernetic to information theory to cog science to comp sci lineage was an increasingly limited set of tools to employ for intelligence.
Cybernetics should have been ported expansively to neurosci, then neurobio, then something more expansive like eco psychology or coodination dynamics. Instead of expanding, comp sci became too reductive.
The idea a reductive system that anyone with a little math training could A/B test vast swaths of information gleaned from existing forms and unlock highly evolved processes like thinking, reasoning, action and define this as a path to intelligence is quite strange. It defies scientific analysis. Intelligence is incredibly dense in biology, a vastly hidden, parallel process in which one affinity being removed (like the emotions) and the intel vanished into zombiehood.
Had we looked at that evidence, we'd have understood that language/tokens/embedded space couldn't possibly be a composite for all that parallel.
This is not in any way similar to what humans do.
https://www.routledge.com/The-Constraints-Led-Approach-Princ...