Toiling on the concepts of toilers and thieves: Rephrasing the concept of "symbol grounding" Andras Lorincz I would like to continue our previous debate that started with the letter of Stevan Harnad during "1999-2000 Student Skywriting CogSci-Szeged99" (NOTE: I do not have the list of those who took part in this debate, neither the list of those who are interested in this debate. Please, answer me directly and I can set a separate mailing list up, depending on the number of people interested and, of course, on the opinion of the managers of koglist.) START OF QUOTATION FROM SH "...In the Cangelosi/Parisi paper, the (predecessors of) (1) "toilers" and (2) "thieves" were foragers who (1) learned which mushrooms were edible by trial and error-correcting feedback or (2) learned which mushrooms were edible by "hearsay" (overhearing the toilers say "edible": there were plenty of mushrooms, so the toilers lost nothing by vocalizing). In the competition, the "thief" strategy beat the "toiler" strategy, and the proportion of thieves in the population grew. But, as would have become evident if the simulation had continued for several more generations, "theft" under these conditions is not an "evolutionarily stable strategy." For once there were few or no toilers left, no one would know what was edible. For toilers, the knowledge is grounded in having learned the features of the edible mushrooms; so the toilers can forage alone; for the thieves, the only "feature" of an edible mushroom is the vocalization of the toilers: "edible". So when there are no more toilers, the thieves cannot eat. ..." END OF QUOTATION Insted of continuing the arguments I was giving that time I will try to rephrase those in a different manner. I would try to clarify the direction of these arguments by providing a few propositions first. Proposition 1. The concept of "thief" is misleading. Proposition 2. "Toiler" is a good concept. There are only toilers. Proposition 3. "Symbol grounding" is an ill-posed mixture of stealing and toiling. It "says" that a symbol was stolen and that now this stolen symbol is subject to toiling. Proposition 4. Separation of the two phases in "symbol grounding" may be better formulated by separating the two phases of symbol grounding to (A) "abduction" and to (B) "validation of abduction" which are both toilings and concern the interaction with the environment. THE ARGUMENTS: Argument1. Consider the viewpoint that there is no external world but we are only dreaming. Then there is no difference between toiling and stealing, both correspond to dreaming. Argument2. Consider three cases: Case 1. You build an aeroplane Case 2. You buy an aeroplane Case 3. You steal an aeroplane C1: You make lots of toilings, but you do steal, at least from mother nature C2: Clearly, you do both. You "exchange money" (= you steal in legal ways) lots of ideas from previous generations C3: You do lots of toilings to make a plan. You make this plan public (you provide a freeware and make your plan stealable) "in exchange" of the aeroplane. Regards, Andras