Conceiving Meaning - Meaning Conceiving

Chalmers, French, and Hofstadter point out in their paper High-level perception, representation, and analogy: A critique of artificial intelligence methodology that the major flaw in most artificial intelligence programs lies in the absents of true conception in some modality. In contrast to the human brain does none of the presented programs acquire or rather conceive the intrinsic properties of the given data, neither does any filter out irrelevant, incomplete or partially incorrect data from the vast stream of outside stimuli like a real world observer. Instead, all the data was prerefined and perfectly suiting for the task at hand making it in fact almost impossible not to come up with the anticipated conclusion/analogy/result.

I must admit that logically concluding an analogy or alike from a bunch of connected, alas meaningless predicates sounds much less impressive than the chance of having discovered a way to artificially draw real world analogies. Maybe Hofstadter is a little too harsh on the quite enthusiastic and sensationalist science colleagues since their main goal seemed to be a program which could logically deduce facts and relations logically from real world data. It was not in their interest to compute these findings as much human-like as possible, contrary to Hofstadter's approach. Admittedly, the citations and conclusions from the papers Hofstadter refers to sound very provocative and sensational, portraying the entire artificial intelligence department as some kind of science fiction lab. Therefore studies like Numbo, Copycat and alike sound rather minimalistic and unimportant even though their implications might be much more revealing than examples which might be more applicable to actual situations but lack a foundation of understanding the underlying concepts of intelligence altogether.