Is This HARD Or Is This HART?

So how do we humans perceive things around us so uniquely? Hofstadter mentions the phenomenon of conceptual slips of tongue in which we replace a word we meant to say with a conceptually similar one in the very same context. We don't only seem to have one specific word tightly connected to some meaning, but might use different ones to express the same or analogous meaning. Also when we look at other languages, there might be several translations for one term, fitting more or less in a specific context. These two phenomena thrown together occur in my daily life as an exchange student. When every now and then a German word slips into my English sentences or when I throw pieces of English vocabulary or even syntax at my parents on the phone. For example, I will "make" pictures while I am here in the US and as soon as I come home, I will say "Fotos nehmen" (take photos) instead of "machen" (make).

Can machines acquire meaning in a sense humans think they can? Grasp intrinsic properties? Highlight certain facts while disregarding others in certain circumstances or specific contexts? - To answer these questions we have to look at the understanding of meaning in the first place. The meaning of a thing might be all facts that are to know about it, its functional role, associations one might connect with it, in all: its perception in the world.

When computer programs are given only partial facts and properties of an entity, they cannot possibly grasp or understand the meaning of it, according to Hofstadter. But what are we given in the world? A human can never acquire all possible impressions, facts and angles of an object for example, but we attribute her the notion of understanding what the object is with just little knowledge about it, and be it just its name.

I have the impression, that humans are not that different then, let's say, google with a few extras. One can ask the search engine for example "what is a horse?" and it will bring up the internal definition of horse in first place under the search term "define:horse". From there we can switch to picture results of horses, videos of horses, scientific articles about horses, maps of places where horses are present, and so on ... All this information can be and might already be connected to an apt meaning of the term horse. The pictures would suffice to identify 99% of all horses shown to the engine in form of an uploaded picture and some kind of recognition software (which google posesses). The videos could identify the typical motion of horses and the common sounds a horse would make. The facts and common terms associated with horses could help to spot conversations via instant messaging or email, or even voice chat about horses.

Even though google has never perceived a horse like we humans do, it will be able to tell from the context that something is a horse, or the other way around develop a context around the term horse in order to draw an analogy. From my point of view, the perception of the object does not play the biggest role in "understanding" the meaning of it, as we cannot understand it any deeper than computers.