computers, for instance, can replicate the syntax of human interaction, but can not be claimed to 'know' the meaning (semantics) of what they do

Hi again shanks,
You'll have to send me references to Chinese Rooms, bats, Dennetts etc privately, I think!

But regarding the above statement, I'd probably subscribe to something like the Turing Test viewpoint: Does it matter? How can we ever really be certain anyone shares 'meanings'?

To which the answer probably has to be another raspberry.
(thanks for the rhyming slang reference, mav - but why don't we blow "treacles"??)

I'd also say that any sharp division between form and content, or in this case syntax and semantics, is almost definitely an artificial one. We may be back to mav's Keats reference: "Beauty is Truth"!
http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Board=miscellany&Number=7585


P.S. for those who are wondering, the Turing Test involves a person conversing with both another person and a computer by typewritten means (such as this Board ). If the tester can't tell the computer and human apart, the computer may be called "intelligent", at least as far as the tester is concerned. For the moment, anyway.
Sort of.