a compound word like "knows-truth-or-falsity", so transparently evocative to readers of English, might as well be, for all the computer could care, "xjs-beuglh?" or "doesn't-give-a-damn-about" or the digit "8" or any other alphanumeric string.(page 164)
This excerpt shows most obviously that todays' computers simply are not able to actually understand anything at all even in a remotely similar way that any average human is able to.
We can pass arbitrary values to computers which can store them in variables. Then the computer can do various computations on these variables; but no matter how complex these computations may be, there isn't even a spark of actual understanding involved in this process.
The only things today's computers are capable of doing is "symbol manipulation".
When we read the output of computer programs we often are impressed and have the feeling that what we read actually makes a lot of sense. We tend to believe that the program which created this output is very clever.
But we may never forget that however smart the output may appear to us, it has absolutely no meaning at all to the computer program which created it.
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