ABSTRACT
A computer program is a semantically interpretable formal symbol system consisting of rules for manipulating symbols on the basis of their shapes, which are arbitrary in relation to what they can be systematically interpreted as meaning. Artificial intelligence is the branch of computer science that is concerned with designing symbol systems that have performance capacities that are useful to human beings. The symbol grounding problem pointed out functional direction in which the causal powers relevant to having a mind may lie: The symbols in a symbol system are systematically interpretable as meaning something; however, that interpretation is always mediated by an external interpreter. Artificial Intelligence systems have so far not proven to scale up readily, not only for the human-scale performance necessary for mind modeling, but even for the kinds of performance that were merely intended to be useful to people, such as pattern recognition and robotics.
