UC Berkeley

Semantics is the essence of human communication. It concerns the manufacture and use of symbols as representations to exchange meanings. Information technology is faced with the problem of using intelligent machines as intermediaries for interpersonal communication. The problem of designing such semantic machines has been intractable because brains and machines work on very different principles. Machines process information that is fed to them. Brains construct hypotheses and test them by acting and sensing. Brains do not process information because the intake through the senses is infinite. Brains sample information, hold it briefly, construct meaning, and then discard the information. A solution to the problem of communication with machines is to simulate how brains create meaning and express it as information by making a symbol to represent the meaning to another brain in pairwise communication. An understanding of the neurodynamics by which brains create meaning and represent it may enable engineers to build devices with which they can communicate pairwise, as they do now with colleagues.