Abstract

The aim of the paper is to present the underlying reason of the unsolved symbol grounding problem. The Church-Turing Thesis states that a physical problem, for which there is an algorithm of solution, can be solved by a Turing machine, but machine operations neglect the semantic relationship between symbols and their meaning. Symbols are objects that are manipulated on rules based on their shapes. The computations are independent of the context, mental states, emotions, or feelings. The symbol processing operations are interpreted by the machine in a way quite different from the cognitive processes. Cognitive activities of living organisms and computation differ from each other, because of the way they act in the real word. The result is the problem of mutual understanding of symbol grounding.