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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8500443" data-attributes="member: 82106">And yet words clearly exist, both literally as physical objects when written down, and in a logical sense. Ask any software developer, we manipulate text all the time! Cutting edge software does much more, discerning the structure within the text, creating representations of that, and manipulating them according to rules which were generated by repeated feedback, so called 'machine learning'. Clearly there is meaning inhered into the sequence of words, but the words, absent any specific meaning, can still be manipulated, merely by understanding the rules of grammar, which don't reference meaning at all. I'd also note that, to the extent that we can train ML algorithms to manipulate by reference to meaning, we have to INSTILL THAT UNDERSTANDING in them, it isn't 'just there'. Likewise if you write a story about a chess game, the story wasn't inherent in the chess game. It isn't like LotR, you had to bring the meaning, ENTIRELY from outside, and it could have been anything. I could tell 100 contradictory stories about a single chess game, none of them is canonical. It isn't fiction itself, and that is FUNDAMENTALLY because it isn't self-referential. No part of what happens on the chess board reflects a fictional interpretation of previous moves, which is totally unlike D&D.</blockquote>