31-SEMANTIC ENGINES AND SYNTACTIC ENGINES

• What brains are for is extracting meaning from the flux of energy impinging on their sense organs, in order to improve the prospects of the bodies that house them and provide their energy.The job of a brain is to “produce future” in the form of anticipations about the things in the world that matter to guide the body in appropriate ways.Brains are energetically very expensive organs, and if they can’t do this important job well, they aren’t earning their keep. Brains, in other words, are supposed to be semantic engines.
• What brains are made of is kazillions of molecular pieces that interact according to the strict laws of chemistry and physics, responding to shapes and forces; brains, in other words, are in fact only syntactic engines.
• A genuine semantic engine,responding directly to meaning,is like a perpetual motion machine--physically impossible
• SO how can brain accomplish their appointed task?By being syntactic engines that track and mimic the competence of the impossible semantic engine.

This intuition pump shows that by tracking and mimicing the competence of the perpetually-genuine semantic engine,in the form of a semantic machine with explicit details,we can get the engine process the semantic(or sorta semantic) level business,just like a brain does(or sorta like brain).