Failed to mention this earlier, but the first Hofstadter book arrived. I Am A Strange Loop showed up Monday or Tuesday and I've read a few chapters thus far. Definitely liking it to this point, but I've got a bit more to read before I throw anything real down. For the time being though, here's a quote that put to words something that I've had on my mind for a bit. Straight out of Chapter 3:
"This idea - that the bottom level, though 100 percent responsible for what is happening, is nonetheless irrelevant to what happens - sounds almost paradoxical, and yet it is an everyday truism."
Sunday, December 21, 2008
The Snow Falls Like A Static Fury
As the weather continues to make itself felt in the greater Seattle area, I'm finding plenty of time to let my mind (and internet searches) wander. So here's the starting point.
http://fora.tv/2008/12/12/MythBusters_Co-Host_Adam_Savage_on_Obsession
This was a great little clip that was referred to me by my friend Derek. Beyond the greatness that is Adam Savage, it got me to open up an extra tab and start a web search that I'm still pursuing. The impetus was a reference to people being either a Hammett or Chandler person. My search went in the direction of Hammett. It hadn't occurred to me before, but I thought I'd be interested in picking up some Hammett and giving that a go as some fun reading (and also, now, some Chandler to compare and determine if the statement regarding preference is in fact true).
As a quick aside, Hammett apparently wrote The Thin Man, which is one of my favorite old movies.
So my search started with the assumption that I'd hit eBay or Amazon and track down a used copy of something or other. But my first search hit a Wikipedia article. I've recently become a sucker for the quick biographies that Wikipedia provides. So there I started. And right off the bat I get a (slight) Hemingway connection. Both Hammett and Hemingway served in ambulance corps during World War I. Hammett however got sick and spent the war in Cushman Hospital in Tacoma, WA.
Which sent me on another tangent. I've never heard of Cushman Hospital, so I got another search going in that direction and found this. The article is only a stub, but the broad details are there. The Cushman Hospital was located on the Puyallup Indian reservation and was torn down around 2003 to make way for the casino. Apparently it was also a location of note in the American Indian rights movement. In 1976, the hospital was taken over by armed members of the Puyallup tribe.
It's strange some of the details that you miss while living in a place. I've been in Tacoma for nine years now (coming out from New Hampshire in the fall of '99) but never was aware of that particular change in the landscape. I wonder if I ever actually saw the hospital building.
http://fora.tv/2008/12/12/MythBusters_Co-Host_Adam_Savage_on_Obsession
This was a great little clip that was referred to me by my friend Derek. Beyond the greatness that is Adam Savage, it got me to open up an extra tab and start a web search that I'm still pursuing. The impetus was a reference to people being either a Hammett or Chandler person. My search went in the direction of Hammett. It hadn't occurred to me before, but I thought I'd be interested in picking up some Hammett and giving that a go as some fun reading (and also, now, some Chandler to compare and determine if the statement regarding preference is in fact true).
As a quick aside, Hammett apparently wrote The Thin Man, which is one of my favorite old movies.
So my search started with the assumption that I'd hit eBay or Amazon and track down a used copy of something or other. But my first search hit a Wikipedia article. I've recently become a sucker for the quick biographies that Wikipedia provides. So there I started. And right off the bat I get a (slight) Hemingway connection. Both Hammett and Hemingway served in ambulance corps during World War I. Hammett however got sick and spent the war in Cushman Hospital in Tacoma, WA.
Which sent me on another tangent. I've never heard of Cushman Hospital, so I got another search going in that direction and found this. The article is only a stub, but the broad details are there. The Cushman Hospital was located on the Puyallup Indian reservation and was torn down around 2003 to make way for the casino. Apparently it was also a location of note in the American Indian rights movement. In 1976, the hospital was taken over by armed members of the Puyallup tribe.
It's strange some of the details that you miss while living in a place. I've been in Tacoma for nine years now (coming out from New Hampshire in the fall of '99) but never was aware of that particular change in the landscape. I wonder if I ever actually saw the hospital building.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Distraction Infraction!
The past week has been a whirlwind of inactivity. I've been making something of a break in terms of the serious reading, and turned towards some straight up fun reading, in the form of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which I've read once before. The initial reading was shrouded in booze and sun (the first cruise in the Caribbean with my family coincided with my starting and finishing. If you haven't been on a cruise, my first experience led me to believe that only three activities occurred on these floating Disney Worlds: eating, drinking, and gambling. On a week long cruise, I spent quite a few nights staking out a solitary spot on the deck with a gin and tonic while reading). This time around, there's less booze. Also, less sun. And 100% more snow.
It's resinous stuff. And as I fade into the words, I definitely recall bits and pieces from the last read. The introduction says that you can pick up a Miller book, flip to any page and start reading passages at random and still get the experience. As I've tracked through linearly, I can see that being true. And in reading it, I think I need to get a bit more Miller for later. A trip to the Half-Price Bookstore is forthcoming.
I looked back at the dates, and it seems that Miller came to Paris just as Hemingway was headed back stateside. Two views of Paris. It seems so much dirtier with Miller. Both seem to love it though. Hemingway's just seems a bit more idealized. Hemingway was 8 years younger then Miller. He was there from the age of 21 through 28 (1921-1928). Miller was there from 36-48(1928-1940). I suddenly have an interest in knowing if they had any interactions (face to face or otherwise) .
I should be getting back into the swing of things this week. I want to knock out a few chapters in the Theories of Personality book I have. It'd also be nice to start on another Chomsky essay (linguistics). And I should be getting the Douglas Hofstadter books I ordered.
It's resinous stuff. And as I fade into the words, I definitely recall bits and pieces from the last read. The introduction says that you can pick up a Miller book, flip to any page and start reading passages at random and still get the experience. As I've tracked through linearly, I can see that being true. And in reading it, I think I need to get a bit more Miller for later. A trip to the Half-Price Bookstore is forthcoming.
I looked back at the dates, and it seems that Miller came to Paris just as Hemingway was headed back stateside. Two views of Paris. It seems so much dirtier with Miller. Both seem to love it though. Hemingway's just seems a bit more idealized. Hemingway was 8 years younger then Miller. He was there from the age of 21 through 28 (1921-1928). Miller was there from 36-48(1928-1940). I suddenly have an interest in knowing if they had any interactions (face to face or otherwise) .
I should be getting back into the swing of things this week. I want to knock out a few chapters in the Theories of Personality book I have. It'd also be nice to start on another Chomsky essay (linguistics). And I should be getting the Douglas Hofstadter books I ordered.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Linguistic Artifacts
This comes courtesy of conversation fragments from a Wednesday night sojourn up to Seattle. It originated in a heart felt disdain for grammar-policery (namely of the politically correct variety, but as I get back to it, I also have problems with straight up English style guide policery as well).
So to start, let's hit the English style guide bit. Steven Pinker had at least one chapter in The Language Instinct dedicated to exposing the fallacies of "grammatically correct" English composition. In many cases the rules and designations that inform us mentally of sentence construction have diverged from the strictures that the English grammar elite have set down for us. The problem here is that the Grammarati take as gospel the linguistic structures of the past with little appreciation for the organic, evolving nature of language. Language is a vector of information that constantly seeks to condense and simplify the essence of thought into a package that can be transmitted between individuals. If meaning is clear, then the technical aspects (as laid out in style guides, etc...) are unnecessary and in many situations contrary to current usage. Style and grammar have become something that is fixed - unquestioned. Some could make a point that its there to maintain the purity of the language. To insure a common ground to translate our thoughts. But we're still using some standards that have no relevance to the way that English is spoken today. Thought then goes through a game of telephone where our idea is pushed through a filter of rules that obscure meaning.
I've only recently cemented this notion in my head. To be honest, the bits and pieces of personality that surround the Grammarati always appealed to me. They were observant. They were meticulous. They were smart. You have to be to memorize and apply by rote the umpteen thousand rules. But the stand they take becomes less and less appealing to me. Perhaps the Internet ruined this. If you head over to any web site with user generated content (check out the rants and raves on Craigslist on any given day, for example), you can watch the arguments of individuals get lost as the vulture-like Grammarati swooping in to tear the linguistic aspects of a post apart without addressing the underlying ideas at all. Ideas become secondary to the rules for construction.
Language at its essence is a means of transferring information from individual to individual. It is by nature flexible, and is constantly adjusting to the ideas that it needs to embody. And in its spoken form we see this flux. But with written language, we have decided on standards of purity. Language is not pure though. It is hodge-podge. It is a simmering cauldron of alloy ready to be poured out into whatever shape is needed. Some of the strictures on written language are simply ornamentation. And in some cases, the addition of this ornamentation detracts from the functionality of the end product.
The second part of this post turns more towards PC language and the marginalization of language elements (which is actually a good thing). The conversation I had on Wednesday started with me expressing how much I hated the grammar police. What I actually meant at the time was how much I hated the language of political correctness. Words that are used all over the place that have adopted a meaning of their own, are stricken down in conversation as insensitive. One such offense I've been called on in this vein was in regards to the word "spastic". I used the word in a context that meant something along the lines of "uncontrolled awkward action". The immediate response from the PC police that was present was that the word spastic was hurtful and insensitive because there are people with actual spasticity issues. I shrugged it off, avoiding the word in future conversations with said person.
But why do we need to fixate so much on the potential meanings of a word vs. their actual/intended values. The context that a word occurs in does much to clarify the thought of the communicator. It seems like the people that subscribe to the idea of political correctness seek to pull words out of context and examine every meaning without regard for actual context.
To head back to some of the linguistics I've read, the human mind appears to work in parallel. When we converse or read, we don't parse serially. Each word is not processed from front to back, but as part of the cohesive whole of the sentence (again take a look at Pinker's The Language Instinct). It's this parallel processing that lets us do some pretty amazing mental gymnastics on awkwardly formatted sentences and words (as a few examples, 1) word order is less important then we think. Given a sentence where word order is garbled or backwards, we can quickly process the actual meaning. (*1) 2) The omission or disordering of letters in words. Dropping letters at the beginning or end of words, omitting vowels, backwards ordering - are all situations where we quickly process the whole from incomplete presentation. Some of these processes have an evident hierarchy. Consider the garbled sdrawkcab. The first thing that comes to mind for me is the word "drawbacks". If you look again, it also is the word backwards, backwards. So having a partial match to a word in the middle shapes our perception of the final product prior to hitting our internal rules for processing in reverse. 3) Filling pronouns. When we use he, she, it, they, etc... previous branches of the conversation are tracked and these place holder words are filled).
So all that said, the point is that we have a knack for context. It's part of our linguistic circuitry. Staking off certain words as off-limits because of a single-meaning (in some cases, an adopted usage - think of the words retarded or queer, where an existing word with an existing non-offensive meaning was conscripted into descriptive service to designate a group) is a self-imposed means of crippling our mental circuitry. Any arguments as to adopting this kind of handicap in order "to change the way we think, by changing the language we use" seems illogical to me. Don't we have to think about the word, and also explicitly assign it the negative connotation (and also destroy any semblance of an old benign meaning) if we're going to strike it from our usage? This seems more destructive then helpful. It enforces verbal stigma in its own way.
And on to the last part. The person I was talking to brought up the following example.
"To throw like a girl"
She used the above as a language construction that enforces stereotypes. So the first wave of attack on this. The actual meaning. When someone says something like, "Billy throws like a girl", the actual meaning is something more like "Bill throws in an awkward, untrained manner." Or (this was the description that I used on Wednesday), "Billy throws as if, he as a right-handed person, were trying to throw with his left hand". I got mildly ribbed about how this second definition would be offensive to left-handed people, as it doesn't take their "plight" into consideration. But back to the point. I think in the case of this phrase, that we are dealing with an archaic construction. If translated literally it portrays a gender stereotype. But how many people still see this as a literal rather then figurative? I grew up with an enormous extended family and none of my female cousins "threw like a girl" (one of them actually played baseball instead of softball in high school. Hard to imagine any of the guys on her baseball team thinking that as a literalism this makes any sense). When I think about the phrase I can see where it can be construed as enforcing a stereotype, but I think that the context has changed. The literal understanding does not align with the understood meaning of the sentence. Some people may still have the attitude that:
For all X=girl, X throws like a girl,
There exists some Y=male, such that Y throws like a girl
But I think that the word girl in the construction comes to mean something less concrete. And I think this is something that applies to figures of speech in general. When we look at the expression "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth", we aren't typically talking about an actual horse. Horses don't have the sharp crackle of gender politics underneath it though. If a laboratory developed a breed of sentient talking horses who were given equal rights (all that language surrounding marriage would have to adjusted by the bible belt to further stake it out as a human institution, so as to prohibit horse couples from raising human babies, and such), the above phrase could find itself as a hot button issue about slavery. By acknowledging the political meaning above the intent of the speaker, we give greater credence to the politicized version (at the expense of the individual and the flexibility of the symbolic representation of language).
Figures of speech tend to last well past their expiration dates. As little nuggets of meaning, they will continue to be used until marginalized by either 1) the underlying idea losing relevance. 2) a more succinct means of saying the embedded idea comes into usage and becomes popularized. 3) Population extinction - if predominant usage is confined to a single population and that population dies out or branches off (thing language drift, tower of Babel style), then the artifact may be removed from the initial tongue by virtue of lack of propagation.
Did your family use the phrase "throw like a girl"? If not, then how did you hear it? Things of this nature are viral. They spread as long as their is a single vector of transmission. You might do everything in your power to insure that you never personally communicate this particular bit of language to any children you might have, but unless you isolate a child completely (which would be neglect and abuse of a horrific nature on your part), Mullet Steve down the street will, by proxy of little Mullet Billy, pass his language virus on.
Political correctness is just a distraction. Language springs into being to represent the realities around us. If we strike phrases or words from our dictionaries, others will spring up to replace them. The realm of political correctness results in soft indefinites. Our janitors become custodial engineers. Meaning becomes lost in the soft folds of a slow death - uttering ten syllables where one would do. And in the end, as the meaning of the unwieldy becomes the original, we have another word that has to be crossed off. We have to further ambiguate so that our minds can lose track of reality for a few more years without addressing the underlying conditions that created the need for that language in the first place. Language does not cause the structure of reality to change. We need to act against the institutions themselves, not the language of the institutions.
*1
A tangential question - are the portions of the brain that appear to be responsible for Dyslexia the same that are involved in the parallel processing? Or is the garbled interpretation of the visual language cues a pre- or post- processing deficiency. Pre- seems less likely if word order doesn't matter in the first place. It also would seem to indicate a level of processing and parsing prior to exiting visual vs. aural input centers. Which would indicate one of two things - 1) The input node (visual or aural) completely processes the information as it comes in, drawing on stored memory and creates the output conditions itself. This would also allude to additional units for other input vectors (taste/touch/smell). Would nature designate that X number of different structures can throw output conditions to the body's machinery without a gatekeeper? 2) The nodes parse incoming signals into a specific format and then feed the structured input into a processing unit which coordinates all input and generates output based on the combined input stimuli (this seems more likely to me). In any case, it provides an interesting example of where something in the brain appears to be broken and can give information about how structures interact. Something worth following up on at a later date.
So to start, let's hit the English style guide bit. Steven Pinker had at least one chapter in The Language Instinct dedicated to exposing the fallacies of "grammatically correct" English composition. In many cases the rules and designations that inform us mentally of sentence construction have diverged from the strictures that the English grammar elite have set down for us. The problem here is that the Grammarati take as gospel the linguistic structures of the past with little appreciation for the organic, evolving nature of language. Language is a vector of information that constantly seeks to condense and simplify the essence of thought into a package that can be transmitted between individuals. If meaning is clear, then the technical aspects (as laid out in style guides, etc...) are unnecessary and in many situations contrary to current usage. Style and grammar have become something that is fixed - unquestioned. Some could make a point that its there to maintain the purity of the language. To insure a common ground to translate our thoughts. But we're still using some standards that have no relevance to the way that English is spoken today. Thought then goes through a game of telephone where our idea is pushed through a filter of rules that obscure meaning.
I've only recently cemented this notion in my head. To be honest, the bits and pieces of personality that surround the Grammarati always appealed to me. They were observant. They were meticulous. They were smart. You have to be to memorize and apply by rote the umpteen thousand rules. But the stand they take becomes less and less appealing to me. Perhaps the Internet ruined this. If you head over to any web site with user generated content (check out the rants and raves on Craigslist on any given day, for example), you can watch the arguments of individuals get lost as the vulture-like Grammarati swooping in to tear the linguistic aspects of a post apart without addressing the underlying ideas at all. Ideas become secondary to the rules for construction.
Language at its essence is a means of transferring information from individual to individual. It is by nature flexible, and is constantly adjusting to the ideas that it needs to embody. And in its spoken form we see this flux. But with written language, we have decided on standards of purity. Language is not pure though. It is hodge-podge. It is a simmering cauldron of alloy ready to be poured out into whatever shape is needed. Some of the strictures on written language are simply ornamentation. And in some cases, the addition of this ornamentation detracts from the functionality of the end product.
The second part of this post turns more towards PC language and the marginalization of language elements (which is actually a good thing). The conversation I had on Wednesday started with me expressing how much I hated the grammar police. What I actually meant at the time was how much I hated the language of political correctness. Words that are used all over the place that have adopted a meaning of their own, are stricken down in conversation as insensitive. One such offense I've been called on in this vein was in regards to the word "spastic". I used the word in a context that meant something along the lines of "uncontrolled awkward action". The immediate response from the PC police that was present was that the word spastic was hurtful and insensitive because there are people with actual spasticity issues. I shrugged it off, avoiding the word in future conversations with said person.
But why do we need to fixate so much on the potential meanings of a word vs. their actual/intended values. The context that a word occurs in does much to clarify the thought of the communicator. It seems like the people that subscribe to the idea of political correctness seek to pull words out of context and examine every meaning without regard for actual context.
To head back to some of the linguistics I've read, the human mind appears to work in parallel. When we converse or read, we don't parse serially. Each word is not processed from front to back, but as part of the cohesive whole of the sentence (again take a look at Pinker's The Language Instinct). It's this parallel processing that lets us do some pretty amazing mental gymnastics on awkwardly formatted sentences and words (as a few examples, 1) word order is less important then we think. Given a sentence where word order is garbled or backwards, we can quickly process the actual meaning. (*1) 2) The omission or disordering of letters in words. Dropping letters at the beginning or end of words, omitting vowels, backwards ordering - are all situations where we quickly process the whole from incomplete presentation. Some of these processes have an evident hierarchy. Consider the garbled sdrawkcab. The first thing that comes to mind for me is the word "drawbacks". If you look again, it also is the word backwards, backwards. So having a partial match to a word in the middle shapes our perception of the final product prior to hitting our internal rules for processing in reverse. 3) Filling pronouns. When we use he, she, it, they, etc... previous branches of the conversation are tracked and these place holder words are filled).
So all that said, the point is that we have a knack for context. It's part of our linguistic circuitry. Staking off certain words as off-limits because of a single-meaning (in some cases, an adopted usage - think of the words retarded or queer, where an existing word with an existing non-offensive meaning was conscripted into descriptive service to designate a group) is a self-imposed means of crippling our mental circuitry. Any arguments as to adopting this kind of handicap in order "to change the way we think, by changing the language we use" seems illogical to me. Don't we have to think about the word, and also explicitly assign it the negative connotation (and also destroy any semblance of an old benign meaning) if we're going to strike it from our usage? This seems more destructive then helpful. It enforces verbal stigma in its own way.
And on to the last part. The person I was talking to brought up the following example.
"To throw like a girl"
She used the above as a language construction that enforces stereotypes. So the first wave of attack on this. The actual meaning. When someone says something like, "Billy throws like a girl", the actual meaning is something more like "Bill throws in an awkward, untrained manner." Or (this was the description that I used on Wednesday), "Billy throws as if, he as a right-handed person, were trying to throw with his left hand". I got mildly ribbed about how this second definition would be offensive to left-handed people, as it doesn't take their "plight" into consideration. But back to the point. I think in the case of this phrase, that we are dealing with an archaic construction. If translated literally it portrays a gender stereotype. But how many people still see this as a literal rather then figurative? I grew up with an enormous extended family and none of my female cousins "threw like a girl" (one of them actually played baseball instead of softball in high school. Hard to imagine any of the guys on her baseball team thinking that as a literalism this makes any sense). When I think about the phrase I can see where it can be construed as enforcing a stereotype, but I think that the context has changed. The literal understanding does not align with the understood meaning of the sentence. Some people may still have the attitude that:
For all X=girl, X throws like a girl,
There exists some Y=male, such that Y throws like a girl
But I think that the word girl in the construction comes to mean something less concrete. And I think this is something that applies to figures of speech in general. When we look at the expression "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth", we aren't typically talking about an actual horse. Horses don't have the sharp crackle of gender politics underneath it though. If a laboratory developed a breed of sentient talking horses who were given equal rights (all that language surrounding marriage would have to adjusted by the bible belt to further stake it out as a human institution, so as to prohibit horse couples from raising human babies, and such), the above phrase could find itself as a hot button issue about slavery. By acknowledging the political meaning above the intent of the speaker, we give greater credence to the politicized version (at the expense of the individual and the flexibility of the symbolic representation of language).
Figures of speech tend to last well past their expiration dates. As little nuggets of meaning, they will continue to be used until marginalized by either 1) the underlying idea losing relevance. 2) a more succinct means of saying the embedded idea comes into usage and becomes popularized. 3) Population extinction - if predominant usage is confined to a single population and that population dies out or branches off (thing language drift, tower of Babel style), then the artifact may be removed from the initial tongue by virtue of lack of propagation.
Did your family use the phrase "throw like a girl"? If not, then how did you hear it? Things of this nature are viral. They spread as long as their is a single vector of transmission. You might do everything in your power to insure that you never personally communicate this particular bit of language to any children you might have, but unless you isolate a child completely (which would be neglect and abuse of a horrific nature on your part), Mullet Steve down the street will, by proxy of little Mullet Billy, pass his language virus on.
Political correctness is just a distraction. Language springs into being to represent the realities around us. If we strike phrases or words from our dictionaries, others will spring up to replace them. The realm of political correctness results in soft indefinites. Our janitors become custodial engineers. Meaning becomes lost in the soft folds of a slow death - uttering ten syllables where one would do. And in the end, as the meaning of the unwieldy becomes the original, we have another word that has to be crossed off. We have to further ambiguate so that our minds can lose track of reality for a few more years without addressing the underlying conditions that created the need for that language in the first place. Language does not cause the structure of reality to change. We need to act against the institutions themselves, not the language of the institutions.
*1
A tangential question - are the portions of the brain that appear to be responsible for Dyslexia the same that are involved in the parallel processing? Or is the garbled interpretation of the visual language cues a pre- or post- processing deficiency. Pre- seems less likely if word order doesn't matter in the first place. It also would seem to indicate a level of processing and parsing prior to exiting visual vs. aural input centers. Which would indicate one of two things - 1) The input node (visual or aural) completely processes the information as it comes in, drawing on stored memory and creates the output conditions itself. This would also allude to additional units for other input vectors (taste/touch/smell). Would nature designate that X number of different structures can throw output conditions to the body's machinery without a gatekeeper? 2) The nodes parse incoming signals into a specific format and then feed the structured input into a processing unit which coordinates all input and generates output based on the combined input stimuli (this seems more likely to me). In any case, it provides an interesting example of where something in the brain appears to be broken and can give information about how structures interact. Something worth following up on at a later date.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Another Direction
I almost went back to edit the last post regarding a point that I later became less sure about. The pervasiveness of recursion was the point. All of the examples I could think of seemed to be based in biological sciences, so I was going to add that perhaps it was something basic to life, as opposed to the universe in general. But I've been continuing to fiddle around looking at recursion, which led me to Douglas Hofstadter (the connection having been a tongue in cheek definition of recursion, which I curiously followed to the unknown name).
Much like Chomsky, his bio reads like a buffet. He currently is a professor at the University of Indiana - Bloomington where he is a "'College of Arts and Sciences Professor' in both Cognitive Science and Computer Science, and also ... Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology". The point here, is his initial post-graduate work was in Physics. At the University of Oregon he wrote a paper predicting that "the allowed energy level values of an electron in a crystal lattice, as a function of a magnetic field applied to the lattice, formed a fractal set." Later experimentation confirmed the prediction, and the fractal set was named "Hofstadter's Butterfly" which was the first Fractal found in physics. Which provides at least one example from the non-organic.
And as a side effect of poking around at this, I just purchased three of Hofstadter's books:
Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern
I Am A Strange Loop
Much like Chomsky, his bio reads like a buffet. He currently is a professor at the University of Indiana - Bloomington where he is a "'College of Arts and Sciences Professor' in both Cognitive Science and Computer Science, and also ... Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology". The point here, is his initial post-graduate work was in Physics. At the University of Oregon he wrote a paper predicting that "the allowed energy level values of an electron in a crystal lattice, as a function of a magnetic field applied to the lattice, formed a fractal set." Later experimentation confirmed the prediction, and the fractal set was named "Hofstadter's Butterfly" which was the first Fractal found in physics. Which provides at least one example from the non-organic.
And as a side effect of poking around at this, I just purchased three of Hofstadter's books:
Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern
I Am A Strange Loop
Monday, December 1, 2008
One Chomsky Essay/Lecture Down, Five To Go
Tonight I finally finished the first section of the first part of Chomsky's Rules and Representations. I've started and stopped it at various points over the past month, picking up and finishing other things along the way. While I could get into my general sense of wonder at the content (an introduction into the ideas behind general innate mental structures of language) or distaste for the vehicle (the language of pseudoscience/philosophy academia, in all it's convoluted, obfuscating glory), I think I'm more inclined at this point to jump into a train of thought that sprang up in the last few pages that sent me on a few tangents. So to get into, excerpt #1:
-"When we turn to the mind and its products, the situation is not qualitatively different from what we find in the case of the body. Here too we find structures of considerable intricacy, developing quite uniformly, far transcending the limited environmental factors that trigger and partially shape their growth. Language is a case in point, though not the only one. Think for example of the capacity to deal with the number system, common to humans apart from pathology and as far as we know unique to humans"
So the first bit. Chomsky seeks to make a case that we are not a completely blank slate. There are kernels of hard code that determine how particular portions of the mind essentially work. These kernels may need experience to fine tune and mold the developing structures into their final shape, but there exists some central bit that dictates what and how these mental capacities develop. The initial bit of this was interesting to me, but the number bit set the stage for the next bit that got my current tangent going:
-"The very essence of the number system is the concept of adding one, indefinitely. The concept of infinity is not just 'more' than seven, just as human language, with its discrete infinity of meaningful expressions, is not just 'more' than some finite system of symbols that can be laboriously imposed on other organisms (nor, by the same token, just 'less' than an essentially continuous system of communication, like the dance of bees). The capacity to deal with the number system or with abstract properties of space is surely unlearned in its essentials."
So from this I got two things stuck in my head. One, the number system as the concept of adding one indefinitely. Two, both the concept of quantifying (the number system) and abstract properties of space as innate mental structures (at least in terms of some basic structures that can become more complex). And one more excerpt, this time from Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, which has a chapter called "How Language Works" that goes through some of Chomsky's technical work on language in a more approachable manner:
-"A grammar is an example of a 'discrete combinatorial system.' A finite number of discrete elements (in this case, words) are sampled, combined, and permuted to create larger structures (in this case, sentences) with properties that are quite distinct from those of their elements.
...
In a discrete combinatorial system like language, there can be an unlimited number of completely distinct combinations with an infinite range of properties."
The chapter goes onto explain some of the broader bits and pieces of Chomskian thinking on structures of language. At the core is the notion of recursion. Basically our lexicon of words fits into various structures (noun phrases, verb phrases) that can recursively nest creating an infinite number of possible output.
So to tie it back, I saw the bit on the number system as adding one indefinitely as an instance of recursion at work (I still haven't gotten around to reading Principia Mathematica, but I wonder if this is where Russell and Whitehead started). The idea of recursion was initially (or at least in terms of viewing it as a useful tool) introduced to me in computer science classes in college as a means of manipulating mathematical formulas such as Fibonacci numbers and such. But I've also seen it poke it's head in biology classes, and obviously more recently in Pinker's explanations of Chomskian theory on language structure. Which brings us to the questions that come to mind.
Is it possible that the structure surrounding "abstract properties of space" are also built on recursive definitions? And if so, would an underlying ability to handle recursive properties be a base mental structure in itself upon which other structures grow upon? Or would it be a property rather then a structure (which happens to be shared by at least two - if not three - innate structures)?
When we look at nature, math, language, etc... we find recursion (or means of representing things recursively). There is a pervasiveness here. Do we see it because our minds are designed in such a way that this relationship can easily be created (a pattern overlaid on chaos), or because this is an actual fundamental principle that explains the structure of the universe. If the former, then it stands to tell us something about how our minds actually work. I would assume, based on the popularity of LISP with AI researchers, that there is a nice body of research that would at least make a case for this. If the latter, then it's quite possible that you could make a case for looking for recursive relationships in any and every field of study, from hard science to social science (recursive relationships as underlying rules of sociological phenomena?).
I wouldn't be surprised if recursion as a core concept didn't have a great degree of viability. Recursion is an elegant way of building complexity and infinity out of a finite number of simple parts.
And a final link. I tend to overuse Wikipedia for such things, but it typically provides a good overview with citations, plus a few jumping off points. This is their topic on recursion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion
-"When we turn to the mind and its products, the situation is not qualitatively different from what we find in the case of the body. Here too we find structures of considerable intricacy, developing quite uniformly, far transcending the limited environmental factors that trigger and partially shape their growth. Language is a case in point, though not the only one. Think for example of the capacity to deal with the number system, common to humans apart from pathology and as far as we know unique to humans"
So the first bit. Chomsky seeks to make a case that we are not a completely blank slate. There are kernels of hard code that determine how particular portions of the mind essentially work. These kernels may need experience to fine tune and mold the developing structures into their final shape, but there exists some central bit that dictates what and how these mental capacities develop. The initial bit of this was interesting to me, but the number bit set the stage for the next bit that got my current tangent going:
-"The very essence of the number system is the concept of adding one, indefinitely. The concept of infinity is not just 'more' than seven, just as human language, with its discrete infinity of meaningful expressions, is not just 'more' than some finite system of symbols that can be laboriously imposed on other organisms (nor, by the same token, just 'less' than an essentially continuous system of communication, like the dance of bees). The capacity to deal with the number system or with abstract properties of space is surely unlearned in its essentials."
So from this I got two things stuck in my head. One, the number system as the concept of adding one indefinitely. Two, both the concept of quantifying (the number system) and abstract properties of space as innate mental structures (at least in terms of some basic structures that can become more complex). And one more excerpt, this time from Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, which has a chapter called "How Language Works" that goes through some of Chomsky's technical work on language in a more approachable manner:
-"A grammar is an example of a 'discrete combinatorial system.' A finite number of discrete elements (in this case, words) are sampled, combined, and permuted to create larger structures (in this case, sentences) with properties that are quite distinct from those of their elements.
...
In a discrete combinatorial system like language, there can be an unlimited number of completely distinct combinations with an infinite range of properties."
The chapter goes onto explain some of the broader bits and pieces of Chomskian thinking on structures of language. At the core is the notion of recursion. Basically our lexicon of words fits into various structures (noun phrases, verb phrases) that can recursively nest creating an infinite number of possible output.
So to tie it back, I saw the bit on the number system as adding one indefinitely as an instance of recursion at work (I still haven't gotten around to reading Principia Mathematica, but I wonder if this is where Russell and Whitehead started). The idea of recursion was initially (or at least in terms of viewing it as a useful tool) introduced to me in computer science classes in college as a means of manipulating mathematical formulas such as Fibonacci numbers and such. But I've also seen it poke it's head in biology classes, and obviously more recently in Pinker's explanations of Chomskian theory on language structure. Which brings us to the questions that come to mind.
Is it possible that the structure surrounding "abstract properties of space" are also built on recursive definitions? And if so, would an underlying ability to handle recursive properties be a base mental structure in itself upon which other structures grow upon? Or would it be a property rather then a structure (which happens to be shared by at least two - if not three - innate structures)?
When we look at nature, math, language, etc... we find recursion (or means of representing things recursively). There is a pervasiveness here. Do we see it because our minds are designed in such a way that this relationship can easily be created (a pattern overlaid on chaos), or because this is an actual fundamental principle that explains the structure of the universe. If the former, then it stands to tell us something about how our minds actually work. I would assume, based on the popularity of LISP with AI researchers, that there is a nice body of research that would at least make a case for this. If the latter, then it's quite possible that you could make a case for looking for recursive relationships in any and every field of study, from hard science to social science (recursive relationships as underlying rules of sociological phenomena?).
I wouldn't be surprised if recursion as a core concept didn't have a great degree of viability. Recursion is an elegant way of building complexity and infinity out of a finite number of simple parts.
And a final link. I tend to overuse Wikipedia for such things, but it typically provides a good overview with citations, plus a few jumping off points. This is their topic on recursion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion
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