Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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ORIGINAL: CuriousLord
I have to tell you, it's amazing how you remember these things.
Thanks, but my memory is currently impaired to the point where I remember the names of 2 out of 4 grandparents. We're close.
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All my memories of these sorts of things are vague notions; even the vocabulary feels alien, yet you're so able to use it!
Probably because I do use it. All too often. Pushes stuff over into the memories that are less heavily affected. And it's still vague. 
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If I recall, the 5:9 elements of memory were pointers, in some respect?
Objects, more like.
Properly, I think you could say they are contexts.
Combinators let you collapse two or more contexts into one complex context.
There does not seem to be an upper bound on the complexity or scope of a context, as far as I know.
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I've often wondered if the pointers could simply contain analytical data to be tried against a larger function..
Revisit lambda calculus. Then frame it as a way to express the application of combinators to contexts.
How these contexts correspond to qualia and information, I couldn't hope to say for sure.
My best bet is ERC/HC representation, HSM representation, or both.
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the handling of even relatively large thoughts could be handled by performing operations (such as the linear set) on thoughts as appropriate.
Thought experiment. Consider a cross between a democracy and a plutocracy. You've now applied a simple combinator to two huge datasets, and your mind can resolve myriad permutations to any level of detail supported by the source data. Lazy evaluation seems to occur, but that's understandable, as the alternative would probably be impaired reaction time. It should be apparent why it is that one can benefit significantly from serializing the context onto a whiteboard or into a paper, as well as why interacting with someone else is beneficial for pretty much everything except for individual atomic operations.
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This seems to speak to me largely in the way people handle things, as the constant and linear assumptions seem to be strongly dominant in human thought.
Have a look at Lisp. Not McCarthy's original work, but the more modern stuff. Look at macros. Toy with the idea. It's not what the language can do that limits us, but how we use it. In computer programming, the Safir-Worf hypothesis is almost redundant. Every good programmer knows from empirical evidence two important facts: (a) a good programmer expresses thoughts in programming languages, rather than thinking in those languages, and (b) the languages used will have a significant impact on how a programmer is able to think about the problems to be solved. Or, as one hacker put it: even if you never write another line of Lisp code, you will be a better programmer for having learned it.
Simply put, the patterns we apply "instincively" are the ones we are used to applying. When we practice, we can expand that set. If we do not, the set stays the same. This determines what will appear self-evident, intuitive or reasonable, just as the commonly accessed data will appear to be common sense, familiar or consonant. Assumptions and patterns to our behaviour can be said to come down to a sort of "working set" of active data and combinators that we use constantly. Results that are not dissonant will not prompt further inspection, for the most part (out of adversity, strength). Much of this is at least somewhat speculative on my part, of course.
But the data would seem to fit, n'est-çe pas?
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Diminishing/accelerating returns seems to be applied vaguely to linear thoughts to approximately handle non-linear nature.
Best fit works for you and me, although we both slip up. Familiar fit works for most.
"Good enough" applies as much to thinking as to work, and nature is the ultimate "government worker" at times.
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I'd agree that words and language are means for thought. I feel that those bits are pointers to concepts and information, and much of that information that they could point to would have been already catilogged for the sake of language use; that it makes for a convinient database for thought to refer to.
Thing is... from an evolutionary angle, it makes sense to reuse what is already there. We already had a hippocampal structure with entorhinal cortex. We already had a prefrontal cortex. We already had a neocortical structure. We already had a cingulate. These were already central elements of higher brain function. The entorhinal cortex already had a single, unified format for all sensory input, spatial-temporal state and so forth. Predictions were already being made over the data. Feedback was already in place to augment learning. All we needed was the introduction of a few additional areas in the brain. That originates the basic form of cognition.
Now, as we know, most people don't sit down and ponder their way into insanity, like Nietzsche did. Otherwise, this would be a far more logical world, or a far more insane one; take your pick. Similarly, we can assume that ancestors with cognition (but no language) did not originate such ideas as consciousness and so forth, although some probably did (and were likely frustrated at their peers for it). Some suggest that language started out with signs, then moved on to using our mouth in the same way, then progressed to a concept of phonemic speech, rather than gestural speech. At first, vowels, then vowel-consonant syllables, then VCV, then combinations. A bit of shorthand arose along the way to contract things (which is part of why we don't see oligosynthetic languages, I guess). And so on.
Kids will do this spontaneously, up to a certain age, if there's no external output, apart from the idea that they should communicate. For an interesting point-in-case, the first documented case of de novo natural language synthesis was recent. Nicaraguan sign language arose a few decades ago, when someone came up with the brilliant idea of taking a bunch of deaf kids with just a few rudimentary gestures each, and sticking them in a room together. It didn't take long for the vocabulary to reach hundreds of words and a definite syntax and grammar to emerge. Presumably, similar things could happen for a vocal language, but that requires starting a lot sooner, as they will otherwise have a very limited phonemic inventory (some sources indicate that K and G were held to be the same sound in Sumerian, for instance).
Anyway, develop enough concepts, and you will eventually gain a notion of a generic Other.
Even the old cavemen must have wondered... what is the complement of Other?
Thus a whole new world opens up, and the rest is history.
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For the sake of this topic, it's my feeling that words can be used as targets for these pointers, and that language can be seen as limitting in the instances in which individuals' mental libraries are largely composed of only lingustic and emotional concepts, as I feel is the approximate case for many. However, I do feel it's entirely possible to have unusual and non-lingustically based functions, definitions, and perhaps even types of pointers. ('types of pointers' referring to different methods of pointers being used, such as between pointers to numbers and to pictures, the types of things that they can hold, etc.)
Move up a level of abstraction, as mentioned earlier. Combinators and contexts. Lambda calculus and set theory.
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All of this said, I feel you're far more studied on the subject, so I'd have to ask you to point out any bits where science or established assumption seem to contradict my assupmtions. And no worries about here as opposed to PM's; I'm typically a fan of more public discussion. :)
I'm out of date on the science. Memory and cognition impairment, again, among other things.
Usually, my approach has been to read the basics of the science, then let it stew, come back to it later when my mind has sorted stuff out, then refresh, ponder it until I have a sort of mental model of things. Then I make predictions and test that against the science and my observations. Sometimes I supplement my idle thinking with a scientifically unsound tool: introspection. But in this area, I think I've speculated far past the point where I could find solid science to back it up, so I've had to rely on observation. Keep in mind, I'm doing this for my entertainment, not for research or whatever. Nobody dies if I'm wrong, unless a zealot hears about it.
Last I heard, there weren't many militant fundamentalist groups in cognitive linguistics, though.
Health,
al-Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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