Criticizing Linguistics/Shared Cognitions (2)

[Salinas17 at aol.com]

In a message dated 10/3/07 12:42:03 PM, amnfn at well.com writes:
<< By the same token, if by language, we mean the coding of information using 
a limited number of recurring subunits that can be recombined to form an 
unlimited number of messages with an indeterminately large degree of complexity, 
then clearly there can be language without cognition. >>

And that might be the problem with that definition of language.  

You speak of "messages"  -- in the ordinary sense of that word -- messages 
from whom to whom? Can a message be from no one to nobody?  Is this message part 
important to your definition of language?  

And why should the "recurring subunits" be limited?  

Why can't every bit of information be assigned its own non-recurring 
"subunit" -- on into infinity?  So we have a language where every thing, every action 
and relationship or process is its own "subunit," its own code and its own 
syntactical slot.  Wouldn't this kind of language be more efficient than juggling 
"recurring subunits"?  
 
And this coding business -- isn't the process --> information, encoding, 
transmission, de-coding, back to information?  So where is the de-coding in this 
definition of language?

And why does the information need coding in the first place?  Why take the 
step of putting a stand-in -- a symbol -- in place of the raw data?  Can't we 
make an "unlimited number of messages" right out of the raw data without 
unnecessary coding?

Why is the language you are describing carrying so much baggage?  Could it be 
that its constrained by a function?  Could that function be communication?

<<Computer code and DNA code are two examples.>>

Actually we have the whole universe and everything in it.  Coded information 
right down to our tiny recurring subunit atoms, hadrons, quarks, spin, gravity 
and dark matter, etc.  In fact, in this view, language is just a form of 
computation - just a spec in the algorithmic theory of everything, not the other 
way around.

(See Steven Weinberg's review of Stephen Wolfram, "Is the Universe a Computer?
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15762
Also Jürgen Schmidhuber's web site on the Zuse Hypothesis: The Universe as 
Computer -- http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/digitalphysics.html
Also Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes 
on the Cosmos (2006))

<<Even writing left behind by people long dead is evidence of this principle, 
at least in one direction. Every time we read a message without meeting the 
person who wrote it, we process language that we acquired from an inanimate 
object.>>

Interesting idea.  

Some say that you can process language acquired from an inanimate object even 
if it doesn't have any writing on it.  "Signatures of all things I am here to 
read," wrote James Joyce, courtesy of Jakob Boehme.   

On the other hand, I can be in the physical presence of at least half the 
people on this planet and not understand a word they are saying, because I don't 
understand the languages they are speaking -- even with my handy book of 
Universal Grammar tucked under my arm.

Another interesting inanimate object is the computer I'm sitting in front of 
 It is the culmination of thousands of thousands of separate "cognitions" on 
the part of thousands and thousands of individuals who go back in time to 
Euclid and before, the people who gradually worked out over a long, long time the 
materials, the numbers, the concepts, the electronics, the processes, the 
software, the distribution and even the marketing.  I am, as an individual, 
incapable of building this machine from scratch, and so are my individual 
"cognitions."

The machine is the culmination of thousands and thousands of "cognitions" on 
the part of thousands and thousands of individuals over along, long period of 
time.  What linked them all together communally is, I believe, language. 

Regards,
Steve Long 





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