[Wittrs] Re: Wittgenstein and "Brain Scripts"
- From: "jrstern" <jrstern@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:22:59 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@...> wrote:
>
> (reply to Josh)
>
> Asking what a brain is doing with language is superior
> to a dictionary, because it is directly concerned
> with the central matter.
"Superior" to a dictionary, what could that mean?
My brain starts processing "The cat is on the mat",
and I come to belief the dog is behind the log. What
is superior about that?
[parable about word usage deleted]
> Imagine a dictionary of brain script showing in a universal syntax how brains
> processes expressions. What would be described are common patters or
> modalities of thought described with the same sort of conventions one uses to
> describe (program) how computers "think." In fact, we would have to create a
> universal script that does this analysis for us. If it were translated and
> understood, it might even be thought of as a universal language, sort of in
> the way that mathematics is (or symbolic logic could be thought to be). If
> you don't like "brain script," call it the book of common syntactical
> processing.
How about we call it a generative transformational grammar?
> Now this last notion here might indeed be far afoul of Wittgenstein. But
> water does go where it must.
Quite.
> (P.S. -- I don't actually believe this very last idea; I just sort of wonder
> about it. On the one hand, It seems to get around the wrong idea that surface
> level language should be perfect (rigid) to improve clarification, as Moore
> and other analytics thought. Rather, let the surface level stuff be what it
> is, and let's work on notations for what can be said to be the processing of
> sense "underneath" it. On the other hand, this might be very foolish. But
> maybe what could happen is something more reasonable: students take a course
> in brain scripts in college, just as they do symbolic logic. And they do it
> solely for the training in seeing confusions in language and how cognitive
> operations differ. This alone would encourage them to listen with their minds
> rather than their ears when they hear something, just as symbolic logic or
> geometry improves the way children reason).
I salute your efforts here, but can't really see how you're going
to run this gauntlet.
On this side you have the logicists who wanted to talk about the
ideas beneath language. On that side you have the formalists who
want to talk about the processing of language. Standing in the
middle is Wittgenstein who with the TLP tried to do both at once.
And standing with him is Turing who showed that any possible
algorithm to do either or both of these,
was reducible to a simple mechanism.
Now, it turns out that these may be as wonderful tools as all
could hope, but they are just that, tools, not finished artifacts,
and there seems to be an immense amount of work yet to do, to
realize the value of all these theories, when it comes to
philosophy of mind. Some of that work is
philosophy, some science, some engineering, and much art,
I suppose.
Do you want to stand outside of this for your "brain scripts"?
Can you find a place outside to stand?
Now, it may be true that the latter Wittgenstein himself decided
to stand outside of that project - in responding to the paper you
posted on Wittgenstein and Chomsky, I said they were doing
different projects, or at least different parts of the elephant.
It is Fodor who best emphasizes the different "levels" there may
be, such that there are different but related projects to work on,
much as in the famous story of the blind men and the elephant,
each mistaking their part for the whole.
But the phenomenon of "levels" is a commonplace today, to those
who program computers, as I'm sure Fodor was well aware. And you
can have as many levels as you want, microcode, machine code,
programming language, frameworks, libraries, services, languages,
protocols, ... the term of art is a "stack"*. And it's all in
Turing 1936, where he noted that the UTM can emulate other TMs,
includig other UTMs, so we can build these stacks as tall as
we like.
*this is an architectural "stack" or stack of tools, components,
systems, whatever, not the LIFO data widget.
The thing about these levels is, they do not exhaust each other.
Someone may build a lovely processor chip, but does not provide
a compiler/interpreter for programming it. Someone builds a great
compiler/interpreter, but it doesn't answer at all to just how to
compute the taxes on someone's paycheck. Someone writes a payroll
program, and it still needs lists of names and pay rates and hours
worked, before it can print checks.
Now, just where in the stack you believe your brain scripts will
run, is unclear to me, but there is no cannonical form for any of
this, we also know that, and that also follows from Turing 1936,
there are all sorts of tradeoffs one can make between levels,
between hardware and software, machine states and tapes. BUT
THIS CUTS BOTH WAYS. You may have the newest and bestest script
ever done, because there is always room for this - and yet, it can
never be entirely new, it can always be intertranslated in an
unlimited number of ways, to older and less good scripts.
Not to mention, run on a TM.
Just sayin'.
So, what is the complement of #7,
"What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence"?
How about,
"We learn what we really know when we speak about it."
Josh
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