RL: One thing that can be easily measured is the "activation" of lexical
items related in various ways to a presented word (i.e. show the subject
the word "Doctor" and test to see if the word "Nurse" gets activated).
It turns out that within an extremely short time of the forst word being
seen, a very large numbmer of other words have their activations raised
significantly. Now, whichever way you interpret these (so called
"priming") results, one thing is not in doubt: there is massively
parallel activation of lexical units going on during language processing.
Thanks for reply. How many associations are activated? How do we know
neuroscientifically they are associations to the words being processed and
not something else entirely? Out of interest, can you give me a ball park
estimate of how many associations you personally think are activated, say,
in in a few seconds, in processing sentences like:
"The doctor made a move on the nurse."
"Relationships between staff in health organizations are fraught with
complexities"
No, I'm not trying to be ridiculously demanding or asking you to be
ridiculously exact. As you probably know by now, I see the processing of
sentences as involving several levels, especially for the second sentence,
but I don't see the number of associations as that many. Let's be generous
and guess hundreds for the items in the above sentences. But a computer
program, as I understand, will be typically searching through anywhere
between thousands, millions and way upwards.
On the one hand, we can perhaps agree that one of the brain's glories is
that it can very rapidly draw analogies - that I can quickly produce a
string of associations like, say, "snake", "rope," "chain", "spaghetti
strand," - and you may quickly be able to continue that string with further
associations, (like "string"). I believe that power is mainly based on
"look-up" - literally finding matching shapes at speed. But I don't see the
brain as checking through huge numbers of such shapes. (It would be
enormously demanding on resources, given that these are complex pictures,
no?).
As evidence , I'd point to what happens if you try to keep producing further
analogies. The brain rapidly slows down. It gets harder and harder. And yet
you will be able to keep producing further examples from memory virtually
for ever - just slower and slower. Relevant images/ concepts are there, but
it's not easy to access them. That's why copywriters get well paid to, in
effect, keep searching for similar analogies ("as cool/refreshing as...").
It's hard work. If that many relevant shapes were being unconsciously
activated as you seem to be suggesting, it shouldn't be such protracted
work.
The brain can literally connect any thing to any other thing with, so to
speak, 6 degrees of separation - but I don't think it can conect that many
things at once.
I accept that this is still neuroscientifically an open issue, (& I'd be
grateful for pointers to the research you're referring to). But I would
have thought it obvious that the brain has massively inferior search
capabilities to those of computers - that, surely, is a major reasonwhy we
invented computers in the first place - they're a massive extension of our
powers.
And yet the brain can draw analogies, and basically, with minor exceptions,
computers still can't. I think it's clear that computers won't catch up here
by quantitatively increasing their powers still further. If you're digging a
hole in the wrong place, digging further & quicker won't help. (I'm arguing
a variant of your own argument against Edward P!). But of course when your
education and technology dispose you to dig in just those places, it's
extremely hard to change your ways - or even believe, pace Edward, that
change is necessary at all. After all, look at the size of those holes..
surely, we'll hit the Promised Land anytime now.
P.S. In general, the brain is hugely irrational - it can only maintain a
reflective, concentrated train of thought for literally seconds, not minutes
before going off at tangents. It continually and necessarily jumps to
conclusions. Such irrationality is highly adaptive in a fast-moving world
where you can't hang around thinking about things for long. The idea that
this same brain is systematically, thoroughly searching through, let's say,
thousands or millions of variants on ideas, seems to me seriously at odds
with this irrationality. (But I'm interested in all relevant research).
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