Yes, Helen did have a very hard time existing without words. Deprived of words on both an auditory and visual basis she was unable to communicate or reason about the odors, tastes and other tactile sensations that bombarded her.
When her teacher Anne Sullivan was finanlly hired and formed words on Helen's palm (called finger spelling) naming each object in her life one by one that she was able to make sense of her world and her intelligence was able to emerge. In short she was given the gift of words. Without her teacher she likely would have been institutionalized for life. Trapped in a body flooded with sensation but no way to reason about them or communicate with the outside world. The rules are not in the words. The rules are inducted and deducted from experiences which you translate into words and what you read or hear in words which have already been induced or deducted by others. Our first evidence of a chair being too small and will break may come from the Goldilocks story where the baby bears chair broke when Goldilocks tried to sit in it. Or it may come from an observation of outgrowing your car seat and knowing that the elephant you saw at the zoo is much larger than any chair you've ever seen. And every childs has tried sitting on a cardboard box only to watch it collapse. The memories upon which we've synthesized these rules becomes lost and the rule itself becomes so obvious that we are not aware that we are invoking it. Also generalization comes into play here the rules become more or less impossible based upon the size of the animal. Something like IF Something is smaller than a chair and is a biped could sit in a chair pretty much like a human. If a another object/animal is small and light enough it can kind of sit in a chair but is probably just lieing on it. Generalization allows me to formalize that rule without using my imagination to imaging each animal and ech object in the world sitting in the chair. If you mention an animal that that I have never heard of a Amoflaccus, the rule lacks a varialbe size and instead of firing a wrong answer triggers a request for information, "Whats a Amoflaccus. And how could we reason about abstractions if we were so dependent on images. The men who discovered calculus did so based upon study and observation of the laws of change. But no student today learns Calculus like that. The rules and terms are spoon fed to them and many times the applications to real life aren't even discussed except in a few word problems. And what does an imaginary number look like. I could follow the rules and do calculations with them based on the words and rules I was taught but noone ever could explain to me what one looked like. The reason pure language translation (I'm assuming you mean syntactical instead of knowledge based) hasn't worked is because we use meaning to arrive act the correct understanding. Patterns are matched to previous language inputs in the users knowledge base (brain) taking into account context and other information extracted from prior inputs and the listeners life experiences (Knowledge base) to arrive at the correct understanding and extract additional information from the input. -------------- Original message -------------- From: "Mike Tintner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Helen Keller must have had a tough time existing without words. According to you she didn't know the shape of the chairs she sat on. She had no words. What are these commonsense rules in words that you learned? That apply to the sentences I gave? Or to elephants and chairs? Where did you get the idea that the elephant is a "multi-ton quadruped"? Which book did you actually read those words in? Where did the sentence: "Something large and heavy will not fit correctly into something small not built to carry that much weight" come from? And what if I say to you: "sorry but the elephant did sit on the chair" - how would you know that I could be right? (You don't see the images/ graphics underlying words, because as you try to understand how you understand sentences, you're supplying further sentences of analysis at great speed. But if you try to trace where those sentences came from - the rules you're referring to above - you'll find there are except in rare cases no such rules. You've actually made them up - and your brain did that for you by using its imagination. It's only by imagination that you can work out which of thousands of animals can or can't sit in a given chair. As I said, there are no rules of combination that cover most of the interactions between things described in the millions or however many sentences you read. That's why pure language translation hasn't worked.). =3aad2a84 ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=fabd7936
