Stripping away a lot of your point here, I just want to point out how
many "jokes" are memorized fragments. A large part of what is going on
here is using a large database. I'm not disparaging your point about
pattern matching being necessary, but one normally pattern matches and
returns a "pre-computed" result rather than constructing a new result
from scratch. This works well for two complimentary reasons:
1) The results that you've stored will already have been filtered to
meet some minimal quality standard (and you will have had time to assess
their quality off-line)
2) The results that are "part of the common culture" are more easily
recognized and processed by the others with whom you interact.
These two reasons act together to limit the amount of originality that
anyone shows in common discourse. (Humorists spend a lot of time
polishing their jokes before they present them to a wide audience.)
I would assert that this same process operates in all areas of
metaphor. I.e., that human speech is very largely reproductions of
chunks that have been previously encountered, where the size of the
chunk is usually larger than a single word, or even pair of words.
Mike Tintner wrote:
Mike,
There is something fascinating going on here - if you could suspend
your desire for precision, you might see that you are at least
half-consciously offering contributions as well as objections. (Tune
in to your constructive side).
I remember thinking that you were probably undercutting yourself with
the example of the elephant and the chair. Here you certainly are.
What you offered was a fine example of human adaptivity. Your wife
took a fairly straightforward sentence "How would you feel about
fencing in our yard?" and found a new kind of meaning for it - a new
and surprising kind of way of achieving the goal of understanding it -
switched from the obvious meaning of fencing to the fighting meaning.
That's classic adaptivity.
Jokes do this all the time - see Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the
Machine. They are another form of adaptivity/ creativity.
[Another comparable example would be the Airport-type joke:
A: You can't mean: go to the hospital, surely?
B; Yes I do. And don't call me Shirley.]
...
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mike Dougherty" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2007 2:44 AM
Subject: Re: [agi] HOW ADAPTIVE ARE YOU [NOVAMENTE] BEN?
On 4/29/07, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The idea that human beings should constrain themselves to a simplified,
...
....?
ok, I know t... enough)
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