On 8/9/2008 12:43 AM, Brad Paulsen wrote:
Mike Tintner wrote:
> That illusion is partly the price of using language, which
> fragments into pieces what is actually a continuous common sense,
> integrated response to the world.
Excellent observation. I've said it many times before: language is
analog human experience digitized. And every time I do, people look
at me funny.
I dunno about that. When I walk into my dining room, I don't see a
continuous experience, I see a table and chairs and plates, etc. I clump
the world into objects that have discrete boundaries. Isn't that
digitization in the sense you mean?
I think of language more as serializing something that's parallel
internally, and saving communications bandwidth by supplying enough
information to uniquely identify an already known concept rather than
fully describing it -- part of which is the use of symbols.
As a side note: There's some evidence that dolphins communicate by
making sounds that imitate what their sonar would return. It's somewhat
equivalent to me being able to wave my hands and make an image appear in
the air. Thus there's no need for symbols, because they can reproduce
the sensory input of the original object. If it had been easier to do
the same thing in our sensory environment (vision rather than sonar), we
might never have evolved symbolic language and all that led to.
-------------------------------------------
agi
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