dwarren@ssc-vax.UUCP (David Warren) (04/22/89)
The second part of the tripartite existence of a concept is at the
abstract conceptual fiber for the concept. The abstract conceptual fiber is
the main and focal seat of the concept within the mind. From the abstract
conceptual fiber, thousands of concrete associative tags flow across the
sentient mind-grid to make reference to and control word-engrams in the
auditory memory channel. If you hear (or think) a particular word through
your auditory memory channel, that word instantly gains access, across at
least one of the concrete associative tags, to the abstract conceptual fiber
for that word so that your understanding of that concept is activated within
your mind. Likewise, if, in the interplay of concepts within your mind, that
particular concept fiber is activated, the following scenario takes place.
From the activated concept-fiber, thousands of concrete associative tags
flowing in parallel are activated in parallel. Only one of them has to reach
the word-engram in your auditory memory channel for that word to be activated
and flow through the channel to the present-most end of the consumed portion
of the tabula rasa channel. In all likelihood, many of the tags will gain
access to the word, but, since it is the same word in all instances, your
mind will hear just one standard production of the constituent sounds of the
word. Note, however, that the parallel activation of thousands of concrete
associative tags serves, by sheer redundancy, to make for an extremely
reliable mechanism for the internall recall of words during verbal thought.
Note also that your auditory memory channel is a self-perceiving channel.
Although word-engrams are controlled en masse by the abstract conceptual
fiber outside of the auditory memory channel, we are consciously aware of the
words only as they flow within the auditory memory channel.
The third part or area of the tripartite existence of a concept within
the mind is spread out over all the sensory memory channels which are
associatively connected to the abstract conceptual fiber of the concept. If
the concept is evocative of images (or sounds or smells or feels or tastes),
then from the abstract conceptual fiber many concrete associative tags will
flow out orthogonally over to the sensory memory data which the unitary
concept represents. An abstract conceptual fiber may be associatively
connected to many visual images, not all of which are necessarily identical
or even similar to one another. Remember, a word is always the same, but
most images will have at least minor differences. Such a state of affairs is
fit and proper, because a word is an unchanging symbol, while an image is
just a variable slice of the rich pageantry of experience.
An abstract conceptual fiber reigns supreme as the unitary point under
which or towards which all the constituent information of a concept is
subsumed. The abstract concept develops or grows by the accretion of
concrete associative tags over time. The abstract conceptual fiber is not
itself a symbol, but it is often attached quite fixedly to a symbol, namely a
word in the auditory memory channel.
The abstract conceptual fiber governs both the word attached to the
concept and also the sensory data associated with the concept. An abstract
conceptual fiber can have concrete associations not only to sensory engrams,
but also to other abstract conceptual fibers. This ability of a concept to
exist within a network of related concepts allows the genesis of such truly
abstract and intangible concepts as our notions of "honesty" and "courage."
Remember that all the abstract conceptual fibers flow in parallel in a
flat plane along the temporal dimension of the mind. Logical relationships
among abstract conceptual fibers are determined not by physical position,
such as contiguity or proximity, but solely by interconnection over concrete
associative tags. Thus, although the fibers lie in a flat plane across the
surface of the brain-mind, their associative interconnections can generate
the analog of superstructures or hierarchies among the abstract conceptual
fibers.
To discuss the psycholinguistic nature of language, we must for
the first time in this article introduce the notion of the control of one
abstract conceptual fiber over one or more (i.e., thousands) of other
abstract conceptual fibers. Up until now we have discussed how one fiber
might influence another fiber, but not how one fiber would dominate another.
The ability of a nerve-cell to require the summation of multiple inputs
before firing permits some fibers to control others. In that portion of the
abstract memory channel which we may henceforth call the "linguistic cable,"
some abstract fibers gradually take on the role of governing and dominating
whole classes of other fibers. For purposes of simplicity and clarity, we
will discuss here only two linguistic classes of words: nouns and verbs.
As an infant learns nouns, he or she also subconsciously assigns an
abstract fiber in the "linguistic cable" to the control of the whole class of
nouns. As each new noun is learned, a concrete associative tag is bonded
from the general noun-control fiber over to the abstract conceptual fiber of
the particular noun. From the noun-fiber in turn a concrete associative tag
goes to the engram of the word in the auditory memory channel. Gradually the
noun-control fiber latches on to a burgeoning "family" of nouns, all
segregated conveniently as a class so that they will remain distinct when
other parts of speech are learned.
Suppose that the infant, seeing and recognizing an object, wants to name
that object in a blurt of speech. The "wanting" is actually the the build-up
of logical tension within the abstract memory channel. The general
noun-control fibergang is activated by the confluence of all the logical
tension stemming both from the perceived object and from the internal state
of the infant. This general noun-control fibergang sends a blanket
semi-activation signal to all the nouns in the vocabulary of the infant. In
a way, all thenoun-fibers are being invited to activate their word-engrams
in the auditory memory channel. But, because of the multiple-input
requirement, no noun-fiber can fire solely on the basis of the blanket
semi-activation signal going out to all nouns as a class. Only that
noun-fiber will fire which is already or simultaneously semi-activated, so
that the two semi-activations cause full activation, and a recall-signal is
fired over to the word-engram in the auditory memory channel.
Remember, the infant is seeing an object out in the real world. The
perception of that object causes associative links to filter through and
semi-activate the one noun-fiber within the whole class of nouns. The desire
to speak a word causes the general noun-control fiber to send the blanket
signal to all the noun fibers. The two semi-activation signals - the blanket
one and the specific one - meet in the appropriate noun-fiber and cause it to
fire a recall-signal over to the word-engram stored in the auditory memory
channel. In this system, if the infant has not yet learned the most
appropriate word for the perceived object, he or she will blurt out some
nearly appropriate word which bears the closest associative relationship to
the perceived object. The word chosen by the infant may sound funny to
adults, but it makes sense within the mind of the infant.
In like manner, an abstract control-fiber for each part of speech
governs all the members within the class of that part of speech. When the
infant goes on from learning nouns to learning verbs, likewise a general
verb-control fiber governs all available verbs.
Once we clearly make the point here that one abstract gang of
control-fibers for a particular part of speech can govern all the members of
the class of that part of speech, we then have finished the fundamental
description of level three of the mind and we have described the
part-of-speech building-blocks which make up the sentence-structures in
natural human languages.
If we describe a particular human language, we move from the internal
domain of genetically provided, universal deep features of the level-three
mind out to the external field of cultural tradition. We see the innate
ability of the human mind to segregate or classify various parts of speech,
and we see the cultural ability of the mind to concatenate part-of-speech
control-fibers into sentence structures. The combinatorial power of the
linguistic portion of the abstract memory channel allows many influences to
affect and determine the dynamic operation of sentence structures. These
influences can include considerations of number, logic, time or tense,
emotion, and so on. Any semantic consideration that can be conceptualized
(preferably subconsciously) can be represented as a control-fiber which
figures in the composition of sentence structures within a natural language.
This article does not attempt to formalize the representation of natural
language within a machine mind. We avoid such formalization by means of
utter simplification, and then we leave the elaborate formalizations to the
expert professional linguists.
Our utter simplification of human language consists here in treating
language as if it had only two parts of speech: nouns and verbs. We want to
simplify language so utterly that the reader will, on the one hand, grant
that noun-plus-verb is the essential core of human language, and, on the
other hand, comprehend how this design for a mind generates utterances
consisting of noun plus verb.
Therefore, instead of formalizing an elaborate design for one of the
natural languages, we ask the following common-sense questions. Is it not
clear that a mind which can grasp the concept of the doer of some action and
then link that concept, expressed as a noun, with another concept, that of
the action itself expressed as a verb, has performed the basic linguistic
feat which is both representative and definitive of human linguistic
achievement? Is not everything else refinement and enhancement?
This design does not beg the question by declaring an easy system of
syntax and by ignoring semantics. The foregoing bulk of this article has
laid the semantic groundwork for proposing that part-of-speech control-fibers
are the semantic building-blocks which the mind concatenates into the
sentence-structures or syntax of a human language. This informal
simplification of language is meant as a common meeting-ground for a view of
language and a view of the brain-mind.
Each abstract-memory control-fiber gang for a part of speech becomes a
node on a sentence-structure of concatenated nodes. The nodes are concatenated
by a spiral of linguistic habituation. Just as an associative
tag fetches a word stored in the auditory memory channel, another associative
tag attached to the end of the stored word sends a signal back to the
sentence-structure reporting that the task of one node is complete and that
now the next node should go into operation. Thus dynamic control of the
semantically driven process of sentence-generation shifts back and forth
between the abstract memory channel where the syntax is stored, and the
auditory memory channel where the words are stored. This shifting back and
forth, although it happens in the flat plane of the mind grid, is extended
over time and is logically complex enough to be the flat analog of a spiral
winding through time.
Each use of a sentence-structure reaffirms the habituation of the
sentence-structure. Any typical node in the sentence-structure can be added
or deleted by the habituational device of practice. The associative tags
which operate under the (short-term) domination of a sentence-structure
exercise their own (long-term) domination over the sentence-structure by
reaffirming and habituating it. Change is caused from without, but then each
subsequently identical loop of the spiral takes hold of what was initially
change and habituates it into a long-term structure.
The concatenated nodes of sentence-structures within the abstract memory
channel reach over, so to speak, via associative tags and string together
words and morphemes within the auditory memory channel. We hear our own
verbal thought within our auditory memory channel.
When this system of generating sentences is worked in reverse, it
comprehends sentences by decoding all the associations among concepts
conveyed by the linguistic sentence-structure. In the comprehension of a
sentence, new associative links are formed among the abstract conceptual
fibers in the abstract memory channel of the receiving mind. The sentence is
recorded both as an episode in experiential memory and as a slight
rearrangement of the associative links among abstract conceptual fibers in
the abstract memory channel.
In this system, an incoming sentence does not have to be believed. The
entrenched, pre-existing associative links in the receiving mind can
withstand and overwhelm the links asserted by the linguistic structure of an
incoming sentence.
This design seeks to explain how a multi-lingual speaker can keep his or
her languages apart and avoid running them together while speaking. Since
the vocabulary items are all segregated down at the deep levels, they remain
segregated at the highest level, that of the particular language.
If you build an artificial mind, do not try to program it like a
computer. Build it, turn it on, and commence teaching it.