This post compares Noam Chomsky's Linguistics to the ideas put forward in "Surfaces and Essences" - S&E- by Hofstadter and Salter. A good introduction to Chomsky's theories can be obtained in: " Noam Chomsky on Linguistics " For anyone new to Chomsky, I suggest that you read S&E first. While Chomsky is confident that analogies (the core of S&E) are irrelevant to the study of linguistics, anyone familiar with S&E will find themselves shouting at Chomsky's video. THE INNATE CAPACITY OF LANGUAGE It seems to me that Chomsky's theory harks back to an era when theories of computation were in vogue, especially at Chomsky's home base, MIT. His linguistic theory (Universal Grammar) is closely analogous (oops) to fledgling formalism behind the new computer languages being developed in the 1950's. His core assumptions seem to be: Language is an innate capacity of humans; Language is computational in its essence. It is a computational pro

This post compares Noam Chomsky's Linguistics to the ideas put forward in "Surfaces and Essences" - S&E- by Hofstadter and Salter. A good introduction to Chomsky's theories can be obtained in: " Noam Chomsky on Linguistics " For anyone new to Chomsky, I suggest that you read S&E first. While Chomsky is confident that analogies (the core of S&E) are irrelevant to the study of linguistics, anyone familiar with S&E will find themselves shouting at Chomsky's video. THE INNATE CAPACITY OF LANGUAGE It seems to me that Chomsky's theory harks back to an era when theories of computation were in vogue, especially at Chomsky's home base, MIT. His linguistic theory (Universal Grammar) is closely analogous (oops) to fledgling formalism behind the new computer languages being developed in the 1950's. His core assumptions seem to be: Language is an innate capacity of humans; Language is computational in its essence. It is a computational pro

I am particularly attracted to the idea of the "fractal", which is a scale-independent repetition of a theme. Nature seems to "discover" a few patterns then use them in endless patterns and variations. This is one of the building blocks of what is taking shape as a "theory of mind". To build a "super mind", it would make sense to design the largest scale of this mind in the cloud to tap the computational power of millions of volunteer machines (as in the cloud project to classify galaxies). However, perhaps this as already been done. At least to serve in my "thought experiment", Google may be enough. The "theme" that has me fascinated is the mapping of one brain state into another, using something similar to the Shrodinger Wave Equation. That equation describes the state of the universe in the "next instant" as a function of the state of the universe in the "previous instant". The mental equivalent would be