Remembrance of Verbs to Describe Actions
Our current impasse is at a point where we are trying to bring to-
gether all the accumulated subsystems of our intended automaton.
Recently we have tended to simplify several elaborate designs of
ours, so that for the final design we luckily end up with a
choice of either the elaboration or the simplification, which
might be too simple to work. We have tended to simplify the voli-
tion system from last March and the verbal decoding system from a
year ago. The impasse rests most pointedly in such questions of
a grammar system as how the automaton will observe actions and
then recall verbs to name the actions.
That verb-problem stands out because we see rather readily now
how we can at least find nouns to go with perceived objects. Ac-
ually, the verb-problem grew out of a narrower problem from sev-
eral days ago, when I was trying to figure out how the automaton
would assign the concept of plurality to perceived objects, so as
to be able to form noun plurals. I was making a little progress
on the plurality question. For instance, I realized that to per-
ceive plurality is not a one-step process, because just to per-
ceive the unity of one entity is a conceptual step in itself. To
recognize two creatures, for instance, a mind can recognize first
the one and then the other, but not both at the same time. So I
was recently tending towards the conclusion that use of the con-
cept of plurality involves (the processing of) multiple slices of
perception.
However, that quasi-conclusion caused me trouble because a system
of unitary associative tags from percept to word didn't seem suf-
ficient to handle plurality. I even started hypothesizing that
our minds project plurality onto things, with greater or lesser
success.
Then late the night of 13NOV1978, I got the idea that maybe there
should be an additional memory alongside the others (sensory and
motor), a memory which held perceptual content but not sensory
content, a memory which would handle conceptual associations be-
yond the linear scope of the purely sensory memories: an abstract
memory.
So for several days I revelled in this possibility of a new in-
sight, but meanwhile I came to focus on this problem of assigning
verbs to perceived actions.
I sensed an analogy here with the work of 16.OCT.1978 on the skin
surface. When we verbally name a perceived action, we automati-
cally tend to select the most aptly differentiated verb available
to us. In so doing, we automatically pass over many less apt
verbs which would nevertheless have correctly described the ac-
tion. For example, "He ruined it" is correctly within the mean-
ing of "He destroyed it."
Another idea which I have been getting is that the remembrance of
verbs is perhaps the function of a rather elevated "abstract lan-
guage domain."
--
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/7256/ The Cyborg Syllabus
http://www.scn.org/~mentifex/ Project Mentifex (Mindmaker)