Jon Wong <saruman7 at hotmail.com> wrote in Psyche-D on Mon 7 Sep 1998:
> A speculation on the creation of syntax.
> The key event in the development/evolution of language and syntax
> was when a verbal utterance became a representation of something
> not immediately seeable, touchable, smellable, tastable, or audible
> in the present environment. This may seem self-evident because, at
> this point, the verbal utterance has taken on the form of a concept
> -- a verbal, and necessarily mental, construct not constrained by
> immediate perceptual experience or placement in the real world.
A.T. Murray:
As an example of the splendid ideas expressed above by Jon Wong,
consider the verbal utterance of the word "blood" representing a
visual-channel memory of an oozing substance looking red and feel-
ing wet, as portrayed in the following ASCII diagram of the mind:
Hearing Vision The Evolution of Concepts Motor Output
/iiiiiii\ /!i!i!i!\ Primitive Verbal Abstract /YYYYYYYYYYYY\
| ||||||| || ||||||| | + + + + + | |||||!|||!|| |
| ||||||| || ||||||| | + + / \ + + | |||||!|||!|| |
| | ||||| || ||||||| | + + / \ + + | |||||!|||!|| |
| |b------||---------|--|---|-(blood) +---+ | |||||R|||!|| |
| ||| l | || ||||||| | / \ + \ / __+__ + | |||||U|||!|| |
| |||| o| || ||||||| |(red) + \ / (dan- )+ | |||||N|||F|| |
| |||||o| || ||||||| | \ / +----+ \ger/-|----|------*|||I|| |
| ||d|||| || | ___ | | +---|----+ \ / _+_ | |||||||||G|| |
| || |||| || / \ | + + +------+ / \ | |||||||||H|| |
| ||||||| || (image)-|--+ / \ + +(cour-) | |||||||||T|| |
| ||||||| || \___/ | + (wet) + + \age/--|----------*|| |
| ||||||| || | | | + \ / + + \_/ | |||||||||||| |
| ||||||| || ||||||| | + + + + + | |||||||||||| |
> But perhaps not as evident is the fact that the disconnection of
> the meaning of a verbal utterance from its immediately-perceived
> real world object or experience means that the newly-formed concept
> has taken on the form of a mental entity that is totally manipulable
> in terms of mental processing. A mental entity whose existence and
> appearance is not tied to immediate perceptual stimuli is completely
> free to be processed by the system that created it. This "disconnect"
> of representation from the perception that engendered it must have,
> as a by-product, also stimulated the creation of structure for its
> manipulation. This, I believe, is a mechanistic explanation for
> the evolution of syntax in language. [...]
A.T. Murray:
A way to process the "totally manipulable" "newly-formed concept"
is to let syntax activate, in serial order, each concept fiber
as it momentarily is the most energized, most salient concept:
/^^^^^^^^^^^\ /^^^^^^^^^^^\
/visual memory\ semantic ________ / auditory \
| /--------|-------\ memory / syntax \ |episodic memory|
| | recog-|nition | \________/---|-------------\ |
| ___|___ | | | | _______ | |
| /image \ | __V___ ___V___ | /stored \ | |
| / percept \ | /deep \------/lexical\----|--/ phonemes\| |
| \ engrams /---|---/concepts\----/concepts \---|--\ of words/ |
| \_______/ | \________/ \_________/ | \_______/ |
--
Arthur T. Muurray
mentifex at scn.orghttp://www.scn.org/~mentifex/http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/7256/ "The Cyborg Syllabus"