As I read your post, I kept thinking about Daniel L. Everett's book, How Language Began. And then you referred to Everett at the end! I suggested this book to my book group, despite it being deeply flawed and in serious need of a ruthless editor to reduce the redundancy and disorganization. The group are intelligent, educated and well-read, but lack any experience in language analysis beyond writing college essays. I will consider incorporating some of your ideas into my presentation about the book to help them grasp the topic.
Hey Mary Dee! Good to "see" you again; long time since the ReCare days. I concur about D. Everett needing a better editor. How Language Began was tough to read through on account of it. Also, I felt his claim that erectus had language, while entirely plausible and reasonably supported, was perhaps overstated. I enjoyed his earlier book Dark Matter of the Mind more, although it doesn't go into the G1 language concept, which is indeed tightly aligned with the subject of the current post.
I'm hoping these posts will ultimately lead me towards something I could publish as a book in a couple of years. What I'm doing here is trying to refine the ideas and figure out the right presentation.
I was glad to see you delving into these concepts. I'm still doing a bit of consulting on the narrative software from ReCare/Catalis, which still works btw. I look forward to your further discussions of these ideas.
Objects and events as defined by perceptual necessity to biological function makes a lot of sense, and says a lot about the perception of time for those functions considering objects could also be considered events in themselves, albeit entangled by various forces of nature and entropy.
What caught my attention was the brief mention of perceiving the known from the unknown, and the cognitive mechanisms required for exploration. Considering language as an intermediate stage of learning (where to learn a musical instrument, for example, one must experience a "conscious incompetence" and "conscious competence" of verbalizing that which is known from unknown before arriving at the more masterful, non-verbal "unconscious competence"), perhaps one could argue the function of language (subject, verb, and object) is to provide that intermediate conscious grappling with the world until the unconscious competence of navigating it presents itself.
Perhaps it's fair to call the experience of unconscious competence "flow," which is a goal of many meditative practices and disciplines. And if "flow" is an ideal state of function, then language served a learning function for simulating knowledge until true knowledge that enables graceful "flow" presents itself.
However, even with more knowledge than less, it would be prudent for an organism to constantly seek the unknown, never settling for knowing "everything," which makes such a knowledge simulating function all the more persistently necessary.
Hey Jason, thanks for the comment. The question of how we adapt to the unknown -- that is, how the unknown passes to the known -- is a huge question. I hope to get to it over the course of the year. I agree with you that language can help mediate the transition.
For unconscious competence, we use a teacher to help us understand the gaps between what we currently can do and what we wish to do, and they use language to help us arrive there. But the learning itself is probably most influenced by our internal criticism. We hear someone more competent, and we judge our performance by their standard. With the help of conscious insight, practice, and unconscious learning, we gradually achieve convergence towards the desired standard.
Performance of that kind is almost sub-object, that is, below the level of objects. You don't play the piano by thinking about the keys. At the conscious object level, you play a piece of music (subject-verb-object), but at the subconscious level (in fact, sub-cortical!) this high level abstraction is sequenced into a complex arrangement of body movements that make it seem almost as though someone else were playing!
As I read your post, I kept thinking about Daniel L. Everett's book, How Language Began. And then you referred to Everett at the end! I suggested this book to my book group, despite it being deeply flawed and in serious need of a ruthless editor to reduce the redundancy and disorganization. The group are intelligent, educated and well-read, but lack any experience in language analysis beyond writing college essays. I will consider incorporating some of your ideas into my presentation about the book to help them grasp the topic.
Hey Mary Dee! Good to "see" you again; long time since the ReCare days. I concur about D. Everett needing a better editor. How Language Began was tough to read through on account of it. Also, I felt his claim that erectus had language, while entirely plausible and reasonably supported, was perhaps overstated. I enjoyed his earlier book Dark Matter of the Mind more, although it doesn't go into the G1 language concept, which is indeed tightly aligned with the subject of the current post.
I'm hoping these posts will ultimately lead me towards something I could publish as a book in a couple of years. What I'm doing here is trying to refine the ideas and figure out the right presentation.
I was glad to see you delving into these concepts. I'm still doing a bit of consulting on the narrative software from ReCare/Catalis, which still works btw. I look forward to your further discussions of these ideas.
I'm glad to have you reading! I would love to hear your comments as you have them, given your long experience as a computational linguist.
Objects and events as defined by perceptual necessity to biological function makes a lot of sense, and says a lot about the perception of time for those functions considering objects could also be considered events in themselves, albeit entangled by various forces of nature and entropy.
What caught my attention was the brief mention of perceiving the known from the unknown, and the cognitive mechanisms required for exploration. Considering language as an intermediate stage of learning (where to learn a musical instrument, for example, one must experience a "conscious incompetence" and "conscious competence" of verbalizing that which is known from unknown before arriving at the more masterful, non-verbal "unconscious competence"), perhaps one could argue the function of language (subject, verb, and object) is to provide that intermediate conscious grappling with the world until the unconscious competence of navigating it presents itself.
Perhaps it's fair to call the experience of unconscious competence "flow," which is a goal of many meditative practices and disciplines. And if "flow" is an ideal state of function, then language served a learning function for simulating knowledge until true knowledge that enables graceful "flow" presents itself.
However, even with more knowledge than less, it would be prudent for an organism to constantly seek the unknown, never settling for knowing "everything," which makes such a knowledge simulating function all the more persistently necessary.
Hey Jason, thanks for the comment. The question of how we adapt to the unknown -- that is, how the unknown passes to the known -- is a huge question. I hope to get to it over the course of the year. I agree with you that language can help mediate the transition.
For unconscious competence, we use a teacher to help us understand the gaps between what we currently can do and what we wish to do, and they use language to help us arrive there. But the learning itself is probably most influenced by our internal criticism. We hear someone more competent, and we judge our performance by their standard. With the help of conscious insight, practice, and unconscious learning, we gradually achieve convergence towards the desired standard.
Performance of that kind is almost sub-object, that is, below the level of objects. You don't play the piano by thinking about the keys. At the conscious object level, you play a piece of music (subject-verb-object), but at the subconscious level (in fact, sub-cortical!) this high level abstraction is sequenced into a complex arrangement of body movements that make it seem almost as though someone else were playing!