Re: From Bill: Help! / linguistics
It seems to me that there are huge problems in understanding how brains as they appear to work can produce anything like language as it appears to be, roughly as if you were to put a mess of marmalade and peanut butter into the microwave and get out a lego pirate ship. So people just struggle with this as best they can, with results that are fundamentally confusing and unsatisfactory. And then there are are the PCT specific problems, such as exactly what kind of error signal is the production of an utterance supposed to control, and how can you get from any kind of error signal to the production of something like:
“Sarah Palin enjoys an ability to connect with voters that cannot be taught”
(from somewhere on the interet, containing an entertaining and presumably unintended ambiguity)
So I have a few speculations of my own, but don’t know any way to get them above the level of what would be politely described as ‘just so stories’.
Avery Andrews
On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:42:57 -0600, Bill Powers powers_w@FRONTIER.NET wrote: >[From Bill Powers (2009.07.22.1027 MDT)] > > >How about introducing yourself a bit, since I don’t recall hearing >from you before now? I hope that’s not just senility setting in. > >Best, > >Bill P. >========================================================================= No, it’s rather my lack of manners not introducing myself… … I’m just an interested bystander who stumbled over CSGnet a while ago and became somehow hooked. I did a Master in linguistics a few years ago in germany (where I was born and live). During my studies I became very frustrated with my subject. Everywhere I looked, e.g. psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, models where based on the input-output view and/or the “brain-as-a-computation-device” paradigm - which both never made sense to me. Take e.g. Alan Baddeley’s model of “working memory” which is still very popular among psychologists. The model consists of buffers (for temporary storage), modules and it assumes the transmission of information between these modules. At my university students still have to learn Chomsky and similar “cognitive” approaches on language. More recent theories of language are still understood within the same traditional paradigm. There seems to be no real attempt to understand language on a biological level. Of course, there are many so called “biologically inspired” theories, and of course, most of them claim to be based on “facts” of how the brain works. But unfortunately the brain is no computation device. If this were true, you PCTers would have easily transmitted your information/knowledge into the heads of these scientists out there. (Of course the real problem is related to the phenomenon of reorganisation … which organisms usually prefer to resist). Anyway, I enjoy following your discussions. The PCT-understanding of ‘behavior’ is a refreshing alternative to these biologically unplausible models, which usually impy a kind of homunculus (e.g. “central executive”). I don’t see any way how to understand behavior other than as the control of perception. However, what I’m missing on CSGnet is the attempt to link PCT more to structures and properties of the nervous system. And I would be interested to hear the PCT view on language at the perceptual and the behavioral structural, not only the functional, level. I have some half baked ideas… which I will be happy to share, provided that you bear my weak command of english. Regards, Ulrich
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