Universal Grammar

While my mind is cooking on the syntax of Bison and Flex and scheme, I was browsing on the Universal Grammar.

Universal Grammar is a theory that argues there are common structural characteristics between all languages, and that human beings have evolved brain/mind mechanisms to deal with these structures quickly.

Right now, since I am working with parse trees, I would argue that the mechanism has to do with white matter, trees and hence grammar (To a male with a hammer, everything is a nail.). Here the definition of language is a subset that can be generated a grammar.

In defining a grammar, many substitutions are used. The trees are built by recursively substituting blocks. Computer scientists generally have to be brilliant at doing this on all levels, but they are not the only people who do this a lot. All definitions, sentences, words and all language grammars do this all the time. You can build trees out of all of this, and subtrees below that, and so on, until the trees wrap around themselves in loops and become graphs. (And then you end up with some ridiculous number like around 176,000km of interconnected white matter in my brain, which is around the earth three times.)

As animals with brains, we were born/equipped with many trees that when evaluated (or evaluate themselves), control behavior. These trees allowed increasingly sophisticated kinds of behavior, but they are usually hardwired and not highly adaptable.
As humans, something must have happened for us to be able to expose these tree building, extension, manipulation (eg. substitution operations), reading and evaluation, allowing us a higher degree of "self-manipulation" than arguably any other creature/thing (possibly except the electronic computers).

The problem now appears narrower and within current knowledge, as it is extremely likely whatever idea this is should already have been thought through and implemented.



To be Continued...

I think the trees are probably all preformed, but I suspect it is the ability to shift focus that makes the difference.

trees formed ->
initial hardwired focus directing programs controlling what to be conscious of / "pruned" ->
focus could be directed at the focus directing programs. How this could occur, not sure... ->
a model of the focus directing program can be produced. ->
the model allows organism to "hack" its own focus, enabling "self-interest" in something. -> Focus now has many degrees of freedom.

And then, we learn routines to jam symbols into words and manipulate them. How that is done remains to be seen.


...
I believe some people know this already and have better language to show it.

A mini tweet

This dead processor thing is one of those things that can make me really annoyed, apparently.

So unexpected and personal.