On 02/16/2015 08:22 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
On 02/16/2015 04:05 PM, glen wrote:
Well, what's fascinating is that this language is more natural to the
computer than it is to us humans. And it is more natural for
expressing logic than is, say, English. It's my fault for failing to
mention the fact that whether a language is natural to an act/concept
depends fundamentally on the act/concept. I'd even argue that it
depends less on the constitution of the observer than we might
otherwise think.
I'd love to have you unpack this a little more for me, but not sure
about the "room"... I'm very interested in the underpinnings of your
assertions, not just the assertions... your ideas usually have a
compelling quality for me, even when they are obscured in your
unconventional (use of) language.... I'm starting to worry that this
is a recursive meta-conversation...???
Bah! That's what threading mail clients and kill files are for. (I've
racked up quite a presence in kill files across the globe... or so I'm
told.) In some situations, we have to assume a competence even if we
know our assumption is false. It would simply take too much effort to
avoid the assumption.
Unfortunately, I don't know what, which part, to unpack. We've beaten
the concept of thought vs action quite to death. But that's the
difference between an observer and a participant. The old philosophical
saw that there exist no perfect observers is important, of course. (You
can't really observe music without participating in it... or more
recently on this list, you can't really watch True Blood without
participating in it.) But for the most part, passive observation won't
lead one as directly to a natural language. You kinda have to embed
yourself in there with the natives in order to appreciate the language
spoken by them.
I have refrained from diving down the rabbit hole of trying to suss out
the language, not because I'm afraid it will live up to it's name, but
because the details of it are irrelevant to using it as a flip response
to you...
I'm all flip and no substance. So I can't tell the difference anyway.
--
⇔ glen
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