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Text is serial because it is based upon speech which, being sound, is necessarily serial. Grammars structure serial representations. I wonder if the serial lim

Text is serial because it is based upon speech which, being sound, is necessarily serial. Grammars structure serial representations. I wonder if the serial limitation is purely historical, or if our intelligence system is somehow fundamentally unable to process massively parallel transmission, even if such has been available during our evolution? Certainly, we recall associations in a seemingly massively parallel fashion, but our conscious thought is apparently serial. We think this, then that... wait, isn't this really that? There may be non-deterministic threads going in the background, but they are more about association or "fit" than working something out. We also model things narratively, a serial representation which is also a nice match for events over time - also serial. BTW: didn't spot the error at first. But I've seen typos in books on second or later readings, which (evidently) also eluded the author and copy editor.

kazinator 11y ago
Sound is serial, and it isn't. Even for the purpose of raw analysis of things like the frequency spectrum, you need a certain sized frame of audio. One or two instantanteous samples won't give you anything. Conversely, we could argue that images are also serial, because we can rasterize them as pixels on a grid, from upper left, to lower right. Anything that can be encoded or approximated by 1's and 0's is serial. How do we really hear? How do we hear speech? Though the audio is constantly in oscillating motion, tracing an amplitude graph in time, we perceive audio as snapshots: images are formed in our mind which persist. We chunk the audio into frames. Speech understanding probably doesn't take place until a whole frame of audio is assembled and delimited into phonemes. That speech frame appears in the mind as a unit which is randomly accessed; we do not imagine we have a "read write head" which can only retrieve one phoneme at a time, and only in one direction.

kazinator 11y ago

Sound is serial, and it isn't. Even for the purpose of raw analysis of things like the frequency spectrum, you need a certain sized frame of audio. One or two instantanteous samples won't give you anything. Conversely, we could argue that images are also serial, because we can rasterize them as pixels on a grid, from upper left, to lower right. Anything that can be encoded or approximated by 1's and 0's is serial. How do we really hear? How do we hear speech? Though the audio is constantly in oscillating motion, tracing an amplitude graph in time, we perceive audio as snapshots: images are formed in our mind which persist. We chunk the audio into frames. Speech understanding probably doesn't take place until a whole frame of audio is assembled and delimited into phonemes. That speech frame appears in the mind as a unit which is randomly accessed; we do not imagine we have a "read write head" which can only retrieve one phoneme at a time, and only in one direction.