5 ms·

I have an idea that's admittedly a bit left of field but not-quite-crackpot. Purpose and causation (and reasoning therein) is structured like a tree. You can a

I have an idea that's admittedly a bit left of field but not-quite-crackpot. Purpose and causation (and reasoning therein) is structured like a tree. You can always take a statement and ask for pointers up and down the tree by asking "how" and "why". Ignoring the specific semantics, everything can be modeled as "things" and force in support/opposition from those things to other things. Thus you arrive at a model of whatever semantics which is just networks of lines of support and attack. So here's my strange idea: what if language maps literally to connections of neurons. The parse tree of a sentence literally encodes the connections of the electrical circuit which models things applying force in support or opposition to other things. This is probably wrong, but its not obvious why it is wrong, and the process of showing that its wrong probably has some insights into a model that isn't wrong. So I throw my wild conjecture to the wind anyway.

solarmist 4y ago
Not too far off base from my understanding. But the first few layers are like firmware they provide the neural interface between hardware (reflexes, processing sensations, etc) and the rest of thinking. So it’s a system that it’s very deeply tied to how we perceive and interact with our bodies and through them the world. And in fact the first level or two of the hierarchy happen outside the brain in the nervous system or spine (unless hearing or sight related obvs) There’s one piece missing though and that’s goals/control variable. My thoughts about this is how we encode things and act of things. When we recognize a tree there’s a set of nodes that activate then some higher layer recognizes trust as a tree and a higher layer still decides how to use that information or how to interact with those nodes (it sets a desired state. Ie. Walk to the tree, write the word, recognize the picture, etc). Take a look into Hierarchical Perceptual Control Theory.
- solarmist 4y ago
  One interesting implication of this is that language is not something separate in the brain. It is a higher level abstraction over the existing processes and reuses all of the existing machinery. So our conception of the word tree would translate to other animals brains directly, they just lack the higher level abstractions of language, consciousness, and understanding that others think and communicate. So the additional nodes collected under the “tree” node (or nodes) would be cleared and repurposed because it’s useless information to the other animal.
nomel 4y ago
It would be interesting to try to map this tree with a language model like GPT.
ethanwillis 4y ago
My suggestion, try the book "realism and reason." It's a collection of papers by Hilary Putnam. It gets into this topic in several different ways, surveys some of the other thinking on it, and so on.
mcswell 4y ago
There was such a theory, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, I think, although I can remember neither the name of the linguist (I don't think it caught on broadly, so it really was just one researcher) nor the name of the theory. I think it foundered for a number of reasons, one of which was that it had--so far as I know--no account of the creativity of humans "doing" language. That is, we can understand and speak any number of sentences we've never heard before, and it's hard (or impossible) to imagine that all those novel sentences were ever in the brain, or that new nerve connections grew so rapidly. For example, I can tell you that I've invented a fugelizer, and that it is useful for turning bryles into fugels. Now I've just used three words that you've never heard before, but you can sort of make sense of what I've said. But clearly there's no 'fugelizer' neuron in your brain, etc.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  Well I have no idea what a fugelizer or a fugel or a bryles are, but those are just as good abstract "things" as any other and so I can just as easily fit them into the pattern of (thing) and (other thing) --(pro existence of)--> (third thing). I can also safely assume that the reason for things existing eventually circuits down to "someone wants it to be this way". So, why would anyone rather their bryles be fugels? (I can figure out other semantics of how bryles and fugels relate to other things I know about later. I don't need a full map of concept relations before I start connecting up the circuit and seeing what it does).
tgv 4y ago
How does the parse tree get represented? Who or what chooses the mapping? They have to be different every sentence. E.g., the word "can" maps onto many different meanings and functions. Your question is about internal representation, but skips the process, and is about a representation that isn't the end of the process either. The idea, common to many of competing theories of human NLP, is that language is to a large extent modular (e.g. recognizing words can be done independent of e.g. a sentence context), while on the other hand, the context (often thought of as feedback from other modules/brain parts) has some influence over it (e.g. the recognition of a misspelled word is easily influenced by the sentence it appears in). The "layers" of language processing then are word, structure, meaning, and pragmatic. The brain being incredibly interconnected, this picture is simplistic, but both behavioral experiments and neurological findings support it to a large extent: it's not one big neural soup. There are other, related processes, which are often left out when talking about language, but e.g. gesture and visual information definitely play a role as well. The parse tree does exist somewhere in the brain, but it cannot map to connections. Instead, it will have to encode some relation between working memory, the large (and largely ununderstood) space of our mind that contains the concepts, and the role in the sentence and further context. Encoding the "pointer address" (because that's what your model sounds like) of the word is simply not enough. It will be passed along at some point, but is in itself insufficient. E.g. in I want the red ball, not the blue ball, the receiver needs to distinguish objects referenced by the exact same word with the exact same meaning. Having a pointer to the lexical concept ball will not help. I think showing "that its wrong" only gives insights into your own mental model, not into language processing in general. It is too undeveloped for further discussion.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  >The parse tree does exist somewhere in the brain Is that even clear? Parse trees are a discretization of stochastic grammars, for example, with probabilities of "production rules" set to either 1 (so you get the right hand side rewrite) or 0 (so you don't get that as an option). Disclaimer: worked on stochastic grammars for computation in recognizers 20 years ago, not sure how the defs might have drifted since then.
  - 4y ago

solarmist 4y ago

Not too far off base from my understanding. But the first few layers are like firmware they provide the neural interface between hardware (reflexes, processing sensations, etc) and the rest of thinking. So it’s a system that it’s very deeply tied to how we perceive and interact with our bodies and through them the world. And in fact the first level or two of the hierarchy happen outside the brain in the nervous system or spine (unless hearing or sight related obvs) There’s one piece missing though and that’s goals/control variable. My thoughts about this is how we encode things and act of things. When we recognize a tree there’s a set of nodes that activate then some higher layer recognizes trust as a tree and a higher layer still decides how to use that information or how to interact with those nodes (it sets a desired state. Ie. Walk to the tree, write the word, recognize the picture, etc). Take a look into Hierarchical Perceptual Control Theory.

solarmist 4y ago
One interesting implication of this is that language is not something separate in the brain. It is a higher level abstraction over the existing processes and reuses all of the existing machinery. So our conception of the word tree would translate to other animals brains directly, they just lack the higher level abstractions of language, consciousness, and understanding that others think and communicate. So the additional nodes collected under the “tree” node (or nodes) would be cleared and repurposed because it’s useless information to the other animal.

nomel 4y ago

It would be interesting to try to map this tree with a language model like GPT.

ethanwillis 4y ago

My suggestion, try the book "realism and reason." It's a collection of papers by Hilary Putnam. It gets into this topic in several different ways, surveys some of the other thinking on it, and so on.

mcswell 4y ago

There was such a theory, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, I think, although I can remember neither the name of the linguist (I don't think it caught on broadly, so it really was just one researcher) nor the name of the theory. I think it foundered for a number of reasons, one of which was that it had--so far as I know--no account of the creativity of humans "doing" language. That is, we can understand and speak any number of sentences we've never heard before, and it's hard (or impossible) to imagine that all those novel sentences were ever in the brain, or that new nerve connections grew so rapidly. For example, I can tell you that I've invented a fugelizer, and that it is useful for turning bryles into fugels. Now I've just used three words that you've never heard before, but you can sort of make sense of what I've said. But clearly there's no 'fugelizer' neuron in your brain, etc.

IIAOPSW 4y ago
Well I have no idea what a fugelizer or a fugel or a bryles are, but those are just as good abstract "things" as any other and so I can just as easily fit them into the pattern of (thing) and (other thing) --(pro existence of)--> (third thing). I can also safely assume that the reason for things existing eventually circuits down to "someone wants it to be this way". So, why would anyone rather their bryles be fugels? (I can figure out other semantics of how bryles and fugels relate to other things I know about later. I don't need a full map of concept relations before I start connecting up the circuit and seeing what it does).

tgv 4y ago

How does the parse tree get represented? Who or what chooses the mapping? They have to be different every sentence. E.g., the word "can" maps onto many different meanings and functions. Your question is about internal representation, but skips the process, and is about a representation that isn't the end of the process either. The idea, common to many of competing theories of human NLP, is that language is to a large extent modular (e.g. recognizing words can be done independent of e.g. a sentence context), while on the other hand, the context (often thought of as feedback from other modules/brain parts) has some influence over it (e.g. the recognition of a misspelled word is easily influenced by the sentence it appears in). The "layers" of language processing then are word, structure, meaning, and pragmatic. The brain being incredibly interconnected, this picture is simplistic, but both behavioral experiments and neurological findings support it to a large extent: it's not one big neural soup. There are other, related processes, which are often left out when talking about language, but e.g. gesture and visual information definitely play a role as well. The parse tree does exist somewhere in the brain, but it cannot map to connections. Instead, it will have to encode some relation between working memory, the large (and largely ununderstood) space of our mind that contains the concepts, and the role in the sentence and further context. Encoding the "pointer address" (because that's what your model sounds like) of the word is simply not enough. It will be passed along at some point, but is in itself insufficient. E.g. in I want the red ball, not the blue ball, the receiver needs to distinguish objects referenced by the exact same word with the exact same meaning. Having a pointer to the lexical concept ball will not help. I think showing "that its wrong" only gives insights into your own mental model, not into language processing in general. It is too undeveloped for further discussion.

jjtheblunt 4y ago
>The parse tree does exist somewhere in the brain Is that even clear? Parse trees are a discretization of stochastic grammars, for example, with probabilities of "production rules" set to either 1 (so you get the right hand side rewrite) or 0 (so you don't get that as an option). Disclaimer: worked on stochastic grammars for computation in recognizers 20 years ago, not sure how the defs might have drifted since then.
- 4y ago