Note that even genome hes this hierarchical structure. It's composed of genes, which are composed of codons, which are composed of bases. It may be that the property is not just a way human brain works. It may be that it just happens to be a good technical solution of transferring information with high fidelity.
A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
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Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
So your visual cortex isn't in your brain? Would you care to point out which region(s) of the brain only receive hundreds of bits/sec? Somebody should tell the lossy video compression folks.
Yes, it is in your brain. But if you think that your visual cortex receives anything akin to a high fidelity "picture", then you are mistaken. Regarding lossy image compression, you're free to look at something briefly and try to redraw it from scratch. Even if your drawing skills are perfect, you will find that your picture will be filled with confabulations and stereotypes. > Because of a limited number of axons in…
I've been tackling this from a different PoV (see recent comments) of audio bitrate sensing (20 Hz is the beat/tone boundary, where beats become tones, corresponding to about 0.2 MB/day of data acquisition), or of speaking and reading rates.
At 100 words/min spoken speech, humans can transmit about 1.1 MB/day sustained (24 hours without interruption).
At 600 words/min reading rate (a very high rate, roughly double the college-educated adult average), a human can absorb a maximum of less than 7 MB/day.
Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that the average speed of communication in different languages is the same, even though they differ in verbosity and expressiveness. This is why Spanish speakers seem to speak so fast - Spanish has more syllables on average. So the bottleneck would appear to be, not the physical limitations of communication, but the rate at which we can structure information to be consumed by another mind. Rather like how the li…
When simultaneously translated English to Spanish, my translators complained because I speak fast, and they'd tell me they can't keep up. When I slow down enough, I end up losing my train of thought, so I had to practice speaking slower. Also it might differ Mexican Spanish vs Castilian, where I didn't get much of a complaint by Castilian translators.
Your scenario introduce 'translation' as an additional task. I wouldn't be surprised if that ends up being the bottleneck, rather than anything specific to either the input or output language processing.
Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it is in your brain. But if you think that your visual cortex receives anything akin to a high fidelity "picture", then you are mistaken. Regarding lossy image compression, you're free to look at something briefly and try to redraw it from scratch. Even if your drawing skills are perfect, you will find that your picture will be filled with confabulations and stereotypes. > Because of a limited number of axons in…
I've been tackling this from a different PoV (see recent comments) of audio bitrate sensing (20 Hz is the beat/tone boundary, where beats become tones , corresponding to about 0.2 MB/day of data acquisition), or of speaking and reading rates. At 100 words/min spoken speech, humans can transmit about 1.1 MB/day sustained (24 hours without interruption). At 600 words/min reading rate (a very high rate, roughly double t…
If you think that the information transferred by human speech consists only of the words spoken, you have a rather shallow view of language. You're also processing information taken from pace, pitch, timbre, intonation, volume, timing and direction (among other things). The written word is to speech what choreographic notation is to dance - it's enough to give you the gist, but you wouldn't mistake it for the real thing.
Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nit: we don't absorb gigabits of information. Perhaps there is that much bombarding our senses St any given moment but the amount that actually makes it into our brain is far less, probably on the order of a hundreds of bits/sec max
Oh_sigh says:"...we don't absorb gigabits of information." We're talking bits/second (bandwidth) here, not simply bits. So given that... The human visual pathway has a bandwidth of about 10 megabits per second, so we build the current "view" somewhere in our brain and constantly update it with the stream of data from the visual pathways (there are several). So we're always scanning visually, always updating our view…
Well, OP never specified, so neither did I, but I did suspect that they were talking about per second. To say we absorb gigabits of information over 90 years is a different story, and one which I assumed OP wasn't talking about.
Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it is in your brain. But if you think that your visual cortex receives anything akin to a high fidelity "picture", then you are mistaken. Regarding lossy image compression, you're free to look at something briefly and try to redraw it from scratch. Even if your drawing skills are perfect, you will find that your picture will be filled with confabulations and stereotypes. > Because of a limited number of axons in…
You seem to be confusing the idea of the brain storing information in long term memory with the brain receiving information. Not all information processed is stored. If the brain didn't receive hundreds of megabits of information per second, nobody would be able to tell the difference between SD and HD video.
Considering the optic nerve can only tramsit ~6 Mbits/sec, and layer 4 of v1 in your visual cortext only gets ~10 kbits/sec, I would say you are wrong.
To test this, try seeing if you can distinguish HD from SD without the use of your fovea. You have one highly detailed section of your eye, and the rest is low quality input which is "upgraded" through previous sightings with the fovea and your brains knowledge of how it thinks the world works.
See 'foveated rendering' which will be important in the VR world, to learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_rendering
Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
#47This seems like a dubious claim to me. If you want other examples of languages where words aren't built from meaningless atoms, look at early writing - the word for 'tree' is a crummy picture of a tree, etc. Later on, writing developed into either using meaningless signs to represent sounds, and stringing those together (as in the case of what you're reading now), or using signs to represent fragments of meaning whic…
You're confusing language with its representation (orthography)
Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
#48Ramblings of non-linguist: The problem with the human body is that is extremely hard to share information. We can absorb gigabytes of information through our eyes and other sensory organs, but we can only emit a few bits of information. When we communicate, we are essentially trying to share our thoughts through a very narrow straw that limits the flow of information. The result of this bottleneck is language. Langua…
Note that the average speed of communication in different languages is the same, even though they differ in verbosity and expressiveness. This is why Spanish speakers seem to speak so fast - Spanish has more syllables on average. So the bottleneck would appear to be, not the physical limitations of communication, but the rate at which we can structure information to be consumed by another mind. Rather like how the li…
> So the bottleneck would appear to be, not the physical limitations of communication, but the rate at which we can structure information to be consumed by another mind.
Yet the way in which we must structure information surely plays a role in how quickly we can do it, right? I can certainly read faster than I can speak, and I'm also confident that I can read with full comprehension faster than I can listen with full comprehension to someone speaking very fast, like at the end of a medicine commercial or the Micro Machines guy.
Take for example a physics teacher. They are fond of drawing diagrams because it's a quicker and easier way to refer to the concepts in play than relying on words alone. If we had the capability to project the imagery that accompanies our thoughts so that others could see it, I suspect we'd have to do a lot less talking. And in fact we practice this already with feelings and body language--most of us know when we've committed a faux pas before anybody says a word about it.
The same goes for programming: my thought is "i want to get all of the user's preferences", which is surely faster than finding where to put the query, when to call it, and then testing its correctness. This is one of the things that Alan Kay and Bret Victor go on about--getting the machine to be usable at a level that is closer to the problem space than to machine code. I understand what you meant, that typing at 300 WPM won't help you to design a system. But a visual development environment that actually works probably would, because it would let you work at a more conceptual level most of the time instead of typing magic words into a terminal.
Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that the average speed of communication in different languages is the same, even though they differ in verbosity and expressiveness. This is why Spanish speakers seem to speak so fast - Spanish has more syllables on average. So the bottleneck would appear to be, not the physical limitations of communication, but the rate at which we can structure information to be consumed by another mind. Rather like how the li…
When simultaneously translated English to Spanish, my translators complained because I speak fast, and they'd tell me they can't keep up. When I slow down enough, I end up losing my train of thought, so I had to practice speaking slower. Also it might differ Mexican Spanish vs Castilian, where I didn't get much of a complaint by Castilian translators.
For me, it's not so much losing my train of thought but it drops me out of any sort of real conversational mode. At which point, I can feel like I'm giving up any sort of real engagement and just saying words.
(Though, in my experience, simultaneous translators I've worked with and listened to are pretty good. They seem to usually do a better than decent job even for speakers going along at a "normal" pace.)
Re: A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist
#50Nothing on the size of ABSL's vocabulary. Is there a linguistics notion of turing completeness? Ie. How do I know if a language is capable of expressing any possible concept ("program")? Is this even a meaningful question? Also note that ABSL is only around 100 years old, and see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Sayyid_Bedouin_Sign_Langu...
There is no such thing as a kind of turing completeness in linguistics. natural languages are not even finite and are rarely used to express "computations."