On 9/13/06, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
On Wed, 13 Sep 2006, padawan12 wrote:
Although Miller and others talk about Pd as a 'language', always with quote marks,
I don't use the quotemarks - I mean, not those that suppose some kind of illegitimacy. In a wide meaning of the word, a language doesn't have to be something verbal or written with letters. Though the etymology points back to a part of the mouth, most would consider the phrase "written language" to not be a contradiction of terms. Here I used quotemarks only as delimiters of a phrase (like I usually do anyway), and not to belittle the phrase.
A well-read man on a poetry newsgroup once told me that thought is when one part of the universe imitates another part, and language is an imitation of that imitation. I thought about that a long time and wasn't able to refute it.
Supposedly William J. Sidis could learn a language in one day. "At the age of four, Sidis learned Russian, French, German, and Hebrew, and soon after, Turkish and Armenian." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis My first word was "kitty".
it doesn't have that syntactic structure
What's missing in it, in order to have a syntax?
or computational causality either.
How can Pd execute a patch then?
I don't see a lack of causality.
I would only say that it isn't one-dimensional. It's still for the most part deterministic, right? I mean there's never any real randomness- I think. The fact that it can follow many paths simultaneously doesn't make it non-syntactical, just awesome.
-Chuckk