Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!purdue!gatech!uflorida!novavax!proxftl!tomh
From: tomh@proxftl.UUCP (Tom Holroyd)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Human-human communication
Message-ID: <335@proxftl.UUCP>
Date: 17 Jun 88 20:45:01 GMT
References: <32403@linus.UUCP> <238@proxftl.UUCP> <33343@linus.UUCP>
Organization: Proximity Technology, Ft. Lauderdale
Lines: 42

In article <33343@linus.UUCP>, bwk@mitre-bedford.ARPA (Barry W. Kort) writes:
> How can we talk about that which cannot be encoded in language?
[stuff deleted]
> I know how to walk, how to balance on a bicycle, and how to reduce
> my pulse.  But I can't readily transmit that knowledge in English.
> In fact, I don't even know how I know these things.

You ride a bicycle by transforming input signals from your sensory system
into output signals for your muscles.  On the way, these signals are modified
by a large number of factors, including some conscious ones which we will
ignore.  The input/output signals can be represented as vectors, and the
transformation is a mapping from one vector space to another.  If you train
a neural net to learn the mapping from sense data to leg movement (and I'm
only talking about simple motion here), the connections of the network encode
the knowledge of how to ride a bicycle.  Enough to build a robot that can
ride a bike.  Maybe not cross an intersection safely.. :-)

Or, I could list a bunch of differential equations that describe the dynamics
of riding a bike.

Neither of these is complete, and the connectionist form would include a
lot of floating point data, so they don't really count as describing anything
in English.  However, by analyzing the forms of the equations, it is often
possible to develop an understanding of what is going on.

Does reducing the problem to a mathematical description count?  The next step
would be to develop a jargon to cover the dynamics of the situation.  Maybe
we just don't have terms for many of the actions required for bike riding.

Summary:  Everything can be described mathematically, and the mathematics
can be described in English.  Caveat:  we haven't figured out how to describe
everything using mathematics yet.  To me, this is the real problem.  Some
subjective phenomena may well prove to be irreducible in the sense that
in order to understand why a person thinks something is beautiful (say),
we'll need to have a large part of that person's brain state, and no amount
of mathematical gymnastics will make the data any less complex.  (For
example, a list of numbers describing a stone falling can be reduced to
a simple quadratic equation.  Brain states don't seem to be this simple.)

Tom Holroyd
UUCP: {uunet,codas}!novavax!proxftl!tomh

The white knight is talking backwards.