Re:What Happens When You Can’t Talk to Yourself?
by rvikmanis on Saturday November 21, 2015 @01:13PM
(#10607495)
> Thought is more fluid; putting it into words concretizes it, collapses the possibilities of the waveform. Somewhat, formalizes it.
That is a very good description.
I discussed this topic with a colleague recently, and we both agreed that putting thoughts into words takes conscious effort. Though I suspect that is not so for the majority of people, whose default mode of thinking is distinctly verbal, even when not talking or writing.
Words are a serialization format for thought. There are different formats; there are also different bindings possible for the same information in the same format. Grammars are used to describe both. Actually, important early work on regular and context free grammars was done by a linguist.
Of course, none of that shows that thought is analogous to graphs of data structures. But I suspect if we ever develop direct brain-to-brain communication (i.e. prelinguistic telepathy), we'll see similar problems to interoperating programs written by different people at different times in different contexts for different purposes.