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Article 6593 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Communication and Intelligence
Message-ID: <1992Aug10.224332.30902@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 10 Aug 92 22:43:32 GMT
References: <1992Aug10.133447.6855@sequent.com> <1992Aug10.163139.20080@mp.cs.niu.edu> <BILL.92Aug10155913@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 36

In article <BILL.92Aug10155913@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu> bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs) writes:
>rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>
>    > As I see it, the unique aspect is that language is DIGITAL.
>
>Let's for the moment ignore written language, and just think about
>spoken language.

  Yes, I was mostly thinking about spoken language, since that is the
origin of language.

>                  This is, as you say, "digital" (though I prefer the
>word "discrete"), because utterances are strings of phonemes, and
>every human language has a limited stock of phonemes -- 40 or so.

  I don't like the term discrete.  The light switch in my kitchen is
discrete, since it has a fixed set of positions (ON and OFF).  That
doesn't make it digital.  But our language is digital in the sense
that it uses components constructed from the digits (i.e. phonemes).

>But other animals communicate in ways that are equally digital, except
>that their vocabularies are much smaller.  Vervet monkeys, for
>instance, have a distinct "snake" call, "leopard" call, etc.

  I would say that they communicate in ways that are equally discrete,
but are not digital.  Unlike humans, they have not taken advantage of
essential digital features.

>I think the big difference is that human language is *combinatorial*.
>Humans can put phonemes together into long strings that obey
>systematic grammatical rules; for monkeys a single "phoneme" is a
>complete message.

  OK.  But only if you'll agree that the term 'digital computer' we have
been using is wrong, and we should call them combinatorial computers,
since they put lots of digits together.


