Related papers: Universal Grammar and Consciousness
Many of the most familiar features of our everyday environment, and some of our basic notions about it, stem from Relativistic Quantum Field Theory (RQFT). We argue in particular that the origin of common names, verbs, adjectives such as…
This article supports the epistemological claim that sound human reasoning about ultimate knowledge is either foundational or circularly justified. In particular, questions which naturally arise in theology, philosophy, and related…
The formalism of quantum theory over discrete systems is extended in two significant ways. First, quantum evolutions are generalized to act over entire network configurations, so that nodes may find themselves in a quantum superposition of…
A generalized framework is developed which uses a set description instead of wavefunction to emphasize the role of the observer. Such a framework is found to be very effective in the study of the measurement problem and time's arrow.…
Indexed languages are a classical notion in formal language theory, which has attracted attention in recent decades due to its role in higher-order model checking: They are precisely the languages accepted by order-2 pushdown automata. The…
The question of what ontological message (if any) is encoded in the formalism of contemporary physics is, to say the least, controversial. The reasons for this state of affairs are psychological and neurobiological. The processes by which…
Dictionaries are inherently circular in nature. A given word is linked to a set of alternative words (the definition) which in turn point to further descendants. Iterating through definitions in this way, one typically finds that…
Classifying the information content of neural spike trains in a linguistic endeavor, an uncertainty relation emerges between the bit size of a word and its duration. This uncertainty is associated with the task of synchronizing the spike…
General relativity required the abandonment of Euclidean geometry. Here we show that quantum theory requires the abandonment of classical logic. We show that the Hilbert space representation of quantum theory is logically inevitable. There…
This paper introduces a theory about the role of language in learning physics. The theory is developed in the context of physics students' and physicists' talking and writing about the subject of quantum mechanics. We found that physicists'…
Human languages differ widely in their forms, each having distinct sounds, scripts, and syntax. Yet, they can all convey similar meaning. Do different languages converge on a shared neural substrate for conceptual meaning? We used language…
The term quantum logic has different connotations for different people, having been considered as everything from a metaphysical attack on classical reasoning to an exercise in abstract algebra. Our aim here is to give a uniform…
We argue for a compositional semantics grounded in a strongly typed ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it in ordinary language. Assuming the existence of such a structure, we show that the…
Following the principles of Cognitive Grammar, we concentrate on a model for reference resolution that attempts to overcome the difficulties previous approaches, based on the fundamental assumption that all reference (independent on the…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
A fundamental theme in automata theory is regular languages of words and trees, and their many equivalent definitions. Salvati has proposed a generalization to regular languages of simply typed $\lambda$-terms, defined using denotational…
Words are fundamental linguistic units that connect thoughts and things through meaning. However, words do not appear independently in a text sequence. The existence of syntactic rules induces correlations among neighboring words. Using an…
Quantum theory is formulated as the uniquely consistent way to manipulate probability amplitudes. The crucial ingredient is a consistency constraint: if the amplitude of a quantum process can be computed in two different ways, the two…
On one popular view, the general covariance of gravity implies that change is relational in a strong sense, such that all it is for a physical degree of freedom to change is for it to vary with regard to a second physical degree of freedom.…
This paper proposes a general quantum algorithm that can be applied to any classical computer program. Each computational step is written using reversible operators, but the operators remain classical in that the qubits take on values of…