Stephen Wolfram

Now, even in ordinary physics, that doesn't always work that way.

If you're near a space-time singularity in a black hole, for example, and you take your teapot or something, you don't have much of a teapot by the time it's near the space-time singularity.

It's been completely deformed beyond recognition.

So that's a case where pure motion doesn't really work.

You can't have a thing stay the same.

But so this idea of motion is something that sort of is a slightly complicated idea.

But once you have the idea of motion, you can start—once you have the idea that you're going to describe things as being the same thing but in a different place—

That sort of abstracted idea then has all sorts of consequences, like this transitivity of motion, go from A to B, B to C, you've gone from A to C. And so at that level of description, you can have what are sort of inevitable consequences.

They're inevitable features of the way you've sort of set things up.

And that's, I think, what this sort of semantic grammar is capturing is things like that.

And, you know, I think that it's a question of what does the word mean when you say I move from here to there?

Well, it's complicated to say what that means.

This is this whole issue of, you know, is pure motion possible, etc., etc., etc.

But once you have kind of got an idea of what that means, then there are inevitable consequences of that idea.

Right.

Well, words are defined by kind of our social use of them.

I mean, it's not, you know, a word...

In computational language, for example, when we say we have a construct there, we expect that that construct is a building block from which we can construct an arbitrarily tall tower.

So we have to have a very solid building block.

And it turns into a piece of code.