Stephen Wolfram

The nouns and the verbs are in the right place, but it just doesn't mean anything.

And so there clearly is some rule that there are rules that determine when a sentence has the potential to be meaningful that go beyond the pure parts of speech syntax.

And so the question is, what are those rules?

And are there a fairly finite set of those rules?

My guess is that there's a fairly finite set of those rules.

And once you have those rules, you have a kind of a construction kit, just like the rules of syntactic grammar give you a construction kit for making syntactically correct sentences.

So you can also have a construction kit for making semantically correct sentences.

Those sentences may not be realized in the world,

I mean, I think, you know, the elephant flew to the moon.

A syntactic, a semantically, you know, we know, we have an idea.

If I say that to you, you kind of know what that means.

But the fact is it hasn't been realized in the world, so to speak.

with the things we're describing in language.

It's a bit circular in the end, because you can, and the sort of boundaries of what is physically realizable.

Okay, let's take the example of motion, okay?

Motion is a complicated concept.

It might seem like it's a concept that should have been figured out by the Greeks long ago, but it's actually a really pretty complicated concept, because what is motion?

Motion is you can go from place A to place B, and it's still you when you get to the other end.

You take an object, you move it, and it's still the same object, but it's in a different place.

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