Stephen Wolfram

Whereas if you use the word eat in a computational language level, you would define there isn't a thing which you anchor to the kind of natural language concept eat, but it is now some precise definition of that that then you can compute things from.

Sure.

But the thing that sort of is the first target for computational language is to take sort of the ordinary meaning of things and try and make it precise.

Make it sufficiently precise you can build these towers of computation on top of it.

So it's kind of like if you start with a piece of poetry and you say, I'm going to define my program with this piece of poetry.

It's kind of like, that's a difficult thing.

It's better to say, I'm gonna just have this boring piece of prose, and it's using words in the ordinary way, and that's how I'm communicating with my computer, and that's how I'm going to build this solid building block from which I can construct this whole kind of computational tower.

Well, I think that that's a complicated thing, because in a sense, human linguistic communication is there's one mind, it's producing language, that language is having an effect on another mind.

Yeah.

And the question of there's sort of a type of effect that is well-defined, let's say, where, for example, it's very independent of the two minds.

There's communication where it can matter a lot, sort of what the experience of one mind is versus another one and so on.

Well, I think the story of natural language, that's the great invention of our species.

We don't know whether it exists in other species, but we know it exists in our species.

It's the thing that allows you to...

sort of communicate abstractly from one generation of the species to another.

There is an abstract version of knowledge that can be passed down.

It doesn't have to be genetics.

You don't have to apprentice the next generation of birds to the previous one to show them how something works.

There is this abstracted version of knowledge that can be kind of passed down.

Now that, you know, it relies on, it still tends to rely because language is fuzzy.