Tom_McCabe2 comments on Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles - Less Wrong

17 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 March 2008 11:58PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (64)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Tom_McCabe2 02 March 2008 12:47:28AM 1 point [-]

"What does a word point to?"

I'm not a neurologist, but I believe the classical answer is that words point to patterns in clusters of neurons. Everything filed under "apple" slightly rearranges neurons in the "apple" category, including pictures of apples, the taste of an apple, stories about apples, etc. Features which all apples have in common are amplified by the pattern-matching, while dissimilar features cancel each other out. Eventually, we get a mental pattern of the "archetypal" apple, describing the category in general, which can be drawn or described from scratch, without identifiable references to any specific apple. (If you haven't personally experienced this with apples, try ideas. Relying on one or two authors for your information will cause you to include some of their identifiable little details in your own writings.)