5/29/11

Linearity of Language



in connection to the linearity ,of language:
basically, language is linear, a stem that moves forward, with branches branching out here and there, in the course of a story or book or text in general. i mean: you start a sentence, which may contain a subsentence ( how do you call this grammatical phenomenon in English " or a number of sub sentences, but pretty soon closes all parentheses and continues with the main syllogistic sequence. this has definitely a lot to do with the medium: printed matter has to operate in a basically sequential way, and if a sequence is broken and then resumed, it has to happen withn the span of the reader's memory. i mean, you cannot have subsentence that runs for ten pages. now, i visualize a medium that will enable us to build two- three- or multi-dimensional linguistic constructs. i mean it would be like instead of having pages numbered by one index, 1,2,3..., we would have them numbered by a couple of indices, e.g. we would have page 1-1, 1-2, 11-3, 2-1,2-2, 2-3, 3-1 etc. and you would have some arrangement that you do not move forward only in one index, like reading a book linearly, but also you could at any point decide to move in an increasing sequence in the other dimension. and you could take a path along any consecutive cells. e.g. 1-1, 1-2, 2-2,2-3,2-4,3-4 etc. in fact you could even do a cycle, starting from 1-1 and end back to it without reading the same cell (:generalization of page) twice. And you could even have cells with three four or n indices. how would you use this medium, i mean how would you "leaf" through it? I do not know. maybe computers will be a solution. this leads to some form of highly parallel processing. this also gives me the following idea: you know how they apply parallel computing to solve problems of partial differential equations? say you have a problem in electrostatics, a potential in a region. to solve this numerically, that is , to get a list of potential values at discrete points of the region, you initioalize with arbitrary values and for each point you average the potential of each neighbours and this is the new potential at this point. this works and converges to the right value, because of the physics involved. clearly, it can be highly parallelized, since you can assign a processor at each point, and all computations would be performed simultaneously (O(1)). now, consider writing a text about people in a city. you can define a four indexed text, where three indices are spatial and one temporal. in other words, every cell of the text deals with a given region of the state space (note that in ordinary books, the index (:page number) has usually some temporal correlation. Here, in our 4-d text, we describe the complete history of a region that we break down in space-time sub- regions. clearly, neighbouring regions will have some connections, as to the events taking place, so you can break the temporally sequential narration technique to wander around in space, and vice versa. in ordinary literature this would be implemented with something like "...at the same time our hero was very worried." but in this extended scheme, all dimensions will exist in the text, and you can look at them. this is of course an image of the outside world. it is a rather conventional technique, corresponding to traditional literature of, say, Balzac or DeFoe. Now, if somebody wants to try fancy schemes, we can take the indices to signify dimensions in some concept space, not in the normal space-time. there are possibilities. relevant questions:
1. can we apply some form of parallelism in the synthesis of this text? one naive way that i can think of, is to have several people writing parallelly and periodically consult each other. this leads to
2. how can we apply recursive techniques in writing this text? this would be the analogue of the recursive averaging process i described for PDE's above.
3. how is this text to be read? i mean what would be the significance of traversing different paths in it? this sounds like an easy question to answer if the text is a simple narrative ( world history ) but if we try to work for added psychoilogical or esthetic effects it can be a very rich question.

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