The principles by which the Language of Thought functions

The principles by which the Language of Thought functions

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Human perception through the senses combined with the brain activity results in natural formation of the primary elements and the connections between them. These principles, emerging elements and connections between them can be roughly called the Language of Thought, which was described by the American philosopher and linguist Jerry Fodor back in the 1970s. He also took part in laying the foundations of cognitive science. We study the Language of Thought with the help of the Theory of Active Perception — TAPe.

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Perhaps we should clarify: the mathematical part in language is used by AI, whereas linguists don't seem to have found it at all. Anyway, almost all massive translations are now done using AI models, even if it is done by "just" iterates through large databases, searching for the next word, backpropagation, etc. without finding the meaning, the connections in the language.

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TAPe models the workings of the innate mechanisms of human perception and allows us to "mathematically" describe the principles, ways, and methods by which the Language of Thought functions. It is through the Language of Thought that the brain perceives reality, transforming it into data and then into information (in its generally known meaning). And since natural language is derived from the Language of Thought or represents one of its forms, TAPe allows us to describe how natural language emerged and by what laws it has evolved.

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However, the brain divides reality according to completely different principles, into completely different elements than letters and numbers and operations with them. This is not classical mathematics at all, neither is it linguistics.

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Human vision is directly connected to the brain, and is the main provider of information about the world around us. The visual system has "innate" detectors that humans got as a result of evolution. With the help of these detectors, the human brain recognises the most complex visual images. At the same time these detectors are the primary elements of the Language of Thought. They interact with each other according to certain laws, which helps the brain recognise or, more specifically, create visual images. The “mathematical” apparatus of TAPe describes these laws.

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The American linguist and professor of cognitive linguistics George Lakoff said that mathematics comes from language. Let us specify that language creates computation or a method of computation. And if we go further and replace the word "language" with "symbolic system", we will see that the computation logic is derived from the symbolic system. But as far as we know, these logic and mathematics have not been not described anywhere — except in TAPe.