Computation in language 3: Myths, stories, and writing

I’ve been arguing that speech communication, in effect, is a computational input/output device for symbols. Its computational power is necessarily quite limited, for the “tape” is short and can move only in one direction. The power is in the symbols themselves. I offer two further remarks, one about myths and stories, and the other about writing.

Myths and stories

We need to think a bit about myths and tales, strings of “tape” the culture seeks to preserve fairly intact. The preservation is not exact, of course, not word-for-word, but the general ‘drift’ of events is preserved. Just what is being preserved in these stories? It’s not the stories as such, but whatever it is that is embedded in those stories – values, customs, what? Lévi-Strauss has his binary oppositions and, yes, they’re important. But like he says, they’re only a code. What are they encoding?

All of a sudden I don’t know what’s going on, though I’ve certainly thought about it a lot and written a bit about it. And what I wrote talks about the nervous system, and in particular about the so-called lizard brain [1]. Surely that’s what’s important about these stories, the way they engage those deep neural structures and thus make their activities public and sharable in a protected setting.

Writing

Writing (Rank 2) in effect extends the length of the tape in our Turing machine input/output device and allows us to move over in, not only in both directions, but even in random ways (e.g. open a document to any page). Written words are of course stable over time and from reader to reader and can accumulate indefinitely. Does this change the character of our language Turing machine?

Moreover it is writing that facilitates the development of computation in the narrow sense of arithmetic calculation. Arithmetic operations, from mere counting through complex calculations, bring a new range of phenomena within range of human cognition.

And so it goes with calculation (Rank 3) and computation (Rank 4) [2].

References

[1] William Benzon, The Evolution of Narrative and the Self, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 16(2): 129-155, 1993, https://www.academia.edu/235114/The_Evolution_of_Narrative_and_the_Self.

[2] William Benzon and David G. Hays, The Evolution of Cognition, Journal of Social and Biological Structures. 13(4): 297-320, 1990, https://www.academia.edu/243486/The_Evolution_of_Cognition.