Sunday, May 15, 2022

Symbols and Nets: Debriefing

It’s been several days since I’d uploaded my most recent run on “Kubla Khan” to the web: Symbols and Nets: Calculating Meaning in “Kubla Khan.” It feels like I’m done tweaking it, so it’s time for a debriefing.

  • First I ask: If I’d read this paper early in my career, what would I have made of it? (Cf. Borges on the curious case of Menard and the Quixote.)
  • Then: Just what did I mean when I said (to myself): It’s all over but the details?
  • Finally, some further thoughts on the methodological postscript.

Would BB69 or BB72 Have Understood It?

Once we get past the introduction, which is in straight prose, the dialog containes six diagrams, all of them transparently derived from diagrams in my 1972 MA thesis, “THE ARTICULATED VISION: Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’.” There is relatively little in there about the work that I’ve done since then. Perhaps the most important bit is a phrase from a recent interview with Geoffrey Hinton, “big vectors of neural activity.” And there’s some computer tech stuff about addresses that I may not have known then. So why did it take me 50 years to write that dialog?

Could I have written it 10 years ago? Back then there wouldn’t have been that Hinton interview I alude to, nor would I have done all the thinking I’ve done about machine learning and artificial neural nets. None of that is in there, but it is implicit in what I wrote and why I wrote it. The same goes for all the cognitive network stuff I did with Dave Hays in the mid-1970s. For me, in 2022, that dialog implies a lot that I’ve learned over the course of half a century (has it been that long, really?). None of that would have been available to BB69 (Bill Benzon in 1969), before I’d written my thesis, or to BB72, after I’d written it.

BB72 would recognized the diagrams as his work, and would have been angry if they weren’t attributed to him – but in this counter-factual he would have been given full credit for them. BB72 certainly saw those nested trees as possible evidence of nested loops in some kind of computation, so I don’t know how he would have taken the concluding dismissal of that possibility. I should also say that BB72 was still somewhat under the influence of Chomsky and attempted to account for those trees with two re-write rules, like this:

T --> B + T + B
B --> B + B

But he didn’t take much satisfaction from them. They seemed rather empty.

I’m not sure what he would made of that dismissal, not do I think it matters. But I do think he would have found the dialog interesting. The question is, would having read it changed his next steps? He’d still have been curious about it all and still would have set off to graduate school with the intention of figuring it out. Would that dialog have changed how he went about it?

That’s hard to say. But what would have been available to him back in the 1970s? He had to work through computational semantics to learn that that wouldn’t solve that problem, though it allowed him to publish a paper about a Shakespare sonnet (129). Would reading that dialog have saved him from doing that? I doubt it. Besides, doing that work proved interesting and useful, just not for THAT problem. And knowing it wouldn’t solve THAT problem is itself useful.

Let’s ask a different question. Let’s bring BB72 forward into the present and have him read that dialog. Now what would he do? The possibilities before him are quite different, though access to that Old School cognitive science would have been tricky. Would he have looked at it? Who knows?

What about BB69? Let’s make it the summer of 1969, after he’d written a senior-year term paper on “Kubla Khan” and had become committed to working out a structuralist account of the poem, but had not yet worked through it to discovering the structure in those diagrams. He would certainly have checked the diagrams for himself. Beyond that, his situation isn’t much different from that of BB72, except that he hadn’t worked over the poem, time and again, until he finally gave up on the binary-structuralist analytic approach and he got the idea to check line-end punctuation. That’s the idea that led to those diagrams. What did BB72 learn from that work that BB69 hadn’t? Does it matter?

I’m not sure it does. BB69 would have verified those diagrams. And he’d certainly have gone looking for similar structures in other poems by Coleridge and then later, poems by other poets. He would have set out to do the kind of work that’s necessary to discovering those diagrams. That’s the important point.

So why haven’t other literary critics independently figured out how to do what BB70 had done?

It’s All Done but the Details

What the hell does that mean? I DON’T think it means that we’re on the edge of figuring out “Kubla Khan,” and by implication, a whole lot more. I DO think it means that if and when I decided to take another detailed look at the poem, I’ll come up with something interesting. Just what, I don’t know.

In my working paper, Calculating meaning in “Kubla Khan” – a rough cut, I had a this chart:

What we’re looking at is a combination of compositional concatenation and convolutional gestalting – this is not the place to explain what those might mean. But I think I will be able to say something about that process that I couldn’t have when I wrote the paper in 2017. Just what...we’ll see when I do it. But see the next section...

Methodology: Cathedrals and Building Materials

The point I was making in the postscript on method (pp. 18 ff.) can be exemplified like this: You’re a linguistic. You know everything there is to know about sentence-level linguistics (assuming, for the sake of argument, the the idea of a sentence is self-evidently useful), from phonetics and phonology up through syntax. But that’s not going to tell you how a connected discourse is put together. You can analyze each sentence-level string in the discourse but, when you’ve done that for the whole discourse, you still don’t know how and why the discourse was put together. That involves consideration that are invisible at the sentence level.

Now, does it make sense to investigate discourse level structure when you don’t have well-settled means of describing and analyzing sentence-level strings? Yes, why not? You just have to be careful how you do it. You want to construct your discourse accounts in terms that are at least commensurate with one or some sentence-level accounts.

That’s what I’m up to with “Kubla Khan.” I know that ultimately we’re going to have to have recourse to neuroscience in order to figure out what’s going on. But the neuroscientists haven’t got a clue about what’s going on in phenomena like “Kubla Khan.” So working at the level of the poem in terms that are commensurate, ultimately, with neuroscience, that’s tricky. Speculative. But someone’s got to do it. And it’s not like we’ve got to go straight to neuroscience in one fell swoop. There’s other levels of description and analysis available.

So, I’m interested in understanding a cathedral. You guys understand stone blocks, morter, and so forth. I’ve just got to keep an eye on what you’re up to while I’m thinking about the overall design. And you might want to look up every now and then to see where it’s going.

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