Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

118 | HOW THE MIND WORKSreintroducing it to the herd, it was killed within a day or so by hyenas.One explanation is that the colored marker made it easy for the hyenas toindividuate the wildebeest and chase it to the point of exhaustion.Recent thinking about zebra stripes is that they are not for blending inwith stripey tall grass—always a dubious explanation—but for turningthe zebras into a living shell game, baffling lions and other predators asthey try to keep their attention on just one zebra. Of course, we do notknow that hyenas or lions have the concept of an individual; perhaps anodd man out just looks more appetizing. But the examples illustrate thecomputational problem of distinguishing individuals from classes, andthey underscore the human mind's facility in solving it.A second problem for associationism is called compositionality: theability of a representation to be built out of parts and to have a meaningthat comes from the meanings of the parts and from the way they arecombined. Compositionality is the quintessential property of all humanlanguages. The meaning of The baby ate the slug can be calculated fromthe meanings of baby, ate, the, and slug and from their positions in thesentence. The whole is not the sum of the parts; when the w0rds arerearranged into The slug ate the baby, a different idea is conveyed. Sinceyou have never heard either sentence before, you must have interpretedthem by applying a set of algorithms (incorporating the rules of syntax) tothe strings of words. The end product in each case is a novel thought youassembled on the fly. Equipped with the concepts of babies, slugs, andeating, and with an ability to arrange symbols for them on a mental bulletinboard according to a scheme that can be registered by the demonsthat read it, you can think the thought for the first time in your life.Journalists say that when a dog bites a man, that is not news, butwhen a man bites a dog, that is news. The compositionality of mentalrepresentations is what allows us to understand news. We can entertainwild and wonderful new ideas, no matter how outlandish. The cowjumped over the moon; the Grinch stole Christmas; the universe beganwith a big bang; aliens land at Harvard; Michael Jackson married Elvis'daughter. Thanks to the mathematics of combinatorics, we will neverrun out of news. There are hundreds of millions of trillions of thinkablethoughts.