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> conception here is that one's layered abstractions is basically an informal mathematics... which is formally structured... which is a formal grammar. It's your internal language, using internal symbols instead of English names

Unless we're getting metaphysical to the point of describing quantum systems as possessig a language, there are various continuous analog systems that can compute without a formal grammar. The language system could be the one that thinks in discrete 'tokens'; the conscious system something more complex.




That's based on a well known fallacy, because analog models cannot exceed the computational power of Turing machines. The alternative position is Penrose who thinks quantum tubules are responsible for consciousness and thus somehow more powerful than TMs.


> analog models cannot exceed the computational power of Turing machines

There is no reason to assume consciousness is Turing computable [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis


Good thing Computability Beyond Church-Turing via Choice Sequences[1] exists.

[1] Mark Bickford, Liron Cohen, Robert L. Constable, and Vincent Rahli. 2018. Computability Beyond Church-Turing via Choice Sequences. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 245–254. https://doi.org/10.1145/3209108.3209200




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