Outer Reaches of the Palindrome Page: 35
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a new key onto the stack.39 We utilize similar recursive methods to communicate and understand
each other. Steven Pinker writes:
What boggles the human parser is not the amount of memory needed but the kind of
memory: keeping a particular kind of phrase in memory, intending to get back to it, at the
same time as it is analyzing another example of that very same kind ofphrase. Examples
of these "recursive" structures include a relative clause in the middle of the same kind of
relative clause, or an if... then sentence inside another if... then sentence. It is as if the
human sentence parser keeps track of where it is in a sentence not by writing down a list
of currently incomplete phrases in the order in which they must be completed, but by
writing a number in a slot next to each phrase type on a master checklist. When a type of
phrase has to be remembered more than once- so that both it (the cat that ...) and the
identical type of phrase it is inside of (the rat that ...) can be completed in order- there is
not enough room on the checklist for both numbers to fit, and the phrases cannot be
completed properly.40
Perhaps, as the human race strives to accurately duplicate its own kind of intelligence, it will
inevitably be forced deeper into the incessant desire to understand its own ability to understand
its own ability. According to Hofstadter, the key may lie within the nature of recursive
structuring. He writes, "Instead of just considering programs composed of procedures which can
recursively call themselves, why not get really sophisticated, and invent programs which can
modify themselves - programs which can act on programs, extending them, improving them,
generalizing them, fixing them, and so on? This kind of "tangled recursion" probably lies at the
heart of intelligence.41"'35
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McConnell, Michael Constantine. Outer Reaches of the Palindrome, thesis, December 2003; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4407/m1/38/: accessed May 22, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .