On database keys, with an
application to the Praxisproblem
Derek J. SMITH
Centre for Psychology
University of Wales Institute, Cardiff
smithsrisca@btinternet.com
http://www.smithsrisca.co.uk
As presented to the
9th World Multi-Conference
on Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics
Orlando, FL, Tuesday 12th July 2005
A BIT MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• 1980s - specialized in the design and operation of very
large IDMS databases.
• Since 1991 taught cognitive science and
neuropsychology to Speech and Language Pathologists.
• Hence interdisciplinary in database, cognitive
neuropsychology, and psycholinguistics.
• Hence fascinated by the possibility that the mind is a
biological database capable of linguistic communication.
DEFINITIONS (1)
“VOLITION” AND “PRAXIS”
• “Volition” is the exercise of “the Will”.
• “Praxis” comes from the Greek prassein, "to do“, and
refers generally to a system’s ability to initiate voluntary
physical behavior of any sort (hence we call it
“dyspraxia” when something goes wrong).
• “Speech praxis” is the process by which the Will
voluntarily initiates the expression of a given idea though
the medium of spoken language.
DEFINITIONS (2)
“REDUCTIONISM”
• Reductionism is explaining complex phenomena in terms
of their parts. E.g. how nuts, bolts, etc., make an
automobile.
• However, there’s a big problem with reductionist
explanations, because systems are frequently greater
than the sums of their parts, and you lose much of their
essence as soon as you start taking them apart. This is
especially true of the mind, which seems to be massively
more than the sum of its neurons.
• Following Levine (1983), we favor the term “Explanatory
Gap“ for this problem.
PLAN OF ATTACK
• This paper looks at the explanatory gap problem in
speech praxis, and shows how that gap might be
narrowed in an artificial cognitive system using
CODASYL-style database keys.
• This means bringing together two hitherto unconnected
areas of knowledge, so we shall open with “background"
sections on (a) the psycholinguistics of speech praxis,
and (b) the use of database keys in CODASYL databases.
We’ll then present a pseudocode demonstration of how
the one can help the other.
We’ll also be telling you a little about what
went on at this place a while back.
LORDAT (1843)
FIVE STAGES OF SPEECH PRAXIS
http://www.smithsrisca.co.uk/PSYlordat1843.html
• So what do psycholinguists know about speech praxis?
• Well in 1843 the French neurologist Jacques Lordat
identified five processing stages within speech
production, and described the first of these as
“isolating” the idea to be expressed in words.
• The four subsequent processes then co-operate in
shaping the final spoken output, as now shown …..
LORDAT (1843)
• Each stage
receives a coded
message from the
one before, adds
to it in some
clever way, and
then passes it on
to the one after.
LORDAT (1843)
FIVE STAGES OF SPEECH PRAXIS
• Lordat’s explanation was duly incorporated into a
number of later 19th century aphasiological models, and
is worth noting because in one form or another it is still
with us today.
• The explanatory diagrams are typically either “A-shaped”
(with the “clever” bits – the mind’s “higher functions” - at
the top) or “X-shaped” (with the clever bits at the central
cross-over point). Here are two of the A-shaped ones, one
old and one new …..
LICHTHEIM (1885)
TWO-LAYER CONTROL HIERARCHY
http://www.smithsrisca.co.uk/PSYlichtheim1885.html
NORMAN (1990)
MODERN THREE-LAYER HIERARCHY
http://www.smithsrisca.co.uk/PSYnorman1990.html
MODERN SPEECH PRODUCTION MODELS
• Speech production did not become a popular study topic
until 1971, when Fromkin's "Utterance Generator" model
extended Lordat from five stages to six.
• The most popular modern models of speech production
come from the Max Planck Institute's Willem Levelt and
the University of Arizona's Merrill F. Garrett. But they all
take the same basic shape, so we’ll work for now with
Fromkin’s …..
FROMKIN’S FIRST THREE STAGES
• Stage 1 – Pre-Lexical Semantics: Decides the meaning to
be conveyed. Code not known, but preverbal.
• Stage 2 – Pre-Lexical Syntax: Decides the grammatical
skeleton of the sentence. Code not known, but preverbal.
• Stage 3 – Lexical: Selects the necessary “content words”
(i.e. nouns and verbs) from the mental lexicon, thus
making ideas verbal for the first time.
• It’s worth remembering these three stages as a unit,
because we’ll be returning to them later.
FROMKIN’S LAST THREE STAGES
• Stage 4 – Prosody: Adds in emotionality via intonation
pattern. Code not known, but mediated by the hindbrain.
• Stage 5 – Phonology: Decides the final syntax and word
morphology. Phonemic code.
• Stage 6 - Final Sound Production: Commits concrete
sounds - "allophones“ – to the motor nerves for
respiration, phonation, and articulation.
• We’re not really concerned with these three stages in this
paper, because they are all post-semantic.
STATE-OF-THE-ART
PSYCHOLINGUISTIC MODELING
• The PALPA (Kay, Lesser, and Coltheart, 1992) is a typical
X-shaped psycholinguistic diagram (that is to say, the
Will is located in the middle of the diagram, not at the
top).
• Here it is …..
The PALPA
http://www.smithsrisca.co.uk/PSYkayetal1992.html
• All input channels are
now at the top, and all
output channels at the
bottom. Ideation is in
the centre box, and
speech praxis is the
bottom left processing
leg.
• Our question is, how
do ideas make it out of
the centre box and
down the first arrow!
SPEECH ACTS AND IDEATION (1)
• In fact, praxis is so complex that it has its own science –
“pragmatics” …..
• ….. and its own very powerful theory - Speech Act Theory
(Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969). Speech Act Theory studies
not just the words people use, but the units of intention –
the “speech acts” which preceded those words.
• Pragmatics is thus the science of the centre box and the
first arrow …..
SPEECH ACTS AND IDEATION (2)
• Each speech act is (a) calculated to achieve some
discrete behavioral "perlocutionary" effect, but (b) has
not yet been fully formed lexically or grammatically.
• The code is preverbal - perhaps “sprites” or ideograms
of some sort.
• Speech acts haven’t been very well modeled yet, and so
remain poorly understood (although we hope to start the
ball rolling with this paper).
SPEECH ACTS AND IDEATION (3)
• Speech Act Theory has its own very difficult jargon. In
this paper, for example, we shall be hearing about a
“directive” speech act, with a “requestive” subtype,
invoking the core verb “to summons”.
• The mind has about a 1000 different speech acts to
choose from (more details in Bach and Harnish, 1979).
ANIMATED PALPA – SMITH (2000)
• So what might a speech act look like? Where do these
all-important sprites come from, where do they go, and
what happens to them when they get there?
• To get a better idea of the process, we need to see the
static flow diagram “in motion”. So here, from Smith
(2000), is sentence production more or less in real time,
for the specimen sentence “The Redcoats are coming”
…..
OUR BASIC PROPOSAL
• So how might a network database help?
• Well above all it would help demonstrate how mental
content is progressively accessed during sentence
production. Not just ideation and initiation (Stages #1 and
#2), but lexical expansion (Stage #3) as well.
• Here’s some important background (we’ve taken
Computer Associates' IDMS system, a 1969 network
database, as the class-defining CODASYL database) …..
ABOUT NETWORK DATABASES (1)
IDMS DATABASE KEYS
• Data is organized into
"records“.
• Filestore is organized
into block-sized "pages“
of up to 256 records per
page.
• The resulting page-line
address is known as the
"database key" for that
record.
ABOUT NETWORK DATABASES (2)
IDMS DIRECT ACCESS
• IDMS is a supremely
flexible data retrieval tool.
It offers 10 ways of finding
things, the most
fundamental of which is
direct access.
ABOUT NETWORK DATABASES (3)
IDMS DIRECT ACCESS
• A hashing algorithm
computes the page
number from the logical
record key (Dumey, 1956).
• Once a record has been
located, its database key is
automatically stored by
the DBMS as a “currency”.
ABOUT NETWORK DATABASES (4)
CHAIN POINTER ACCESS
• IDMS also arranges for
certain data records to
"own" certain others, thus
capitalizing on the data's
natural one-to-many "set"
relationships.
ABOUT NETWORK DATABASES (5)
CHAIN POINTER ACCESS
• Each record includes in its
physical record length the
database key of the next
record in that set. These
“chain pointers” are a
storage overhead, but one
which is well worth paying.
Just like the brain during
semantic or lexical
categorization.
ABOUT NETWORK DATABASES (6)
“CURRENT OF SET” ACCESS
• Once a record has been
located, its database key
is automatically stored by
the DBMS, identifying it as
“current of set” for the set
in question.
• This makes said record
effectively direct access,
even if it had originally
taken a lot of chain
pointering to track down.
Just like the brain during
medium term recall.
ABOUT NETWORK DATABASES (7)
IDMS TRAVERSALS
• In practice, the final outputs of a database interrogation
are always composites of fragments of data collected
from potentially hundreds of points across the network.
The process of collecting these fragments is known as
“traversing” the database. The inventor of the process,
Charles W. Bachman, winner of the 1973 A.C.M. Turing
Award, once likened it to "navigating" (Bachman, 1973).
• Traversals are hard to plan, but then easy to achieve
using only a handful of "Data Manipulation Language"
(DML) verbs, such as OBTAIN CALC, OBTAIN NEXT,
MODIFY, and ERASE.
TOWARDS AN IDMS "MINDBASE" (1)
DATABASE KEYS AND MACHINE VOLITION
• OK, so let’s start to bring these thoughts together …..
• Supposing the mind were an IDMS database, then for
database traversal purposes, only the first three of
Fromkin's six stages would need to be considered. This
is because they are the ones which access the semantic
network. Everything else is just number-crunching.
• Let’s look at those stages one by one …..
TOWARDS AN IDMS "MINDBASE" (2)
“ISOLATING” A PROPOSITION
• Stage #1 is where we tap into the mind’s central stream of
contextually coherent propositional thought.
• Each successive proposition will activate a number of the
mental sprites we have been talking about. Always
<agent> and <action>, and sometimes also <object>,
<adverbial>, and <instrumental>.
• Every now and then, a small subset of propositions
becomes salient enough to warrant initiating a
communicative act, whereupon that particular unit of
ideation is "isolated" ready for production.
TOWARDS AN IDMS "MINDBASE" (3)
SPEECH ACT SELECTION
• Stage #2 is responsible for converting the aforementioned subset of propositions into a speech act of
some sort.
• The point is that by selecting a particular speech act, we
restrict our choice of possible sentence structures to
only a handful of options. It is rather like opening sealed
orders on a military mission - one specific action gets
selected from a repertoire of many, you get told what to
do next, and the desired outcomes are specified.
TOWARDS AN IDMS "MINDBASE" (4)
LEXICAL EXPANSION
• Stage #3 is where we start attaching words to what until
now have been preverbal codes.
• Unfortunately, this process does not always work cleanly
– see our e-paper on “Speech Errors” at
www.smithsrisca.co.uk/speech-errors.html.
TOWARDS AN IDMS "MINDBASE" (5)
STAGES #1 TO #3 IN PSEUDOCODE
• Here are some extracts from the pseudocode set out in
the written version of this presentation. The selections
show the following four circumstances …..
•
•
•
•
(1) Isolation of ideation.
(2) Selection of a speech act by direct access.
(3) Chain pointer use in opening a set.
(4) Set currency use in continuing a set.
INDICATIVE IDMS PSEUDOCODE (1)
ISOLATING PAUL REVERE’S IDEA
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Different combinations of external circumstances
demand different actions …..
IF AGENT = ….
….
ELSE IF AGENT = “BRITISH COLUMN”
IF ACTION = ““ On null condition …..
NEXT-SENTENCE ….. no action is necessary
ELSE IF ACTION = “MOVING NORTHWEST”
MOVE “PLAN X” TO SPEECH-ACT-CODE
NEXT SENTENCE
ELSE IF ….
ELSE IF ….
.....
INDICATIVE IDMS PSEUDOCODE (2)
EXAMPLE OF DIRECT ACCESS
• Once a given set of circumstances has prompted a
particular pre-learned plan of action, the detailed
response can be retrieved from long-term memory …..
• MOVE SPEECH-ACT-CODE TO ACT-RECORD-KEY.
• OBTAIN CALC ACT-CONTROL-RECORD.
• The “sealed orders” on this occasion specify a
“directive” speech act, with a “requestive” subtype, and
the core verb “to summons”.
INDICATIVE IDMS PSEUDOCODE (3)
EXAMPLE OF CHAIN POINTER ACCESS
• The waypoints on the road to Lexington are themselves
in long-term memory, organized on an owner/member set
basis …..
• MOVE “MIDDLESEX COUNTY” TO DISTRICT-KEY.
• OBTAIN CALC DISTRICT. We don’t actually need this
record, but we have to get it because it contains the chain
pointer to the first set member …..
• OBTAIN FIRST MINUTEMAN IN MINUTEMEN-INDISTRICT.
INDICATIVE IDMS PSEUDOCODE (4)
EXAMPLE OF SET CURRENCY USE
• Having processed one minuteman, we have to relocate its
record before getting the next, again because we need
the chain pointer it contains …..
• OBTAIN CURRENT MINUTEMAN.
• OBTAIN NEXT MINUTEMAN IN MINUTEMEN-IN-DISTRICT.
CONCLUSION (1)
WHAT WE HAVE SEEN SO FAR
• The pseudocode is entirely typical of IDMS programming,
in that you have to pay precise attention (a) to where you
are in the data network, and (b) to how you are going to
get to where you want to be next. The record and set
currency mechanisms are invaluable in this respect.
• We may identify three specific potential advantages of
the IDMS metaphor to ALL students of the mind …..
CONCLUSION (2)
IDMS IS LIKE FOR LIKE WITH BIOLOGY
• The network database is just that, a network, and so, too,
is biological associative memory.
• And yet only a microscopic proportion of the $billions
spent on AI in the past 50 years has utilized a physical
network architecture.
CONCLUSION (3)
IDMS IS TOTALLY REDUCIBLE
• The activity of an IDMS mindbase is automatically totally
reducible. The DML is pre-processed to native COBOL,
and then put through the regular COBOL compiler to
produce object code. Both conversions are 100%
trackable, and in debug mode we can even execute the
object code one instruction at a time.
• This is important because what cognitive theorists are
really about is reverse engineering - “de-compiling”
neural object code in order to understand what on earth it
is up to.
CONCLUSION (4)
IDMS MIMICS NEUROCHEMISTRY
• IDMS's use of database currencies is uncannily similar to
the brain's physiological memory mechanisms. E.g.
“second messenger neurotransmission” and “calcium
switching”. In other words, biological long-term memory
looks to have its own keys and currencies (Smith, 1997).
• Or to put it another way, closing the explanatory gap is a
code-breaking exercise of sorts!
CONCLUSION (5)
CRYPTANALYSIS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
• The building we saw
earlier was “Station X”
– Bletchley Park – The
UK Code and Cipher
School during World
War Two, where Alan
Turing helped decode
the Nazi Enigma signal
system …..
CONCLUSION (6)
THE COLOSSUS
• ….. and the birthplace in December 1943 of the world’s
first programmable electronic binary digital computer.
CONCLUSION (7)
THE COLOSSUS BUILDING
• ….. which was successfully rebuilt by preservation
enthusiasts between 1994 and 1996.
CONCLUSION (8)
TURING’S OFFICE (HUT 8) NOWADAYS
• The same Alan
Turing, incidentally,
who inspired the
A.C.M. Turing Award,
saw the mind as
computable, and
devised the “Turing
Test” of machine
consciousness.
CONCLUSION (9)
SPECIFIC PROPOSAL
• The best way across the explanatory gap would be
to approach it as a code-breaking exercise, starting
with neural “crackle” as the given “intercept”, and
reverse engineering it back to the DML of the
original ideation …..
• ….. and looking out especially for the location of the
biological “currency tables”.
• IDMS may even assist students of artificial
consciousness at the same time …..
CONCLUSION (10)
ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
• A leading consciousness theorist, David Chalmers, has
argued that if a technically advanced theory could one
day explain at the reductionist level how the brain thinks,
it would still be "silent about how these processes might
give rise to conscious experience" (Chalmers, 1995, p64).
• We submit IDMS as a candidate for Chalmers'
"technically advanced theory“ …..
• ….. and suspect that its reducibility and capacity for slow
motion execution will reflect on the “how” question as
well.
THE END
• Or is it??
REFERENCES
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•
•
•
•
•
Austin, J.L. (1962). How to do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bach, K. and Harnish, R.M. (1979). Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chalmers, D.J. (1995). The puzzle of conscious experience. Scientific American,
273(6):62-68. Levine (1983)
Fromkin, V.A. (1971). The non-anomalous nature of anomalous utterances.
Language, Vol. 47, pp. 27-52.
Searle, J.R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, D.J. (1997). The IDMS Set Currency and Biological Memory. Cardiff: UWIC.
[ISBN: 1900666057]
Smith, D.J. (2000). A slow-motion video analysis of information feedback in a
computer-animated psycholinguistic model. Computer-animated poster presented
10th April 2000 at the Tucson 2000 - Towards a Science of Consciousness
conference, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ.