Brains of Sand P Programming Paradigms
Figure P.1
The purpose of this section is to use the transparent, accessible concepts of Declarative and Procedural Programming/ Knowledge Paradigms to shed light on the much more opaque, inaccessible aspects of schizolinguistics. This has become necessary due to the iconoclastic nature of the TDE model, which associates the once familiar^ linguistic concepts of semantics and syntax with new, rather unfamiliar properties*.
Consider what a software engineer means by 'Declarative Programming'- it means that you control the machine's behavior by encoding WHAT tasks must be completed, WHAT outcomes or output it must produce. This is in contrast to the usual case of Procedural Programming, which involves writing code that tells the machine HOW it should go about completing the required tasks. Of course, this dichotomy is, like so many others, a false one. Declarative specification (the WHAT) is tantamount to giving the machine a single data file, containing WHAT must be done, WHAT is needed, but if that data file is broken down into its constituent parts, the result is a procedure, or list of smaller instructions defining exactly HOW to produce that WHAT.
Consider the common-or-garden compilation of a computer code source file, called WHATUWANT.cpp (the .cpp file type ending means it is written in C++). At the high level of the source code file, the programming process is indisputably declarative - the programmer is commanding the machine to act ("compile and execute THIS!") in a single step. At the level of the compiled and linked object files, automatically re-written in low-level assembler, the same machine command is now just as indisputably procedural, due to the many small instructions that the machine must obey. While fairly self evident to most of us, after a little reflection, these insights are obvious to professional programmers and software engineers. The point of this exposition is to suggest that the correct interpretation of semantics and syntax is comparable to the distinction between Declarative and Procedural forms of knowledge^. Semantics, like Declarative Knowledge, comes as a single unit of data, knowledge STATE, while Syntax, like Procedural Knowledge, consists of choices from several different 'drafts' of statements (knowledge inter-state TRANSITIONS).
Figure P.1 depicts these conceptions of semantics and syntax within a map of an ideal brain, one that conforms to Tulving's human memory model. As the figure demonstrates, this 2x2 knowledge subtype memory matrix is a reasonably good approximation to the human memory map, according to the biaxial classification scheme invented by Endel Tulving^^. Therefore, Tulving's discoveries lend significant empirical credence to the GOLEM model of cognition.
*There is a considerable body of evidence that the old terms were both wrong and misleading. The new schizolinguistic versions of these venerable terms have already proven so useful that they may also be true.
^Knowing THAT ... = Declarative knowledge, a factual description, c.f. Knowing HOW ... = Procedural knowledge, a skill, a rote habit or routine, recipe
^^Tulving, Endel (1985). "How many memory systems are there?". American Psychologist. 40 (4): 385-398