We Are So Smart

After taking an object-oriented programming class and a PHP/MySQL class, I have this new and incredible respect for the human brain. In PHP (which, if you're not familiar with, is a standard web programming language), syntax is very important. If you forget a semicolon or a curly bracket, your webpage will not work. The web server is very unforgiving when it comes to syntax. And it got me to thinking how incredible the mind is and how unnecessary syntax is in human language (well at least in English). This is because our brain focuses on semantics, or the actual meaning of strings of characters, rather than the individual placement of characters. So I can write:

Ths pzza is rlly awsm.

And everyone who reads this blog will be able to understand it. Our brain is somehow able to extrapolate meaning out of this extremely grammatically incorrect sentence. But if I were to write this inside a PHP block:

$x=10;
$y=12;
$Sum=$x+$y
echo $Sum;

It wouldn't work because I didn't put a semicolon behind "$Sum=$x+$y". It can't just understand what I'm trying to do, like my brain would (coincidentally, this makes programming very difficult). This is really interesting (and kind of scary) because even after 50+ years of computing, we have not even scratched the surface of the capabilities of the human brain. You'd think that we'd be somewhere close to having some kind of relative AI functionality. Most of the web is focused on syntax rather than semantics, which can make searching for things difficult. Facebook recently "linked" everything in it's users profile pages to either an existing fan page or to a newly created page that pulls form Wikipedia and related user-created examples. But it's very flawed in it's execution because of this syntax problem. For example, one of my favorite books listed in my profile is Choke by Chuck Palahniuk. And when I click the link on Facebook, all the user-generated results have nothing to do with the book—these users are using "choke" to define the physical action or the sports term. Facebook doesn't know what I mean by "choke". It just sees it as a five-character string and it compiles a list of people who have mentioned the same string (c-h-o-k-e).

As frustrating as it is to purchase a computer in the zenith of the Information Age and not have it be all that you want it to be, it does highlight how incredible the human brain is. I think we should appreciate much more how incredibly smart we all are. The ability for our mind to just make sense of complete nonsense (like the high school text message above) is nothing short of extraordinary.