The 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.
Remember in CS theory, a language is just a set of strings. If you think in pictures that is STILL a language if your pictures are structured.
So I'm really handwaving the above just to suggest that it all depends on the assumptions that each expert is making in elucidating this debate which has a long history.
> 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.
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
Remember in CS theory, a language is just a set of strings. If you think in pictures that is STILL a language if your pictures are structured.
So I'm really handwaving the above just to suggest that it all depends on the assumptions that each expert is making in elucidating this debate which has a long history.