# textual higher-order primitives We need to find higher-order primitives in natural language and then have strong, fast ways of extracting those primitives. here's what I have so far: 1. a fact 2. an opinion 3. a feeling 4. a thought now let's add some structure 1. a fact 1. a fact about an opinion (my opinion is X, and that's a fact) 2. a fact about a feeling (it's a fact that I feel like X) 3. a fact about a thought (it's a fact that I thought X) then we can add another primitive, the hypothesis: 1. a hypothesis I built the rest myself because it seems like the fact was the super-class of the rest of the list. Maybe a hierarchy is not the right way to describe it, and a better way would be through the use of modalities. An opinion can be stated through the mode of a fact or a hypothesis. "maybe he thinks this is true" versus "he thinks this is true". Although it would all be incapsulated by two super-super modes, which are actually two extremes of a continuous value: **veracity** going from fact <-|-|-|-|-> humanism But now it strikes me that "veracity" means two different things when it comes to a fact, and when it comes to a hypothesis. Surely that is a natural feeling to have when thinking about these things. In order to make this distinction more evident however, let's define our words more carefully: fact -> concrete reality hypothesis -> abstract reality If we think about this more globally though, they're not so different. Where's the line between meteorology as an abstract reality and a typhoon as a concrete reality? What's the difference? My mind immediately answers with : abstract reality is a *candidate* for being a super-reality. If we were to use the connection between them so as to put both on a continuum, we might define the following: **DOR** (Degree of Replication) reality <--> super-reality --- Here's what we've learned that we can apply to natural language processing: - We need to be able to determine if a statement is a "summarized" or "abstractized" version of another statement and automatically generate graph structures. - In order to do this, we have to: 1. define the correct primitives 2. create strong, fast, reliable systems for measuring, detecting, extracting those structures 3. build on top of that the systems which attempt to create a conceptual pyramid of abstraction between the objects - in order to do that, we need: 1. data structures that neural networks can use to communicate their attempts to create hierarchies with humans 2. data structures that neural networks can edit 3. **take topic modeling, and add a new dimension to it** and the final structure of these primitives is now: - **veracity (from fact to humanism, 0->1)** - **degree of abstraction (from real to super-real, 0->1)** - opinion - thought - feeling