Re: categories and inguistic?

Re: categories and inguistic?

[RONALD BROWN]

I tried to raise some general issues from category theory in Delhi, 2003, and this was published as 

136. (with T. Porter), `Category theory and higher dimensional algebra: potential descriptive tools in neuroscience', Proceedings of the International Conference on Theoretical Neurobiology, Delhi,
February 2003, edited by Nandini Singh, National Brain Research Centre, Conference Proceedings 1 (2003) 80-92. arXiv:math/0306223

One main point was to introduce the notion of colimit, as a method of gluing, and of enabling distributed comunication. Another was to ask: can we really believe the brain works serially,  in one dimension so to speak?  and so to introduce some idea that higher dimensional notation and rewriting in higher dimensions is possible. 

With regard to colimits, one should mention the extensive work of Andree Ehresmann and Jean-Paul Vanbremeersch on `Memory evolutive systems', see their recent book

Can applications to linguistics be developed in these areas? 

While sending this, I'll mention that a short note

`Moore hyperrectangles on a space form a strict cubical omega-category with connections'

is available from my preprint page
www.bangor.ac.uk/r.brown/brownpr.html

Ronnie Brown

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