The child receives data through the sense organs; the child also has some inborn processing capacities--otherwise it would not be ...able to learn--but in addition, some "information" or "programs" are built-in at birth (for example, the child does not have to learn how to suck, for this is an innate reflex); there is a working memory, in which the child keeps those items of knowledge that are being used at a particular moment; and there is a permanent memory, which is, in Locke's terms, largely a "blank tablet" at birth, but which has a storage capacity that makes a hard disk pale into insignificance. The child gradually builds up a symbolic representation of the world around it, so there must be some inner "language" or medium of representation; even a newborn baby is starting to see and taste and smell and hear and touch, and to remember the more striking of its experiences, so the internal medium by which it represents and stores these impressions cannot be the native language (of which it is still ignorant. Jerry Fodor [in The Language of Thought] has discussed this inbuilt "language of thought," which is similar conceptually to the "machine language" that is built into the personal computer and about which most users remain completely ignorant).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of som...e invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What a wonderful faculty is memory!--the most mysterious and inexplicable in the great riddle of life; that plastic tablet on whic...h the Almighty registers with unerring fidelity the records of being, making it the depository of all our words, thoughts and deeds--this faithful witness against us for good or evil.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The eyes, opening and shutting like keyholes and never forgetting, recording by thousands,... the skull with its brains like eels the tablet of the world the bones and their joints that build and break for any trick....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I come to this white office, its sterile sheet, its hard tablet, its stirrups, to hold my breath... while I, who must, allow the glove its oily rape....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A solitary traveller can sleep from state to state, from day to night, from day to day, in the long womb of its controlled interio...r. It is the cradle that never stops rocking after the lullaby is over. It is the biggest sleeping tablet in the world, and no one need ever swallow the pill, for it swallows them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »