Is natural language a high-level programming language?

If the mind is a computer, then there must be something in the brain that corresponds to the low-level strings of data (the machine code) that computing mechanisms manipulate. This machine code provides the basic structure for everything that a computer is able to do. In electronic computers it is implemented in the flow of electricity across circuits. In the brain, it might be implemented similarly, in the flow of electricity across neurons.

Can you read this?

What exactly it means (or does) will depend on the computing mechanism in question, but even granted this information it is incredibly difficult (and time-consuming) for people to program in machine code. Because of this, programmers typically make use of a hierarchy of programming languages. Each language is an abstraction of those beneath it, eventually bottoming out in the machine code itself. A programmer will write code in whatever language s/he finds most accessible, and once s/he is done it will be translated into machine code by a compiler.

This is basically the plot of Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash...

Similarly, it seems likely that the basic code used by a computational brain could be incredibly difficult for us to decipher. Contrary to Fodor's fabled language of thought, there doesn't seem to be any reason why (at the computational level of description) the brain should operate on natural language. Nonetheless, there does seem to be an intimate relationship between the brain and natural language. We obviously produce language whenever we speak, and (perhaps less obviously) language can exert a powerful influence on how we think and behave. In a quite literal sense, it could be seen as re-programming the mind. So if the mind is a computer, then it might make sense to think of natural language as (among other things) a high-level programming language.

Note added 10.05.13: Apparently Fodor beat me to it. Piccinini writes that "Fodor likened human public languages to high level programming languages, and the human LOT to a computer's machine language" (2004: 387). I haven't found the original reference yet, but I think it's in The Language of Thought somewhere.

• Piccinini, G. 2004. "Functionalism, Computationalism, and Mental Contents." Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 34/4: 375-410.