Do Neurons Dream of Primitive Operators? Wake-Sleep Compression Rediscovers Schank's Event Semantics

We show that they do. Roger Schank's conceptual dependency theory proposed that all human events decompose into primitive operations -- ATRANS (transfer of possession), PTRANS (physical movement), MTRANS (information transfer), and others -- hand-coded from linguistic intuition. We ask: can the same primitives be discovered automatically through compression pressure alone? We adapt DreamCoder's wake-sleep library learning to event state transformations. Given events as before/after world-state pairs, the system searches for operator compositions explaining each event (wake), then extracts recurring patterns as library entries under Minimum Description Length (sleep). Starting from four ge...

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