Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Chomsky on Terence McKenna, GPT-3, Sam Harris, Cryptocurrencies, Kierkegaard, Neuralink, and Hofstadter

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6MU5zQwtT4Noam Chomsky talks about group selection, his own death, the Piraha language, and more, it his widest varied interview yet.Iain McGilchrist's podcast: Coming next week Stuart Hameroff's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLo0Zwe579gPatreon for conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, and God: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Help support conversations like this via PayPal: https://bit.ly/2EOR0M4 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Google Podcasts: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Id3k7k7mfzahfx2fjqmw3vufb44 iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 Discord Invite Code (as of Mar 04 2021): dmGgQ2dRzS Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeverything00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:17 Iain McGilchrist: Language without thought? 00:06:54 Stuart Hameroff: X bar structure in microtubules 00:11:16 Roger Penrose's Emperor's New Mind 00:11:59 Veno Volenec: Derivational Theory of Complexity and Generative Grammar 00:20:02 Existentialism and Kierkegaard [John Clever] 00:21:00 Sam Harris and Islam [Naman Jain] 00:21:54 Terrance McKenna and Stoned Ape Theory (psychedelics aiding language development / evolution) 00:22:58 Group Selection [Slaventhefourth] 00:23:32 Cryptocurrencies and decentralizing money [ThrowingSn0w] 00:31:35 Elon Musk's Neuralink [Tarek] 00:31:56 Douglas Hofstadter strange loop and generative grammar [Ryan] 00:34:25 Peter Singer’s “Drowning Child” Thought Experiment [The_platypus_king] 00:42:31 Steven Pinker 00:43:48 Yuval Harari's Sapiens and the origin of language as introspective [Brez] 00:49:50 Piraha language and Daniel Everett [Mahendra Varma] 00:54:40 Karl Friston's free energy principle [MediocreBat2] 00:55:03 What does Chomsky get awestruck by? [Mai April] 01:03:58 Žižek / Hegel / Heidegger [Zowhat] 01:06:23 What mysteries would Chomsky want solved? [Mai April] 01:11:44 Open AI and GPT-3 01:12:22 Do you fear death? [Wil-Waal] 01:12:40 How to be more like Chomsky? [Overboi1]* * *Subscribe if you want more conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, God, and the mathematics / physics of each.* * *I'm producing an imminent documentary Better Left Unsaid http://betterleftunsaidfilm.com on the topic of "when does the left go too far?" Visit that site if you'd like to contribute to getting the film distributed (early-2021).

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Another video we did, the recent one on Carl Jung and Wittgenstein and so on, that one is the highest rated video. It has a high ratio of likes. So not the highest viewed, but highest rated. So let's see if we can break the record. Noam Chomsky joins us for our second AMA. That is an Ask Me Anything. And just like last time we tried to steer clear from politics and instead stay in the philosophical realm. The reasons for this are twofold. So number one, you can visit virtually any other channel with a video on Chomsky recently to get his views on politics, which they tend to ask the same questions over and over. which they tend to ask the same questions over and over.

Number two, the reason is that this channel is dedicated to explicating theories of everything, which is a physics term, but it also has a philosophical implication of an all-encompassing worldview, or at least one that explains the majority of the important phenomenon around us. It's this latter definition that I tend to glom onto more. However, unification of quantum physics

with gravity at high energies or low distances is, at least to me, required. We touch on several topics such as Kierkegaard, Roger Penrose, cryptocurrencies, the Piraha language, and even minorly Sam Harris. Even minorly, we talk about psychedelics, or at least Terence McKenna. If you like content like this, then please consider supporting at patreon.com slash KurtJaiMungle. I do plan on having another, a third AMA with Chomsky sometime before the end of this year. I cannot guarantee that. However, each dollar helps, not only with finances, but with encouragement and reassurance that

this is something that is worth supporting. Thank you so much. I appreciate your viewership. I hope that you enjoy it. Those earpieces really work? Yeah, they work great. I experiment with them since I'm not hearing very well on the internet. Oh yeah, I can tell because sometimes when I ask questions I see you lean forward because I imagine you're trying to listen intently. Yeah, they just relay it straight to your ear directly. I see. Many of these questions are from your fans. Some are also from professors. I'll start with the professors first. Okay. Ian McGillicrist. He is the writer of Master and Its Emissary. He says, can you ask Chomsky what he would say to someone who thought language was not in itself required for thought or communication, but instead arose to make manipulation more effective, manipulation of the world or of people or of objects and so on? of people or of objects and so on? Well, the question is, questions like that always

bring to my mind some comments which I may have mentioned in our earlier discussions, one by Alan Turing, another by Ludwig Wittgenstein at about the same time, in fact at a time when Turing and Wittgenstein were in communication. Turing's comment is in his famous paper which initiated the field of artificial intelligence, his paper 1950 Artificial Intelligence's 1950 paper on machine thinking, Can Machines Think? And Turing points out correctly that the question, can machines think, is too meaningless to deserve discussion. The reason he doesn't develop it is clear because we simply have no independent concept of thought. We have a, when he was asked what thought is, he said some kind of buzzing in the head. We don't know what it is. I think we can do better than that. Now in fact Wittgenstein's comment expands on this probably independently.

He says, in his typical aphoristic style, you have to interpret what it means, he says, people think may be dolls and spirits. What that means is the way we use the word think, we apply it to people and what people are doing. The word has, like all words, has open, it's called open texture. It's not precisely defined. It has a number of possible interpretations at the fringe. a number of possible interpretations at the fringe. And we extend it to things that we think of as being rather like people. So he says dolls and spirits, but maybe your pet dog, you know, whatever. But the point is there's really no answer to these questions.

By now we have a pretty clear, reasonably well worked out conception of what linguistic expressed thought is. It doesn't have to be articulated, most of it's internal, but it's linguistically formulated. So we have some understanding of what linguistically formulated thought is, but we have no concept beyond that. So the question that's asked is just in an area where you can say whatever you like, because we have no answers. Like, I happen to have a couple of dogs lying under the desk right now. As far as I'm aware, they have about 10 ideas in their mind. I don't want to say them, although I'll immediately react. But maybe there's more, maybe there isn't.

I'm surprised you even used the term DOG. You actually said the word because before you were scared to. Well, they've got a different one known, so they don't race right for the door as soon as I say it. Great. Now, some of these questions, I don't have the username. I'll try my best to say the person's full name or username when I can, but this one just says, what do you see as your life's mission? As? Your life's mission. your life's mission? As your life's mission? My life's mission?

I'm not that exalted. They have their tasks that I'd like to perform, immediate ones, longer-term ones, questions I'd like to help find answers to, human problems I'd like to help solve. That's family, happy family I care for. Those are enough for life's mission. Professor Stuart Hameroff asks, what do you think of Hameroff's idea about X-bar structure in microtubules? X-bar structure in language? Yes. Well, there was a time when the move to X-bar structure was a positive move back in the 1960s.

came to be recognized at the time, the mid-60s, the mechanisms for language description were basically phrase structure rules and transformational rules. There were inadequacies in both systems. Phrase structure rules had very severe inadequacies. One of them is they're too rich, so there's nothing in the theory of phrase structure which says you can't have such rules. And if a theory permits impossible rules, that's a refutation of the theory. Also there were hidden assumptions sneaked in illegitimately into phrase structure. So for example, when you have the symbol VP, the hidden assumption is it's based on V, but that's an illegitimate assumption.

The rule VP arrow VNP standard rule saying a verb can take an obj. That's no different from x arrow y z. The rest is illegitimate assumptions. So x bar theory was created as a way to eliminate the illegitimate assumptions and have a narrower system closer to what the actual language, what the nature of language is. And it did overcome those two difficulties that I mentioned. It ruled out those illegitimate rules. It had its own problems which weren't discovered until quite a few years later. They should have been recognized at once. X-bar theory forces everything into what's called an endocentric mode, meaning that each phrase has to be a projection of a particular lexical head. So a verb phrase is a projection of a V. Noun phrase is a projection

of N. But there are plenty of constructions in language which just don't have that property. In fact, one of them is a simple subject predicate construction. That's why if you look back at the early rules, the first one is S arrow NPVP, the traditional subject-predicate relation, but that's not an endocentric construction. And there are others. In fact, every case of displacement moving one phrase to some different place, yields a non-endocentric construction. Now the way this was handled was just by forcing these into some endocentric frame by arbitrary stipulations, but that's no good. No theory should have arbitrary stipulations. theory should have arbitrary stipulations. So X bar theory was flawed as well. And later developments have enabled us to overcome these flaws and develop what's called a merge-based system which associated with labeling conventions which overcome fundamental flaws of X-bar theory.

So I think it was a stage that was important. We then move on to a bitter stage. I expect we'll move on to bitter ones as we proceed. Science doesn't come to an end. Have you happened to read Roger Penrose's Emperor's New Mind? And if so, what do you think about it? Roger Penrose's paper on... He had a book called Emperor's New Mind.

Oh. Well, he's a brilliant scientist. It's exciting and interesting to read his work. A lot of it. I'm not competent to have a judgment about some of it in areas I know something about is suggestive, but not really confirmed or clear enough to proceed with. But it's very much worth reading. Professor Vino Volinic of Concordia University asks,

The derivational theory of complexity was created and rejected when cognitive neuroscience was at a relatively early underdeveloped stage. Since generative grammars are realist theories that are supposed to characterize the actual functioning of the brain, that are supposed to characterize the actual functioning of the brain, do you think that the derivational theory of complexity was discarded prematurely and that recent advancements in neuroscience and brain imaging have the potential to vindicate it? The derivational theory of complexity was an interesting idea proposed by was an interesting idea proposed by George Miller, friend and colleague, an outstanding psychologist back probably late 50s early 60s. So the idea was that you could measure the complexity of processing of an expression by looking at the number of operations that entered into generating it. They had some initial successes with experiments,

then they started not working. There was also another problem. It was based on conceptions of language that were fairly prevalent at the time. But these keep changing as we learn more, as in the example we just discussed about X bar theory. And that means that the ranking of expressions in terms of derivational complexity changes as the theories change. Well, for an experimentalist that's a problem, means you have to redo the experiments every time some new idea shows up. These problems led to pretty much abandonment of the idea.

Maybe with more refined theories it might be possible to reconstitute it. The more general question that's raised by the questioner is the relation between the theories postulated within the study of generative grammar and the actual neural realization of them. There is a big gap, but there's the same gap for everything else. The brain sciences are not at a state where you can relate any moderately complex trait to what's going on in the brain. You can do it very loosely. You know, I can say this area of the brain is firing when you're doing so and so, but what's going on in that area of the brain we know very little about. Here's where Penrose has actually had some ideas about quantum theoretic approaches to the internal structure of neurons, which has a rich internal structure, possibly a basis for a great deal of computation, but of the neuroscience is on the wrong track when it's

looking at neural nets. There's other reasons to think that. So basically we don't really know where to look. Randy Galissel has done very important work on this. I think very convincing work showing that neural nets just do not have the possible possibility of developing the core element in any computational system. It just doesn't have that capacity. So using the model of which he sometimes does of the drunk looking under the lamppost for his watch, which he lost somewhere else. But when asked why you're looking here, he says that's because that's where the light is. But the light is where you have neural nets, but it's probably not where things are happening. So this is not a criticism of the brain sciences, it's very hard. In particular, if you take a look at, say, the study of language,

the study of the neural basis of language is extraordinarily hard, because you cannot do experiments. You can imagine all kinds of experiments, invasive experiments, that would give rich information about the nature of language and its use, but you can't do the experiments for ethical reasons. We just don't allow invasive experiments with humans, like say raising a child under controlled conditions, or sticking electrodes into the brain or something like that. Now we do allow it, rightly or wrongly, at least we used to, may not anymore with other animals. Okay, so in

fact we've learned a great deal about the neuroscience of human vision by invasive experiments with cats. Let's say for example the famous Hubel, Weasel, Nobel Prize winning experiments which gave a tremendous amount of information about peripheral processing of visual stimuli in cats. Since humans have about the same visual system as cats, it's apparently true of humans too. So we know a lot about that. But in the case of language, there's no other organism. There are no analogous systems in other organisms. It's essentially unique. So even if we allowed It's essentially unique. So even if we allowed invasive experimentation, say with chimpanzees or crows or whatever other birds show high level of, animals show high levels of some kind of intellectual activity, it's no use because they don't have these systems. So the, in multiple ways, study of the neural basis for language is extremely difficult. There are results, but they're limited. There's another problem.

All of the studies that are carried out are studies of the use of language. But there's a fundamental distinction, which actually goes back to Aristotle, between possession of knowledge and use of knowledge. Those are two distinct things. Modern terms, it's called competence and performance. Now what we observe is the use of knowledge, but there's something else, the storage of knowledge. What's the nature of the system that's stored that you access in using it? And we don't know how to experiment with that.

You just don't know where to look. Actions, at least you know where to look. A person is saying something, you can see what area the brain fires up, you know, but if there's a language disorder, you can see if the actions of using the language are related to some area of the brain that might be affected. So there's a lot of work on that, but it's all study of production or sometimes perception of language. That's use of the system, not the nature of the system, which remains fixed no matter how you use it. We have the same store of knowledge,

whether we're using it or not. we have the same store of knowledge whether we're using it or not. John Clever asks, what's Chomsky's thoughts on Kierkegaard and the existentialists in general? I find it interesting and provocative to read, but I can't draw conclusions from it with regard to my own either thinking about intellectual problems or the way I live or think about life. It doesn't resonate with me. So it's interesting literature, but like a lot of literature it's hard to say what the impact is. What does Chomsky think of Sam Harris's views on Islam?

That is, that Islam's ideologies are incompatible with human rights. So what does Chomsky think about this? It's both ignorant and racist. Not worth discussing, in my opinion. Based on the chat during the livestream and even afterward, someone told me to bring up Ayaan Hirsi Ali to demonstrate that it's not racism per se. But I didn't see these messages until later, so I emailed Chomsky and got this as a response. I'd have to look at it, but there would be no contradiction in Jews making anti-Semitic comments,

former Muslims making racist comments about Muslims, etc. Okay, this person, their name is Cross Your Genitals. Terence McKenna posited that psychedelics were the evolutionary catalyst that propelled mankind into projective imagination and language. As a linguist, do you consider psychedelics as important to the evolution of language? There's a lot of speculation about that, but I don't know of anything substantive. And furthermore, I don't see how it could possibly work. I don't see any imaginable connection between whatever effect psychedelic states have on people and the either the combinatorial properties that yield the basic form of language or the concepts that we use when we're constructing thought in language. There's just no connection that anyone can point to.

Slavin the Fourth asks, what does he think of multi-level selection and or group selection? I think I don't want to claim to have a sophisticated answer to this question. I don't. I think there are arguments in favor of group selection, which can't be ignored. Whether they're definitive, I'm not in a position to say. Throwing Snow asks, I'd love to know if Chomsky believes that cryptocurrencies can really decentralize the financial world, and if that's even beneficial to society at large.

Decentralization of financial institutions? Via cryptocurrencies, or the popularization of them? Well, that's, I mean, this is a question that arises at many different levels, but one of them has to do with central banks. The other has to do with investment banks, banks altogether, you know, so on, private financial institutions. Central bank is essentially a government institution, though it's supposed to function independently of the government. And these are different questions. I mean, modern state capitalist societies, I don't think could function without some kind of central bank. On the other hand, the individual banks have way too much power.

They're probably harmful to the economy. They've grown enormously in the past 40 years. If you go back to 1950 and 1960, first of all, banks were tightly regulated and they were basically closely connected to the real economy. A bank was a place where you could put extra money if you didn't want to use it right now. You could go to the bank for a loan to buy a car, you know, things like that. That's what a bank was. Not now.

After 40 years of neoliberalism, banks just have an overwhelming role in the economy. There's a huge amount of trading that goes on, which has nothing to do with the real economy. In fact, it's often, and of course they're subject to continued crises and collapses. In fact, they probably even couldn't survive without a major public subsidy. The International Monetary Fund did a study a few years ago of the top, the major US banks, I think the top six or so banks, and asking simply where does their profit come from. from a government insurance policy, a policy that in its public version is too big to fail. What it means is an implicit guarantee by the government that we're not going to let you collapse because you're too big. That leads, of course, to regular huge bailouts after a crisis. But much more than that, it means the banks have access to cheap credit, they get inflated credit ratings, they can borrow on

cheap terms, they can engage, the investment banks can engage in risky activity which is quite profitable in the short term and if it crashes the friendly tax payer will come in and bill them out so they have numerous advantages of that kind. It's hard to put a number on them. Bloomberg Businessweek did an analysis and estimated on the basis of the IMF figures that it might amount to maybe $80 billion a year of subsidy. That's a fair amount of money. It's not clear that, and more recent studies indicate that financial institutions contribute to the economy up to a certain level beyond that they

probably harm it in many ways. It's pretty interesting that economists have not done very much study of this. Back after the crash of 2008-2009, crash was caused by predatory lending methods of big investment firms and banks, which were permitted by the deregulation, the massive deregulation of the Clinton administration, Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, others had deregulated everything, which led to real criminal behavior on the part of the banks. When it all crashed, the government has to step in and bail them out. It was the worst of periodic crashes since Reagan. There weren't many before because things were controlled. crashes since Reagan. There weren't many before because things were controlled.

There were some reflections on this by leading economists. I remember an article by Robert Solow, Nobel laureate economist, very smart guy, in Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in which he raised the question whether the huge financial institutions are a benefit or a drain on the economy. And he pointed out that economists had given very little study to this, which is kind of striking, because especially over the 40 near liberal years, they just become an overwhelming part of the economy, but they didn't fit into the models that economists were looking at. And he tried to give a back of the envelope calculation and concluded they're probably harmful. There's much more study now, which I think gives greater weight to that conclusion. And there are many ways of cutting back their massive oversized role. One very straightforward way is just a financial transaction tax, small tax on every financial interaction. Doesn't, for the sum of money that would be collected is huge, be a huge benefit to the,

it goes right to the government, which could be used for productive purposes which could be used for productive purposes for the bank. And what it would do is sharply cut back trading that is irrelevant to the economy. An awful lot of the trading that goes on, much of it automated by now, is just I can make a little bit of money by moving something from here to here, so let's do it. There's nothing to do with the economy in riches, various extraordinarily rich segments of the economy, and all of that could be cut out just by simple transaction tax, financial transaction tax. It would move the financial institutions closer to having something to do with the real economy. But even beyond that, it's a question whether they shouldn't be broken up.

Why should they be bailed out every time they crash? Why not break them up? In fact, why not put them under popular control? Why not have public banks? Why not have the post office be used as a simple bank, which people use because it's right there and put money in and take money out. There are lots of ways of cutting back on the extraordinary power and basically harmful role of these huge institutions. I think those are steps that can easily be taken and should be. Not in the longer term. You can ask what are these institutions about altogether,

but that has to do with the nature of state capitalist society. Tarek from YouTube right now, live, wants to know, what does Chomsky think of Elon Musk's Neuralink? So far, it's high in the sky. A lot of money is going into it. Nobody has the slightest idea whether there's any scientific basis to it or if we could possibly learn anything from it. So it's, you know, maybe something will come out of it, maybe not, but it's pretty much a shot in the dark. I don't see any scientific basis for it. Can't show that nothing will happen. Maybe it will, but to me, it looks like a publicity stunt, frankly.

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Does Chomsky think that Douglas Hofstetter's theory of mind, that is, that the mind is a recursive loop or a strange loop, is in line with generative grammar? So that is, is Douglas Hofstter's theory of mind in line with generative grammar? Particularly the idea that sensory data leads to symbols in the brain. I mean, something is going on in the brain when you... he's a very smart guy and very interesting to read, so I think you can always get a lot out of reading him. But what does it mean for sensory data to have a symbol in the brain? Something's going on in the brain when I see a red light and stop when I'm

driving. Is there a symbol in the brain that says red? We don't have any theory of how the brain works, in which such a notion fits in a fashion that yields explanations of anything. There are, there are, something, the nature of what is happening in the brain is very obscure. We can say in a very abstract way, very abstracting from what may be going on in the brain, we can maybe develop some which read sensory sensation, written qualia, maps to a symbol that enters into some computational procedure. But that's extremely remote from what may actually be happening in the brain. And the theories that do it are very weak, or that use it don't really tell you very much. They just pretty much translate ordinary experience into a technical terminology.

The Platypus King asks, I was wondering if Professor Chomsky has ever addressed Peter Singer's drowning child thought experiment and what he makes of it. This is his theory of whether defective children should be allowed to develop and grow? No. Let's say you see a child drowning in a pond close to you you can save the child and all it would cost you would be your clothes okay most people would do that but then imagine sorry right to say to save the child but then what about a child that is far away in africa cost the same something like kin selection should we in fact obey the principle which underlies kin selection

of being more concerned about the our own child than the child across the street child than the child across the street. That's a little bit like asking should we be human beings or not human beings? It's instinctive in human beings to be more concerned about what's close to you. There are theories like Hamilton's kin selection theory that try to go back to the evolutionary origins of it. And I don't think anything is going to modify that. You can ask whether if we were some other organism, in some different universe, could we behave differently? But I don't think there's any general principles that bear on this. Our ethical systems relate and will never escape the nature of our human, our human, our actual human nature and capacities. Maybe some of them by some other standards should be changed,

but we don't know what those other standards are. Now this seems to me, it's okay in a philosophy seminar, but it has nothing to do with the ethical problems that humans face. Sure, we should be concerned about a child starving in Bangladesh. But instead of discussing this in a philosophy seminar, what we should be doing is doing something about it. Okay, we should be acting to overcome those problems where we can. We can't do it everywhere. We can do it in a lot of places. And these are very common. What interests me about these questions are not what you can talk about in a philosophy seminar, but very concrete real examples. So let's take UNRWA, the United Nations Relief Reconstruction Agency. A lot of children in the world depend on it for survival. We react to that by cutting off the funds to it.

Okay, so in, say in Gaza, one of the most miserable, dangerous, horrible places in the world, UNRWA was a lifeline for survival for hundreds of thousands of children, plenty of others. That's a real question. What do we do about it? We cut off the lifeline because President Trump said Palestinians aren't nice enough to me, so I'm going to cut off their lifeline. That's the kind of thing we should be talking about. It's not of much interest in my view to have a philosophical discussion about whether in principle we ought to be concerned about a child somewhere else as much as Iran. We're not going to find an answer to that,

but we can find an answer to this and it's very real and immediate. And there are many such cases all over the world, all the time. Take just recent history, take current history. Right now there's a massive problem about providing vaccines to people who need them. Okay. Just a couple of days ago, President Biden took vaccines from a store that's stored in the United States, the AstraZeneca vaccines, which can't be stored in the United States, the AstraZeneca vaccines, which can't be used in the United States because they've not yet been approved by the federal drug agency. So they're just stored. And he decided, the United States, they decided to give them to countries, to other countries.

Which countries? them the countries to other countries. Which countries? Canada, which is the world champion for storing vaccines that it can't use. More than any other country it stored excess vaccines instead of giving them. So we'll hand them to Canada. To Mexico. Why to Mexico? because it's part of a bargain to try to induce Mexicans to break international law by keeping people fleeing from misery in Central America from reaching our borders. Why not give the vaccines to Africa, for example, where they need them? Okay, well, that's a real problem. These are the problems on the front pages every day. So let's worry about those. Time and energy are finite. We have to distribute

our energy and efforts. I think there are much higher priorities than an abstract discussion about whether by some ethical system we don't have, we should be just as concerned for the child across the street as for our own. It's something to think about in your spare time. But meanwhile, we have overriding in your spare time. But meanwhile, we have overriding practical questions of life and death. Now, this vaccine problem is a very striking one. All of the wealthy countries are trying to monopolize vaccines. Some are storing them way beyond what they need, like Canada, for example. Others are taking them for themselves, not giving them to the people who need them. That's not only deeply unethical by any ethical standards, but it also is well known that it's suicidal.

known that it's suicidal. If you don't allow people in Africa and Asia to be vaccinated, the virus is going to mutate, and it'll mutate to forms which will be lethal for us. So here we have a situation where the rich, powerful, and educated are carrying out actions which are in the first place deeply immoral and in the second place suicidal and they're doing it on the basis of this principle we have to take care of ourselves first well that's a real question let's think about that one. What do you disagree about most with Steven Pinker? And why do you think he believes whatever it is that disagreement is, given that he's not evil or stupid? Why is he so mistaken in your opinion? Well, I don't like to answer talk about things at that level of generality.

He's a personal friend. We agree on some things, disagree on others. If you can mention the things we disagree on, I'd be glad to talk about them. But I don't feel like I make general comments. Sure, the person wants to know what you disagree

with him most on. Well, we have very different pictures of conceptions of all kinds of things, ranging from evolution of language to the nature of society. Many great differences, I think, but could talk about individual things. Yuval Harari in his book Sapiens theorizes that language evolved in humans as a consequence of thought and imagination not principally as a form of communication. Your own work in independent theory suggests a clear link between cognition and language. Any thoughts on the notion that language evolved as an introspective tool first?

Well, this is not a question of speculation, but of scientific research. So how do you proceed to answer the question? Well, do you want to know how some system evolved? The first thing you have to ask is, what is the nature of the system? It's pointless to ask how, say, complex cells evolved without knowing the nature of a complex cell. That's truism. Study of evolution begins with understanding the phenotype. So what's the nature of language? We have to begin with that. Speculation about how it evolved is completely idle, unless it's based on an understanding of the system that evolved.

So we take a look at the system that evolved, and I think we find pretty convincing, if not overwhelming, evidence that its nature, its design, if you like to call it that, without any implications about designers, just the technical notion of design, its structure, nature, is as fundamentally a system of thought. It turns out that there are, for example, conflicts in the nature of language between computational efficiency being a computationally perfect instrument, object, and communicative efficiency,

use for utility for thought. Every case that we know of, communicative efficiency is sacrificed. It's just not an issue. So it seems that language is based on concepts of computational efficiency. What Mother Nature would do if she was trying to find the simplest computational process which would yield the basic structure of language. What we find is case after case, nature picks the solution which yields thought, doesn't care about whether it harms communication or not. We also find that the communication or not. We also find that the part that language, basic language is essentially bifurcated. There's an internal system, which effectively generates thoughts. And there's a mode of externalizing it, taking what's internal and turning it into some sensory

motor output. Typically sound that could be signed could even be touch, can't be smell because we don't have refined enough sense of smell. But the externalization is just to some sensory motor system. Well, there's by now quite extensive evidence that the externalization system does not enter into the functioning of the internal system. I could run through some of the evidence, but I think it's quite convincing.

And furthermore, the externalization system seems to be ancillary to language in other respects. Not only does it not enter into the functioning of the of the apparent diversity and complexity and mutability of language. And in fact, if you think about it, the externalization system is not strictly speaking part of language. The externalization system is by its nature an amalgam of whatever the internal system is and the nature of the sensory motor system in which it's being expressed. And the sensory motor systems are totally independent of language. They existed long before language emerged. They haven't been affected by the appearance of language in other organisms, like say apes, pretty much share the sensory motor system, but have not even the basic rudiments of language. So it seems to be systems that are

kind of peripheral to an external to language, and those are of course the systems used for communication. So when we put all this together, turns out that very strong reason to believe that language evolved as a as a system of computation which generates thoughts and then tacked onto it are modes of externalize it in some sensory mode or medium. If that's the case then language did not evolve as an instrument of communication but that's the kind of thinking that has to go on. Maybe you can question the steps, but it's clear that to study to begin with, we're not going to learn about the evolution of any system, except to the extent that we understand the nature of that system.

That's general for language or anything else. Mahendra Varma asks, Daniel Everett and others claim that the Piraha language deviates from universal grammar, but the papers and book they produced are unconvincing and don't tell much or present much data. Can you, Professor Chomsky, argue on behalf of them, such as Professor Daniel Everett and so on, and explain their case and then rebut it? Well, the Piranha story began as an error that has by now turned into a fraud. There is nothing to it. Daniel Everett misread the papers that he was referring to, all of them. He assumed that they were saying that all languages must use unbounded recursion. No paper ever said that. Nothing.

What was said is that the capacity for unbounded recursion is part of the general faculty of language. That's a crucial difference. There's plenty of things in the faculty of language that individual languages don't use. So, for example, English doesn't use the emphatic consonants of Arabic. Okay. English doesn't use the inflectional system of Czech. You know, okay, plenty of things that are not used in individual languages, but they're part of the faculty of language. They're available to the language learner immediately, all available, and acquisition of language is a matter of picking out among them. So in the first place, the Purana example has zero, nothing to do with universal grammar. That was just an error of reading, misreading the papers. That was pointed out very quickly. It's in the technical professional

literature right away. Well, okay, people make mistakes. The right way to respond when a mistake is exposed is to withdraw the claim. Well, that hasn't happened. In fact, it's become a huge publicity thing in the newspapers and so on, where people have no idea what the issue is. At that point, it begins to verge on fraud, I'm sorry to say. But the fact of the matter is it has about as much to do with language as if, suppose we found a tribe somewhere where people from infancy, children are given a black patch to put over one eye. Well, they would not have binocular vision. In fact, we know from experiments with their animals that the visual system would deteriorate and accommodate.

In fact, this is known for children. In fact, when you have a child, I in fact had a child who we discovered when she was an infant that she wasn't using one eye. She was just looking at things with her other eye, which is not unusual. So the way they handled it is by putting a patch over the eye that she uses to force use of the other eye. Then gradually the brain accommodates and uses both. But suppose you had a tribe where people put a patch on one eye. But suppose you had a tribe where people put a patch on one eye, then the children who grew up would be essentially blind in one eye.

Would that tell you anything about binocular vision? Of course not. Binocular vision is an element of the nature of the visual system. If some particular group doesn't use it, it tells you nothing about the visual system. Similarly, if Piranha didn't use unbounded recursion, it would tell you nothing about the universal grammar, nothing whatsoever. In fact, it's probably not true about the language, but that's a side issue. In any event, the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot. There's absolutely nothing there.

The only question that arises is whether, in fact, this language has the properties that Everett claimed. Many linguists say it doesn't, but okay. It's a technical question about one particular language, Okay, it's a question, a technical question about one particular language with no implications at all for universal grammar or for anything more general. Mediocre Bat wants to know, I'd like to know if Chomsky has any thoughts on Carl Friston's free energy principle. I've heard of it, but the little I've seen about it didn't encourage me to look any further, frankly. I don't know of any such principle that has any consequences or implications. My April wants to know the mysteries Chomsky pursues and feels awestruck by? Well, I'm awestruck by, for example, the same things that Galileo was awestruck by. Galileo and his contemporaries were carrying out

in the 17th century a major revision of the whole picture of science. that's the birth of modern science, questioning everything, reconstructing it and so on. And one of the topics that they were interested in was that struck their, captured their attention was language. And they expressed Galileo and others expressed their awe, A-W-E, and amazement at an astonishing property of ordinary language. Somehow with a handful of symbols, a couple of dozen symbols, we can construct in our minds infinitely many thoughts, which is already kind of miraculous. How can this happen?

And in addition, we can find a way to convey these thoughts to the minds of others who have no access to our minds. Galileo regarded the alphabet as the most stupendous of human inventions. The level of Michelangelo or Titian, his contemporaries had the same view. I think they were right. It's what I've sometimes called the Galilean challenge. How can this miracle be achieved? For Descartes, this was essentially one of the basic reasons why he established mind as an entity distinct from body, because of the way in which language is used creatively to express an infinity of thoughts which have never been heard before and can somehow enable others who have no

access to our minds, enable them to nevertheless understand and grasp the workings of our minds that he thought required something outside the mechanical universe so the that oh and amazement i think remains we understand some parts of it not others syph b asks does a society's ability to engage and question answering, sorry, question asking slash answering dictate the moral fabric they operate under? Moral problem. Well, we should certainly ask the, one of the, let's go back to the scientific revolution. The great achievement of the scientific revolution was to be puzzled about what seems obvious. That's a hard step to take.

We live in a world where we just take things for granted. So, for example, we take for granted that the best thing in life, the highest goal, is to get a job. If you talk to a young person, they want advice, you tell them, make sure when you're at school you get the capacity to get a job when you graduate. Well, Galileo was questioning whether we should believe the ideas about the world, which say that objects fall because the ground is their natural place. Should we accept that or should we reject it and subject it to an analysis?

We could ask the same question about getting a job. We're not asking a new question. For two millennia, not a short time, right through the 19th century, the idea of getting a job was regarded as a fundamental attack against basic human rights and human dignity. Why? Because getting a job means accepting servitude to a master. It means saying, okay, I'll rent myself to you for my entire waking life, almost most of my waking life, and I will follow your orders during this period. That was considered an utter abomination. By now it's sort of taken for granted, but should we take it for granted, or should we go back to the ideals of working people, classical liberals, Cicero, all the way back, Abraham Lincoln, saying that this is not a decent way for human beings to live.

People should be in control of their own work and their own destiny. One of the founders of classical liberalism, Wilhelm von Humboldt, captured the point very lucidly. He said, suppose an artisan creates a beautiful object on command and a job. We may admire what he did, but we despise what he is, a tool in the hands of others. That was common belief right through the 19th century. So common, in fact, that it was a slogan of Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party, that what they call, what was called wage slavery in those days is the same as slavery except that it's temporary until you gain your freedom. Well, we've lost that. We now accept that putting yourself, renting yourself into servitude that putting yourself, renting yourself into servitude is one of the highest goals in life,

an idea that would have been an abomination for 2,000 years. Okay, it's the kind of thing we should question. We should question lots of things that are simply taken for granted, and the ability to question, to be puzzled, to open your mind. That's not only the basis for scientific advancement, but also for advancement in our lives towards a world of greater freedom and justice, kinds of questions that always should be raised. And we find if we raise them, horizons open that you hadn't thought of before. So this ability to question and be puzzled is one. We don't have to cultivate it with young children because they have it automatically. Everyone who's spent any time with young children knows they're constantly asking why. In fact, it gets irritating at some point, but they're right. They want to know why,

not just take it for granted. We should not drive that capacity out of people's minds. A lot of education stifles that instinct, drives children to and students to obey. The most extreme version of this is the prevalent ideas of teaching to test. You don't teach so that the student will learn, but you teach so that he'll pass a test. Every one of us has been through that. We know that if we take a course that we're not interested in, but we want to get into college, so you study hard for the exam, you pass it, two weeks later you forgot what the course was about. Okay, that's the worst possible form of education. It's driving out of students minds, just what should be cultivated and encouraged, namely the capacity to question, to be puzzled, to ask why, not be satisfied, when you say, oh, it's obvious. That's just the kind of thing that should be questioned.

So yes, there's a lot at stake in this. Zoe Watt says, you have criticized obscurantist philosophers like Slavoj Žižek, Derrida, and Foucault in the past. What about Hegel and Heidegger? and Foucault in the past. What about Hegel and Heidegger? Well, it's very hard to comment on somebody quite generally.

I haven't read very much Hegel. I don't get much out of it, but I have read some things like his lectures on the philosophy of history. I've even written some about it, which I thought was astonishing in some of its extraordinary racism and incomprehension.

That's what struck me about it. I didn't find much in the way of stimulation of ideas. Might be my fault. Maybe I'm missing things. You know, don't claim to understand everything by any means. But anyway, what I've read of Hegel never tempted me to go much further, rightly or wrongly. What about Heidegger? Heidegger?

Most of the time I have no idea what he's talking about. I started reading Introduction to Metaphysics when I was a college student, but a little way in I was so appalled by the apologetics for Nazism that I just couldn't bring myself to go on. Maybe I missed something, maybe not. A lot of it struck me as empty verbiage. I didn't see anything there. Again, maybe I'm missing something. This was back in the early 50s, incidentally. I was kind of shocked later to discover that many years later, the intellectual world discovered that, to its amazement, that Heidegger had been a Nazi sympathizer. It springs out of his work instantly, as soon as you look at it. Now, that's not a reason to reject somebody's thought, but for me it was a personal reason not to go on. I can tolerate a lot of things, but there are choices. Wida Ching wants to know,

if you could answer or acquire the answer to any one mystery, what mystery would it be? There are many mysteries I'd like to solve. Some on an intellectual level, some on a human level. So let me just mention two. I'm sure I could think of many more. On an intellectual level, I would very much like to solve the problem that I call think of many more. On an intellectual level, I would very much like to solve the problem that I call Galileo's challenge and Descartes' challenge. How are these miracles possible? We haven't the slightest idea. We can understand the mechanisms that enter into these actions, free creative use of language, haven't the slightest idea how it's exercised. Actually, that's true of voluntary motion generally.

The leading scientists who study the neuroscience of voluntary motion. I don't mean complicated things like speaking, but simple things like, say, raising your finger. Trying to decide what goes on when you decide to raise your finger. They have no idea what they say, the two leading scientists, actually former colleagues of mine at MIT when I was at MIT, Emilio Bitsi, Robert Ajayme, and they wrote a state of the art paper not long ago in which they put it, as they say, rather fancifully, we can understand, we're coming to understand the puppet and the strings, but we have nothing to say about the puppeteer. And it's a very mysterious fact, because even for the most simple actions like this, why not? There's experimental evidence showing that the decision to raise your finger is made about half a second before you become conscious of deciding it.

So the decision is made pre-consciously in ways which you have no understanding of it. At a much richer level, it becomes the question of how you and I are doing what we're doing right now. How can we constantly be engaging in this process of creating new structures, new thoughts, maybe new in the history of the language, others understand them instantly and can somehow penetrate to our minds even though they have no access to our minds just through the use of a few symbols. All of that is highly mysterious. I know I'm never going to solve it. In fact, humans may never solve it, maybe beyond human capacity, but it would be an amazing discovery. Now turning to the human level, there is an astonishing problem that we're facing right now, an overwhelming problem. For the first time in the history of the human species, we have to decide quickly whether the human experiment will

continue or whether it's soon going to end in an inglorious catastrophe. There are two major problems, issues. One of them is heating the planet. If it goes on on the present course, we will soon be at a level where human survival is impossible. That's not seriously in doubt. We know how to and the same is true of nuclear weapons. The threat of the use of nuclear weapons is sharply increasing. Chances of surviving that are very slight. In both cases, and in fact in every other case of a major problem, we have answers. There are feasible solutions.

They're right on the table, and spell them out. Perfectly feasible solutions. We have a brief period in which we can grasp the opportunity and solve the problems. Now here comes the question. Humans are not doing it. They are racing to disaster. It's kind of like what I said about the vaccines. by monopolizing the vaccines, not only is it criminal ethically, but it's suicidal. These are things that we all know.

We know we're engaged in suicidal activity. We know that there are answers, here they are, but we can't act on the answers. Now the question is, can humans develop the will and the moral and intellectual capacities which will enable them to save the species from essential destruction in the not distant future? If that question isn't answered, nothing else matters. There were two great questions left toward the end that I didn't get a chance to get to, so I emailed Chomsky and he promptly responded. What do you think of language models like GPT-3 from OpenAI, provided that you've heard of it? Chomsky said, it's not a language model. It works just as well for impossible languages as for actual languages. It is therefore refuted, if intended as a language

model, by normal scientific criteria. Independently of the refutation, the way it works has no relation to language or cognition generally. Perhaps it's useful for some purpose, but it seems to tell us nothing about language or cognition generally. The last question was, do you fear death? What are your brief thoughts on it? When I was a young teenager, Chomsky says, I was concerned that when my consciousness disappeared, the whole world would disappear with it. It soon passed. Death is a stage of life. I know of nothing more to say about it. Death is a stage of life. I know of nothing more to say about it. Well, I'm afraid I'll have to take off. You have to go.

Okay. The last question, if you don't mind, someone wants to know what advice you have for a young person. What advice do you have for a person growing up who wants to be somewhat like you? have for a person growing up who wants to be somewhat like you? I wouldn't advise anyone to be someone like me. They should be who they are. The advice is find out who you are, go back to one of the earliest questions asked in intellectual history by the priestess of the Delphic Oracle in ancient Greece. She had very simple advice. Her advice was know thyself. That's the beginning. Find out who you are, what kind of person you are, what matters to you, what's significant to you, what engages your imagination, what grasps your hopes and concerns,

and pursue it. It's the only advice I know. The advice of the priestess. It's a good start. Thank you. Thank you so much. I appreciate you being extremely generous with your time. I'll email you and let you know how this video performs compared to the others but either way thank you so much there's 300 people watching and I didn't I got to less than 1% of the question if you're watching thank you for the questions and the opportunity to discuss it with you very much enjoyed it Thank you professor bye bye okay well thank you everyone if you see me looking off to the side it's because i'm trying to read some of your questions you