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Let's say that you are very good at basketball, enough so that you can almost always make a shot from anywhere on the court. Your mind is computing, based off o

Let's say that you are very good at basketball, enough so that you can almost always make a shot from anywhere on the court. Your mind is computing, based off of visual feedback, how to fire your muscles in such a way so that the basketball makes a near-perfect parabola and makes it into the net. Does your brain "know" the formulas that describe projectile motion? Is it running a physics model in your brain?

yongjik 11y ago
I think that's a very good analogy, and no, I wouldn't say my brain would "know" Newton's formulas. However, I will still say my brain "knows" grammar. The difference is complexity. Even if you consider spins, throwing a ball is only about 9 degrees of freedom. It is too small to make good prediction on how the brain works, so Occam's razor dictates that it probably doesn't solve a differential equation. (Also I could try throwing a baseball, and I'll find that I have to re-learn everything, so it's reasonable to assume that my brain was "optimized" to just throw one particular kind of balls to a particular height.) Human language is so mind-bogglingly complex that even if you just restrict yourself to a dozen words you can easily utter sentences that were never spoken in entire history of English. Yet my brain has no problem dealing with that. Sure, we could say that it's all statistical relation, but those relations have to stack (almost) recursively and connect phrases that are a dozen words apart. At what point do we stop calling them a heap of relations and instead call it what it is, i.e., grammar?
- brenschluss 11y ago
  Let's make it complicated, then: if you're great at walking a tightrope on a windy day, is your brain storing a model of your muscular+skeletal structure and live-computing a kinematics physics model + wind simulation to simulate how you should be walking across that tightrope? My point was that Newton's formulas are simplified models of how the world works. As a result, just because you know how to throw a ball doesn't mean you "know" Newton's formulas. Similarly, just because you know how to speak doesn't mean you "know" grammar. The question to ask to help us answer this question would be: is grammar a simplified model of language?[1] [1] This depends on whether you're a linguistic prescriptivist or descriptivist.
  - mbrock 11y ago
    I don't think that question has that much to do with prescriptivism and descriptivism. Prescriptivists want to use the study of grammar to uphold certain linguistic norms; descriptivists find that language works fine without expert supervision; neither is a stance on the scientific origin of linguistic structure. You could be a prescriptivist and believe that grammar is a simplified model: you would just want that model to carry normative weight (e.g. for conservative reasons, or to promote standardized national language, or whatever reason).
semi-extrinsic 11y ago
A very important difference: someone who is good at throwing a basketball (or any sport, really) will "switch off" their brain while doing so. There's various words for this, e.g. "being in the zone". Ask the person to think about something while throwing, and they'll likely miss. It takes years of training to teach the brain to do the correct motions while " switched off". Using language, on the other hand, requires us to really think.
- will_pseudonym 11y ago
  Actually if you look at research done on freestyle rappers, you'll find similar mechanisms as those found in great basketball players. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/11/the-neuroanatomy-of-freestyle-rap/265414/ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/11/the-neuroa... Being in a flow state seems very similar to being in the zone.
  - mbrock 11y ago
    And then consider that freestyle rapping is a formally demanding way of speaking, and that speaking is something people do all the time without much mental effort. Impressive rappers can produce rhyming and alliterating verses in "flow" but a normal dinner conversation is in flow by default (depending on how neurotic your dinner guests are).
    - 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
      Do the more neurotic dinner guests rhyme a lot?
- mbrock 11y ago
  Language doesn't seem to require conscious thought either. Philosophers like Heidegger and Wittgenstein talked about that a lot. The postulating of an internal thought process "behind" everything is basically what Heidegger spent his life refuting, from what I've read of Dreyfus's book... And Wittgenstein explains language as a tool that people use to get things done, more or less. You can talk without "really thinking", people do it all the time. Grammar is natural in that sense. Pinker's "The Language Instinct" mentions studies that show higher educated people in some situations tend to make more grammatical blunders and to be slightly less "fluent," maybe because of second guessing their language instincts. (Any errors in this comment due to the fact that I wrote it without thinking.)
jusssi 11y ago
It doesn't "know the formulas". However, it has accumulated a life time worth of statistics, which it uses to predict what's about to happen, all the time. So I can be immediately surprised when something unexpected happens. In that sense, there's a running physics simulator. As for throwing the basketball, most people know (#) what the arc should be, and can immediately after the throw tell if a throw will hit or miss with reasonable accuracy, assuming a viewpoint that allows them to extract the movement accurately. The difficulty there is learning to execute that throw. (#) edit, know as in "have learned", not as an innate ability.

yongjik 11y ago

I think that's a very good analogy, and no, I wouldn't say my brain would "know" Newton's formulas. However, I will still say my brain "knows" grammar. The difference is complexity. Even if you consider spins, throwing a ball is only about 9 degrees of freedom. It is too small to make good prediction on how the brain works, so Occam's razor dictates that it probably doesn't solve a differential equation. (Also I could try throwing a baseball, and I'll find that I have to re-learn everything, so it's reasonable to assume that my brain was "optimized" to just throw one particular kind of balls to a particular height.) Human language is so mind-bogglingly complex that even if you just restrict yourself to a dozen words you can easily utter sentences that were never spoken in entire history of English. Yet my brain has no problem dealing with that. Sure, we could say that it's all statistical relation, but those relations have to stack (almost) recursively and connect phrases that are a dozen words apart. At what point do we stop calling them a heap of relations and instead call it what it is, i.e., grammar?

brenschluss 11y ago
Let's make it complicated, then: if you're great at walking a tightrope on a windy day, is your brain storing a model of your muscular+skeletal structure and live-computing a kinematics physics model + wind simulation to simulate how you should be walking across that tightrope? My point was that Newton's formulas are simplified models of how the world works. As a result, just because you know how to throw a ball doesn't mean you "know" Newton's formulas. Similarly, just because you know how to speak doesn't mean you "know" grammar. The question to ask to help us answer this question would be: is grammar a simplified model of language?[1] [1] This depends on whether you're a linguistic prescriptivist or descriptivist.
- mbrock 11y ago
  I don't think that question has that much to do with prescriptivism and descriptivism. Prescriptivists want to use the study of grammar to uphold certain linguistic norms; descriptivists find that language works fine without expert supervision; neither is a stance on the scientific origin of linguistic structure. You could be a prescriptivist and believe that grammar is a simplified model: you would just want that model to carry normative weight (e.g. for conservative reasons, or to promote standardized national language, or whatever reason).

semi-extrinsic 11y ago

A very important difference: someone who is good at throwing a basketball (or any sport, really) will "switch off" their brain while doing so. There's various words for this, e.g. "being in the zone". Ask the person to think about something while throwing, and they'll likely miss. It takes years of training to teach the brain to do the correct motions while " switched off". Using language, on the other hand, requires us to really think.

will_pseudonym 11y ago
Actually if you look at research done on freestyle rappers, you'll find similar mechanisms as those found in great basketball players. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/11/the-neuroanatomy-of-freestyle-rap/265414/ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/11/the-neuroa... Being in a flow state seems very similar to being in the zone.
- mbrock 11y ago
  And then consider that freestyle rapping is a formally demanding way of speaking, and that speaking is something people do all the time without much mental effort. Impressive rappers can produce rhyming and alliterating verses in "flow" but a normal dinner conversation is in flow by default (depending on how neurotic your dinner guests are).
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
    Do the more neurotic dinner guests rhyme a lot?
mbrock 11y ago
Language doesn't seem to require conscious thought either. Philosophers like Heidegger and Wittgenstein talked about that a lot. The postulating of an internal thought process "behind" everything is basically what Heidegger spent his life refuting, from what I've read of Dreyfus's book... And Wittgenstein explains language as a tool that people use to get things done, more or less. You can talk without "really thinking", people do it all the time. Grammar is natural in that sense. Pinker's "The Language Instinct" mentions studies that show higher educated people in some situations tend to make more grammatical blunders and to be slightly less "fluent," maybe because of second guessing their language instincts. (Any errors in this comment due to the fact that I wrote it without thinking.)

jusssi 11y ago

It doesn't "know the formulas". However, it has accumulated a life time worth of statistics, which it uses to predict what's about to happen, all the time. So I can be immediately surprised when something unexpected happens. In that sense, there's a running physics simulator. As for throwing the basketball, most people know (#) what the arc should be, and can immediately after the throw tell if a throw will hit or miss with reasonable accuracy, assuming a viewpoint that allows them to extract the movement accurately. The difficulty there is learning to execute that throw. (#) edit, know as in "have learned", not as an innate ability.