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Chomsky – The Machine, the Ghost and the Limits of Understanding (2012) [video]

171 points by nsomaru 6y ago

TaylorAlexander 6y ago
Adding this to my watch list! Chomsky really helped open my eyes about the world. I never understood how certain structures of power maintain control over society until I started listening to him. I’m so happy many of his talks are on YouTube.
- bnbond 6y ago
  Agreed. He’s a good entry point to that sort of critical theory. The Foucault Chomsky debate is on YouTube, though I find it very hard to follow.
  - alecco 6y ago
    It’s very interesting how Foucault fans think he won. He only kept trying to move the point of the conversation to madness and how the powers that be used it. Perhaps it’s a good example of fanaticism vs old school reasoning. Chomsky didn’t “win” because the conversation was constantly derailed. It was a waste of time. Don’t try to reason or debate fanatics.
    - llamaz 6y ago
      I'm not a Foucault fan, and I used to hold the same opinion as you. But now I realise the exchange was, as you say, a "waste of time". Chomsky doesn't seem to have read up on the issues Foucault is talking about, and he admits as much in an interview on the topic, about how he was surprised that he could not find /any/ common ground from which to build a conversation with Foucault. This is more of a failure of communication on the part of French intellectuals, who use verbose language helps keep their radical tradition so insular. So... it's what you would expect an exchange between the analytic and continental philosophers to be like. Chomsky takes the enlightenment humanism tradition for granted, and assumes he can find common ground with Foucault there, but Foucault had been working in a tradition where the humanism vs anti-humanism debate (e.g. Althusser) was front and center. In fact, Foucault himself was on the anti-humanist side. (anti-humanism doesn't mean "evil", it's just an unfortunate tongue-in-cheek terminology). What you end up with is Foucault trying his best to introduce Chomsky to the basics of a core part of the French intellectual tradition, more-or-less unsuccessfully. What the debate highlights is the extent of the divide between continental philosophy and analytical philosophy. It doesn't make new ground.
- alecco 6y ago
  He was very inspiring. But he broke my heart when he supported Chavez unconditionally. Even if years later he retracted support for some journalist being jailed. Too little, too late. Be sure to check out Manufacturing Consent (90s) and his criticism of the raise of (Maoist) Posmodernism in academia (interviews and lectures from the 80s). Do it before it gets removed.
  - maroonblazer 6y ago
    >his criticism of the raise of (Maoist) Posmodernism in academia (interviews and lectures from the 80s) Are there links you can recommend?
    - alecco 6y ago
      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chomsky+on+postmodernism https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chomsky+on+postmodernism The results are a good start. I read all this a long time ago so I don’t have a list of links. I’d stay on his work and opinions before 2000. The Documentary “Is the man who is tall happy” is easy to watch. His academic material is borderline incomprehensible. There was a Chomsky generator somewhere.
      - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
        You’re right about his academic work. I read one book with Chomsky cited as the author that was actually a transcription of some interviews of him. And then I read a book he wrote and it was a very different style! I find his speaking to be clear and easily digestible, while some of his writing can be very difficult to read.
  - krapp 6y ago
    >and his criticism of the raise of (Maoist) Posmodernism in academia I'm sorry but in a country where people call Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton communists without a hint of irony I can't help but at roll my eyes at such a premise.
    - 6y ago
parhamn 6y ago
This is slightly off topic and might be taken as rude, but it would be interesting to revoice Chomsky’s lectures with his voice from his younger years. Seems doable using tools today, no? His pacing and voice made him a bit harder to follow in the recent decade for me. This seems generally useful for other lectures with accents, bad pacing, etc. (going 1.5x is not the right solution). I’m not sure if lecturers would be happy with losing their voice’s ‘brand’ though.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  1.25x is perfectly okay IMO. I think it helps to push yourself a little to understand that age changes things but it doesn't make them inferior and it's good to be reminded of such things and learn to tolerate it if it perturbs you. We all get older.
- alexashka 6y ago
  I've listened to some of his lectures over the years but the most I've ever gotten from him, was from a single book that compiled and edited his lectures into a QnA format, sorted by topic. The book's called 'understanding power'. I got my copy from a used book store for a few bucks. Great stuff full of interesting historical bits I had no idea about. It also helped clarify his philosophical stance, which is simply that people need to organize in order to affect change. He's decided that his part is providing research and it is up to others to use it to do their part. Chomsky to me, would've been a giant historical figure, if he had found a Steve Jobs to represent his work, the same way Steve Wozniak did. Instead, Chomsky went at it alone, making some of the most juicy and interesting material feel stale, simply because he has no ability to present it in a compelling manner.
  - dgellow 6y ago
    In case you’re not aware, Chomsky IS a giant historical figure. He’s a founder of modern linguistics and cognitive science, a renowned analytical philosopher, and a major political activist of the 20th American landscape. His academic and political work is massive.
ketamine__ 6y ago
Could someone link some good parts?
- EdwardCoffin 6y ago
  It's one extended good part. I have the audio for this on my phone, have listened to it many times start to finish.
  - bolzano 6y ago
    You're not the only one! :D
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ilaksh 6y ago
Very interesting. One thing he touches on a little bit is our understanding of the mind. If anyone wants a very recent (philosophical?) take on how the mind works, check out Andy Clark's book Surfing Uncertainty.
- visarga 6y ago
  I checked Andy Clark's wiki page and he seems to be one of the most up to date philosophers, his conclusions are not against nor ignore AI developments, especially: embodiment, RL setting with agent, environment and reward, top-down error coding perception and the extended mind thesis.
  - ilaksh 6y ago
    Yeah.. honestly a lot of philosophers when I read/hear them make me think that philosophy is just a dated precursor to science. But people like Joshua Bach and Andy Clark show how very useful philosophy can be. Although I guess they are not technically pure philosophers because most of it is cognitive science.
waingake 6y ago
I found this Chomsky video last night. It's from the late 80's early 90's. He's really still in his prime here. He makes some really insightful calls on the direction of the emerging "Information Super Highway" in this as well. https://youtube.com/watch?v=-kL0UNWcWFc&feature=share https://youtube.com/watch?v=-kL0UNWcWFc&feature=share
- lookingforsome 6y ago
  TL;DR of the idea of an Information Super Highway?
  - krapp 6y ago
    It's what some people were calling the internet/Worldwide Web in the early 1990s[0]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway
  - leejoramo 6y ago
    In the USA our main national automobile highway is called the “Interstate”, because it connected the States into one system. Previous systems were built at the State level. Sometimes we referred to Interstates as “Super Highways”. This Interstate system was inspired by the German “Autobahn” When we started to connect different independent computer networks, it felt very similar to what the Interstate had done just 20 years before. So the term “Internet” was created. When the Internet started to hit the mainstream culture in the 1990’s, the comparison to the Interstate became even more useful. “Now you can email between networks such as AOL and CompuServe.” So people started to play with the words: Information Super Highway Infobahn And many more
- jswizzy 6y ago
  Is in his prime code for before everything he made up about langue was debunked?
  - kgarten 6y ago
    Not sure, why you attack him with such malice. I don’t agree with Chomsky in a lot of topics, still I believe he’s one of the large, great intellectuals of our time. Listen to his sentences when he talks ... I would have a hard time writing so eloquently (and he just speaks them). By the way, I assume you mean “Language” not “langue”, or did you want to refer to the social consensus on how signs are applied. The later is not so much Chomsky but de Saussure. Chomsky started in the 60s with Competence/Performance ... Language is hard :) I know and Chomsky contributed a lot in understanding it better, even though he didn’t reach you it seems.
tikwidd 6y ago
Here is my attempt at a summary (disclaimer: going from memory; watched this and related lectures during my MA thesis last year): - Early scientific inquiry in the enlightenment period (by those who referred to themselves as "philosophers", but who we would now call "scientists") was based on the "Mechanical Philosophy". At this time skilled artisans [who we might call "hackers" today] were creating sophisticated machines, e.g. clocks, talking machines and simulations of digestive systems. -These new machines stimulated the minds of the scientist-philosophers in a similar fashion to the machine learning/AI demos today. A nascent philosophy of science emerged at this time: they wondered if the whole universe was one giant machine, viewing God as a kind of skilled artisan who carefully tuned the universe, which as a result operated on the same mechanical principles. In this philosophy of science - the "Mechanical Philosophy" - everything in the universe can be understood in mechanical terms [which are intuitive to human beings; e.g. babies assume a hidden point of contact when shown a cause and effect at a distance]. In the Mechanical Philosophy, the nature of the universe is intelligible to us by direct observation. - Newton, to his own dismay (and ridicule by his contemporaries), showed that the Mechanical Philosophy was incoherent, because the "action at a distance" posited in his theory of gravity could not be explained in purely mechanical terms. Chomsky argues that post Newton, the goals of science ("philosophy" at the time) became more modest: the goal of understanding nature/the universe in direct terms [by applying intuitive explanations] was abandoned! Now we try to build _models_ of natural phenomena that are intelligible to us. The model is intelligible, even if the underlying phenomenon is not. All modern science works this way, e.g. quantum physics, chemistry, biology, linguistics. - This is what Chomsky means when he says that Newton exorcised the machine, but left the ghost intact. We no longer seek mechanical explanations - the machine was exorcised from our theory of science - but the "ghost" is still there. After Newton, the problem was largely forgotten. But "exorcising the ghost" - i.e. forming theories about nature that are directly intelligible to the senses - is considered too hard to approach (you can't even "ask stupid questions" about it.). Nobody in chemistry is trying to form directly intelligible theories of chemical bonds for example. We just expect the model to be intelligible. - Chomsky argues that "exorcising the ghost" - understanding nature in direct mechanical terms - might be beyond the capability of our species. It would not be surprising that our species has inherent biological limitations such as this, since we are ordinary animals, rather than angels. Every other animal has well defined scopes and limits in their various capacities. The scopes of our capacities as a species go hand in hand with the limits. The science-forming capacity is just one aspect of our biological endowment, which is limited in this way. Plausibly, aliens watching us might observe that we are unable to make progress in certain areas of science due to these inherent limitations. [This ties somewhat into Chomsky's view of language, as a biological system with inherent scope and limits]. Takeaway: we shouldn't expect the study of all of nature to be reducible to the study of physics, or some unifying theory, as is often assumed. Two different models might be reducible or integrate (e.g., attempts to unify physics and chemistry), but this is not necessarily the case, because the study of physics is not "closer" to reality or more fundamental in any meaningful sense (since the study of physics is really just another set of intelligible models). Likewise, the models we use to study biological and mental systems are not necessarily reducible to physical models [it is only worth pursuing these unifications if they improve the study of one or another field, they are not useful goals in their own sake].
slibhb 6y ago
The idea that dualism was demolished by Newton, whose theories (just-so stories) forced us to forget the "body substance" and left us with only the "mind substance," is very interesting. We tend to think of Newton as the exact opposite: someone who made a clockwork universe intelligible. This perspective makes idealism seem inevitable. I wonder what Chomsky has to say about Kant.
- tikwidd 6y ago
  Reminds me of the John Maynard Keynes quote, "Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians". Chomsky's ideas about of innate linguistic systems in the mind seems to jibe well with Kant [1]. Chomsky has explicitly connected his work with the Cambridge Platonists/British Neo-platonists. [1] https://askaphilosopher.org/2011/08/15/chomsky-and-plato-compared/ https://askaphilosopher.org/2011/08/15/chomsky-and-plato-com...
- AndrewKemendo 6y ago
  The great thing about Chomsky is that there's almost always a video or writing from him about some subject of importance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pndR7wrF-bo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pndR7wrF-bo
betwixthewires 6y ago
In the video a girl asks a question that he doesn't seem to understand that I thought was interesting but he didn't answer, and she got frustrated about it, but I stopped for a second and pondered it. It was, if there are inherent limitations to cognitive capacity, does that not mean there is no free will, and therefore that morality does not exist, since morality is predicated on the idea that human beings can of their own free will do things, including things they shouldn't? When thinking about it I determined that the question is premised on this idea that with any limitation whatsoever free will does not exist. This is flawed. I cannot choose to levitate right now, but it does not mean I cannot choose to do anything. The absence of infinite options and capabilities does not negate the ability to choose to do things that I am capable of. In fact, I'd say it is the opposite, one cannot have free will with infinite capabilities because, as Chomsky put it, taking any form comes with the consequence that there will be limitation, and something without limitation would be without form, "an ameboid' as he puts it, and so such a creature could not make decisions or take any action at all.
- kiba 6y ago
  It was, if there are inherent limitations to cognitive capacity, does that not mean there is no free will, and therefore that morality does not exist, since morality is predicated on the idea that human beings can of their own free will do things, including things they shouldn't? Why would morality be predicated on the notion of free will? That sounds like nonsense. Bad things happening to people aren't going to be erased just because free will doesn't exist. When thinking about it I determined that the question is premised on this idea that with any limitation whatsoever free will does not exist Nobody had ever explained to me in any coherent form what free will is. We are always deterministic machines, making decisions according to the law of physics. It can't certainly be random, because it would just be random and we definitely observe people making non-random decisions.
  - betwixthewires 6y ago
    So if you watch the video it will provide context. Morality is predicated on free will in the sense that without free will humans cannot do good or bad things, because if our behavior is entirely deterministic, no action is truly an action and therefore cannot be good or bad. Bad things happening to people is an amoral concept, people doing bad things is within the scope of morality. It is not evil for, say, a piano to land on someone, but to deliberately drop a piano on someone is something that can be examined morally. >Nobody had ever explained to me in any coherent form what free will is. This is where watching the video to get the context comes in handy. Basically philosophers/scientists like Descartes and others made a point which I think is very compelling, that the only thing we can be certain exists, because we experience it directly, and it is arguably the only thing we experience directly, is that we have free will, and therefore to presume that it does not exist but then to investigate other things is silly. The concept is closely related to Descartes' "evil demon" thought experiment from which we get the famous though often misunderstood phrase "I think therefore I am". In the video Chomsky even makes a great joke that for someone to argue that free will doesn't exist they have to have, and therefore experience first hand, free will, unless their argument is that they have no choice to argue that point because they were driven to it deterministically.
mvh 6y ago
PSA: Chomsky answers emails.
ineedasername 6y ago
I don't like Chomsky in his main area of expertise of Linguistics. My post-grad work was in NLP, embedded within a linguistics department, and requiring a heavy background in formal linguistics. A fair number of faculty, while appreciative of his contributions to the field, held him in low regard because he & some of his main "acolytes" systematically worked to block any researchers in the U.S. working on ideas that ran counter to his own. Meaning more than a generation or more of advancement has stagnated in the US. Advancement in syntactic theory (his main contribution to linguistics) has tended to come from outside the US. It's possible this has changed somewhat since my formal education, but it was the status quo for quite some time.
- Iv 6y ago
  "Science progresses one funeral at a time" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
- john4532452 6y ago
  I find it very hard to believe. Could you please provide any citations.
- benjaminjosephw 6y ago
  Isn't this more or less how a paradigm shift would look from the perspective of someone who sticks to the old paradigm?
- blonde_ocean 6y ago
  Hey, can I connect with you 1-1 to discuss your post-grad work? I’ve been playing around with the idea of getting a graduate degree in linguistics, but with a CS-focus. Would love to hear from someone who’s been through it.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
  >> A fair number of faculty, while appreciative of his contributions to the field, held him in low regard because he & some of his main "acolytes" systematically worked to block any researchers in the U.S. working on ideas that ran counter to his own. Meaning more than a generation or more of advancement has stagnated in the US. I've heard this about Chomsky before and I don't get it. It sounds like he's criticised for doing what any researcher would do- defend his work and criticise competing approaches. I know that's what I do and what everybody else I know does (and has done to me too). Of course any researcher worth her salt will defend her work and of course they will criticise competing approaches. Robustly so. That is how research works and that is how researchers work. He "systematically worked to block any researchers in the U.S. working on ideas that ran counter to his own"? Yes, that's precisely what you do when you think the other approach is rubbish, you fight to put it out like a fire that threatens to burn down your beloved field. You only ever stop criticising others' work and promoting your own ideas when you are 100% convinced -no doubts at all- that it's your work that's flawed. Otherwise, how does science advance? Nobody has the absolute truth in any scientific question. Our best chance to know the truth is to try to formulate an answer and then have everybody's answers duke it out, like pit fighters in Conan the Barbarian. The alternative is to let your ideas go without putting up a fight - but then you run the risk of letting ideas that are worse than yours prevail. And I'm probably getting all this from Schopenhauer on the art of dialectic, which I read a while ago, but this is how debates go. And science is a debate. And if you're having a debate, it means there is disagreement- that's the point of having a debate; and the point of having research: that we can't agree about what the truth is in the first place. Otherwise, we wouldn't need research. So I think that those complaints are best explained as sour grapes by those who failed to convince of the merit of their ideas, and blame Chomsky for doing his job as a scientist better than them. Of course you're starting at a disadvantage if you're going up against an established authority in your field, no less one of the size of Chomsky, but that's exactly what everyone else spends all their time trying to become, an established authority in their field. And they want that so that they can defend their own ideas more easily. So that, too, is not such a great piece of criticism.
kashyapc 6y ago
I recently began educating myself about human language acquisition (a rabbit hole I was pursuing from another book, Behave). I learnt that there's two main schools of thought—the "innate instinct" model (Chomsky et al) and its alternative, the "usage-based" model, which posits that language is "an embodied and social human behaviour and seeks explanations in that context". Here's an open-access paper[1] that summarizes and contrasts both the models. And if you, like me, find the "innate instinct" model to be an unsatisfying explanation, check out the following works: - Michael Tomasello. See his excellent work on "joint agency" / "joint attention" (as something that is unique to humans), human developmental psychology, and many other topics. He summarized his most recent book in this talk here[2]. - George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. See their classic work: Metaphors We Live By [1] https://www.intechopen.com/online-first/usage-based-and-universal-grammar-based-approaches-to-second-language-acquisition https://www.intechopen.com/online-first/usage-based-and-univ... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNbeleWvXyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNbeleWvXyQ
- ukj 6y ago
  The irony in all of this, of course is that you see both theories as two possible models. Which begs the question "What exactly is a model?" And model theory (or if you want, interpretation theory) is Mathematically well formalised and understood in so far as anyone can understand formal languages. And formal language theory is precisely Chomsky's long-standing contribution.
  - ribit 6y ago
    Very true, but the problem is in paying these models to the actual study of linguistics and human language. For example, you can approach computation using something like a Turing Machine, but this won't help you understanding how to understand a modern CPU architecture or how to write well-optimized code. Chomsky's work is very interesting and relevant in the domain of formal languages, but as far as human languages goes, it always struck me as a self-indulgent intellectual exercise with little practical relevance.
    - 6y ago
waingake 6y ago
Can someone explain what he means when he says there is no physical?
- ukj 6y ago
  It's just an all-encompassing word that's not subject to testability/falsification. Some people say the universe is physical. Other people say the universe is material. Other people yet say it's neither of those two. Nobody can explain what the observable difference would between a physical and a material universe.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  The main point he is making is that this notion of "the physical universe" comes from pre-Newtonian science's attempts to model the world as a mechanical machine, where every interaction can be explained by direct physical contact between parts of the system, and the laws of motion. This project seemed largely promising and successful, especially once Descartes came up with the idea of separating the mind, which didn't seem mechanical, from the physical world. So, after Descartes, the world looked pretty simple: there is a physical world that all works like a bunch of gears, and a mental/spiritual world where the mind exists, and these two together explain the universe. However, Newton came along and discovered the law of universal attraction (gravity), which meant that the "physical world" does not in fact work like a machine, that there is no kind of physical contact that can explain the motion of the heavens. Of course, that also opened the way to the possibility that many other interactions are similarly immaterial, so the whole project falls apart. We do not in fact have a theory of the "physical world" and what it is. I would note that Quantum Mechanics, even though it is highly unsatisfactory to our intuition, does get us back to a conception of a purely mechanical physical world (though with wave-like mechanics instead of gears). Unfortunately, for now, it STILL, 400 years later, hasn't solved the problem that Newton discovered. Gravity is still not accountable for in a mechanical, contact based way like the other forces are, even though GR has given a much more detailed model of how it works, and we have discovered gravity waves that prove it is not instantaneous action at a distance. Of course, the main interpretations of QM have also given up realism , so while we do have an account of a physical world, it is unreal in a sense (that is, the world does not have any definite properties until you measure something; in QM a tree falling a in a forest really doesn't make any sound unless someone/something hears it). We also don't yet have any idea of how to define measurement, even though it is a kind of physical process.
mcprwklzpq 6y ago
Here is a later text version of this lecture: Noam Chomsky - Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding. https://chomsky.info/201401__/ https://chomsky.info/201401__/ I tried to edit for brevity and summarise the main point here, too: Mechanical philosophy originated with Galileo and his contemporaries, held that the world is a machine (device with gears, levers, and other mechanical components, interacting through direct contact) and could in principle be constructed by a super-skilled artisan. The way they viewed these machines is similar to the way we view computers today (compare with "we live in a simulation"). Galileo insisted that theories are intelligible, only if we can “duplicate [their posits] by means of appropriate artificial devices.” The same conception, was developed by Descartes, Leibniz, Huygens, Newton, and others. Descartes recognised “the creative aspect of language use” (and thought), a capacity unique to humans that cannot be duplicated by machines. The use of language is: 1) innovative without bounds, 2) appropriate to circumstances but not caused by them, 3) can engender thoughts in others that they recognize they could have expressed themselves. Descartes invoked a new principle to accommodate these phenomena, a kind of creative principle (mind), res cogitans, which stood alongside of res extensa (body) (Cartesian dualism). Newton showed that to account for the properties of matter (or res extensa or body) it is necessary to resort to interaction without contact, therefore matter is not a machine, and we do not have any definition of matter. The properties of the material world are “inconceivable to us,” but real nevertheless. Since then in science we do not conceive of the world as a mechanism (the world is a machine that we explore and map) but we construct intelligible (the one that a machine can compute) theories about the world. In summary: we can not know what the world is but we build theories about it that a machine can compute. The world is not a machine - our mind is a machine. Also in there Chomsky subscribes to cognitive neuroscientists C.R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King critiques of neuroscience (mind is not computed by neural nets, but mabe by some chemical reaction inside cells, maybe by RNA, which may provide Turing complete set of operations).
- slim 6y ago
  thank you
- ngcc_hk 6y ago
  Is the interaction without contact was later solved by the field theory? Both Newton and Einstein did not believe in this action in a spooky distance. (Qm one is different .)
jokoon 6y ago
What was this quote where he said that age was caused by sedentary lifestyle? Or something similar? I can't find it.

171 points by nsomaru 6y ago

Adding this to my watch list! Chomsky really helped open my eyes about the world. I never understood how certain structures of power maintain control over society until I started listening to him. I’m so happy many of his talks are on YouTube.

bnbond 6y ago
Agreed. He’s a good entry point to that sort of critical theory. The Foucault Chomsky debate is on YouTube, though I find it very hard to follow.
- alecco 6y ago
  It’s very interesting how Foucault fans think he won. He only kept trying to move the point of the conversation to madness and how the powers that be used it. Perhaps it’s a good example of fanaticism vs old school reasoning. Chomsky didn’t “win” because the conversation was constantly derailed. It was a waste of time. Don’t try to reason or debate fanatics.
  - llamaz 6y ago
    I'm not a Foucault fan, and I used to hold the same opinion as you. But now I realise the exchange was, as you say, a "waste of time". Chomsky doesn't seem to have read up on the issues Foucault is talking about, and he admits as much in an interview on the topic, about how he was surprised that he could not find /any/ common ground from which to build a conversation with Foucault. This is more of a failure of communication on the part of French intellectuals, who use verbose language helps keep their radical tradition so insular. So... it's what you would expect an exchange between the analytic and continental philosophers to be like. Chomsky takes the enlightenment humanism tradition for granted, and assumes he can find common ground with Foucault there, but Foucault had been working in a tradition where the humanism vs anti-humanism debate (e.g. Althusser) was front and center. In fact, Foucault himself was on the anti-humanist side. (anti-humanism doesn't mean "evil", it's just an unfortunate tongue-in-cheek terminology). What you end up with is Foucault trying his best to introduce Chomsky to the basics of a core part of the French intellectual tradition, more-or-less unsuccessfully. What the debate highlights is the extent of the divide between continental philosophy and analytical philosophy. It doesn't make new ground.
alecco 6y ago
He was very inspiring. But he broke my heart when he supported Chavez unconditionally. Even if years later he retracted support for some journalist being jailed. Too little, too late. Be sure to check out Manufacturing Consent (90s) and his criticism of the raise of (Maoist) Posmodernism in academia (interviews and lectures from the 80s). Do it before it gets removed.
- maroonblazer 6y ago
  >his criticism of the raise of (Maoist) Posmodernism in academia (interviews and lectures from the 80s) Are there links you can recommend?
  - alecco 6y ago
    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chomsky+on+postmodernism https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chomsky+on+postmodernism The results are a good start. I read all this a long time ago so I don’t have a list of links. I’d stay on his work and opinions before 2000. The Documentary “Is the man who is tall happy” is easy to watch. His academic material is borderline incomprehensible. There was a Chomsky generator somewhere.
    - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
      You’re right about his academic work. I read one book with Chomsky cited as the author that was actually a transcription of some interviews of him. And then I read a book he wrote and it was a very different style! I find his speaking to be clear and easily digestible, while some of his writing can be very difficult to read.
- krapp 6y ago
  >and his criticism of the raise of (Maoist) Posmodernism in academia I'm sorry but in a country where people call Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton communists without a hint of irony I can't help but at roll my eyes at such a premise.
  - 6y ago

parhamn 6y ago

This is slightly off topic and might be taken as rude, but it would be interesting to revoice Chomsky’s lectures with his voice from his younger years. Seems doable using tools today, no? His pacing and voice made him a bit harder to follow in the recent decade for me. This seems generally useful for other lectures with accents, bad pacing, etc. (going 1.5x is not the right solution). I’m not sure if lecturers would be happy with losing their voice’s ‘brand’ though.

stjohnswarts 6y ago
1.25x is perfectly okay IMO. I think it helps to push yourself a little to understand that age changes things but it doesn't make them inferior and it's good to be reminded of such things and learn to tolerate it if it perturbs you. We all get older.
alexashka 6y ago
I've listened to some of his lectures over the years but the most I've ever gotten from him, was from a single book that compiled and edited his lectures into a QnA format, sorted by topic. The book's called 'understanding power'. I got my copy from a used book store for a few bucks. Great stuff full of interesting historical bits I had no idea about. It also helped clarify his philosophical stance, which is simply that people need to organize in order to affect change. He's decided that his part is providing research and it is up to others to use it to do their part. Chomsky to me, would've been a giant historical figure, if he had found a Steve Jobs to represent his work, the same way Steve Wozniak did. Instead, Chomsky went at it alone, making some of the most juicy and interesting material feel stale, simply because he has no ability to present it in a compelling manner.
- dgellow 6y ago
  In case you’re not aware, Chomsky IS a giant historical figure. He’s a founder of modern linguistics and cognitive science, a renowned analytical philosopher, and a major political activist of the 20th American landscape. His academic and political work is massive.

ketamine__ 6y ago

Could someone link some good parts?

EdwardCoffin 6y ago
It's one extended good part. I have the audio for this on my phone, have listened to it many times start to finish.
- bolzano 6y ago
  You're not the only one! :D
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

ilaksh 6y ago

Very interesting. One thing he touches on a little bit is our understanding of the mind. If anyone wants a very recent (philosophical?) take on how the mind works, check out Andy Clark's book Surfing Uncertainty.

visarga 6y ago
I checked Andy Clark's wiki page and he seems to be one of the most up to date philosophers, his conclusions are not against nor ignore AI developments, especially: embodiment, RL setting with agent, environment and reward, top-down error coding perception and the extended mind thesis.
- ilaksh 6y ago
  Yeah.. honestly a lot of philosophers when I read/hear them make me think that philosophy is just a dated precursor to science. But people like Joshua Bach and Andy Clark show how very useful philosophy can be. Although I guess they are not technically pure philosophers because most of it is cognitive science.

waingake 6y ago

I found this Chomsky video last night. It's from the late 80's early 90's. He's really still in his prime here. He makes some really insightful calls on the direction of the emerging "Information Super Highway" in this as well. https://youtube.com/watch?v=-kL0UNWcWFc&feature=share https://youtube.com/watch?v=-kL0UNWcWFc&feature=share

lookingforsome 6y ago
TL;DR of the idea of an Information Super Highway?
- krapp 6y ago
  It's what some people were calling the internet/Worldwide Web in the early 1990s[0]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway
- leejoramo 6y ago
  In the USA our main national automobile highway is called the “Interstate”, because it connected the States into one system. Previous systems were built at the State level. Sometimes we referred to Interstates as “Super Highways”. This Interstate system was inspired by the German “Autobahn” When we started to connect different independent computer networks, it felt very similar to what the Interstate had done just 20 years before. So the term “Internet” was created. When the Internet started to hit the mainstream culture in the 1990’s, the comparison to the Interstate became even more useful. “Now you can email between networks such as AOL and CompuServe.” So people started to play with the words: Information Super Highway Infobahn And many more
jswizzy 6y ago
Is in his prime code for before everything he made up about langue was debunked?
- kgarten 6y ago
  Not sure, why you attack him with such malice. I don’t agree with Chomsky in a lot of topics, still I believe he’s one of the large, great intellectuals of our time. Listen to his sentences when he talks ... I would have a hard time writing so eloquently (and he just speaks them). By the way, I assume you mean “Language” not “langue”, or did you want to refer to the social consensus on how signs are applied. The later is not so much Chomsky but de Saussure. Chomsky started in the 60s with Competence/Performance ... Language is hard :) I know and Chomsky contributed a lot in understanding it better, even though he didn’t reach you it seems.

tikwidd 6y ago

Here is my attempt at a summary (disclaimer: going from memory; watched this and related lectures during my MA thesis last year): - Early scientific inquiry in the enlightenment period (by those who referred to themselves as "philosophers", but who we would now call "scientists") was based on the "Mechanical Philosophy". At this time skilled artisans [who we might call "hackers" today] were creating sophisticated machines, e.g. clocks, talking machines and simulations of digestive systems. -These new machines stimulated the minds of the scientist-philosophers in a similar fashion to the machine learning/AI demos today. A nascent philosophy of science emerged at this time: they wondered if the whole universe was one giant machine, viewing God as a kind of skilled artisan who carefully tuned the universe, which as a result operated on the same mechanical principles. In this philosophy of science - the "Mechanical Philosophy" - everything in the universe can be understood in mechanical terms [which are intuitive to human beings; e.g. babies assume a hidden point of contact when shown a cause and effect at a distance]. In the Mechanical Philosophy, the nature of the universe is intelligible to us by direct observation. - Newton, to his own dismay (and ridicule by his contemporaries), showed that the Mechanical Philosophy was incoherent, because the "action at a distance" posited in his theory of gravity could not be explained in purely mechanical terms. Chomsky argues that post Newton, the goals of science ("philosophy" at the time) became more modest: the goal of understanding nature/the universe in direct terms [by applying intuitive explanations] was abandoned! Now we try to build _models_ of natural phenomena that are intelligible to us. The model is intelligible, even if the underlying phenomenon is not. All modern science works this way, e.g. quantum physics, chemistry, biology, linguistics. - This is what Chomsky means when he says that Newton exorcised the machine, but left the ghost intact. We no longer seek mechanical explanations - the machine was exorcised from our theory of science - but the "ghost" is still there. After Newton, the problem was largely forgotten. But "exorcising the ghost" - i.e. forming theories about nature that are directly intelligible to the senses - is considered too hard to approach (you can't even "ask stupid questions" about it.). Nobody in chemistry is trying to form directly intelligible theories of chemical bonds for example. We just expect the model to be intelligible. - Chomsky argues that "exorcising the ghost" - understanding nature in direct mechanical terms - might be beyond the capability of our species. It would not be surprising that our species has inherent biological limitations such as this, since we are ordinary animals, rather than angels. Every other animal has well defined scopes and limits in their various capacities. The scopes of our capacities as a species go hand in hand with the limits. The science-forming capacity is just one aspect of our biological endowment, which is limited in this way. Plausibly, aliens watching us might observe that we are unable to make progress in certain areas of science due to these inherent limitations. [This ties somewhat into Chomsky's view of language, as a biological system with inherent scope and limits]. Takeaway: we shouldn't expect the study of all of nature to be reducible to the study of physics, or some unifying theory, as is often assumed. Two different models might be reducible or integrate (e.g., attempts to unify physics and chemistry), but this is not necessarily the case, because the study of physics is not "closer" to reality or more fundamental in any meaningful sense (since the study of physics is really just another set of intelligible models). Likewise, the models we use to study biological and mental systems are not necessarily reducible to physical models [it is only worth pursuing these unifications if they improve the study of one or another field, they are not useful goals in their own sake].

slibhb 6y ago

The idea that dualism was demolished by Newton, whose theories (just-so stories) forced us to forget the "body substance" and left us with only the "mind substance," is very interesting. We tend to think of Newton as the exact opposite: someone who made a clockwork universe intelligible. This perspective makes idealism seem inevitable. I wonder what Chomsky has to say about Kant.

tikwidd 6y ago
Reminds me of the John Maynard Keynes quote, "Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians". Chomsky's ideas about of innate linguistic systems in the mind seems to jibe well with Kant [1]. Chomsky has explicitly connected his work with the Cambridge Platonists/British Neo-platonists. [1] https://askaphilosopher.org/2011/08/15/chomsky-and-plato-compared/ https://askaphilosopher.org/2011/08/15/chomsky-and-plato-com...
AndrewKemendo 6y ago
The great thing about Chomsky is that there's almost always a video or writing from him about some subject of importance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pndR7wrF-bo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pndR7wrF-bo

betwixthewires 6y ago

In the video a girl asks a question that he doesn't seem to understand that I thought was interesting but he didn't answer, and she got frustrated about it, but I stopped for a second and pondered it. It was, if there are inherent limitations to cognitive capacity, does that not mean there is no free will, and therefore that morality does not exist, since morality is predicated on the idea that human beings can of their own free will do things, including things they shouldn't? When thinking about it I determined that the question is premised on this idea that with any limitation whatsoever free will does not exist. This is flawed. I cannot choose to levitate right now, but it does not mean I cannot choose to do anything. The absence of infinite options and capabilities does not negate the ability to choose to do things that I am capable of. In fact, I'd say it is the opposite, one cannot have free will with infinite capabilities because, as Chomsky put it, taking any form comes with the consequence that there will be limitation, and something without limitation would be without form, "an ameboid' as he puts it, and so such a creature could not make decisions or take any action at all.

kiba 6y ago
It was, if there are inherent limitations to cognitive capacity, does that not mean there is no free will, and therefore that morality does not exist, since morality is predicated on the idea that human beings can of their own free will do things, including things they shouldn't? Why would morality be predicated on the notion of free will? That sounds like nonsense. Bad things happening to people aren't going to be erased just because free will doesn't exist. When thinking about it I determined that the question is premised on this idea that with any limitation whatsoever free will does not exist Nobody had ever explained to me in any coherent form what free will is. We are always deterministic machines, making decisions according to the law of physics. It can't certainly be random, because it would just be random and we definitely observe people making non-random decisions.
- betwixthewires 6y ago
  So if you watch the video it will provide context. Morality is predicated on free will in the sense that without free will humans cannot do good or bad things, because if our behavior is entirely deterministic, no action is truly an action and therefore cannot be good or bad. Bad things happening to people is an amoral concept, people doing bad things is within the scope of morality. It is not evil for, say, a piano to land on someone, but to deliberately drop a piano on someone is something that can be examined morally. >Nobody had ever explained to me in any coherent form what free will is. This is where watching the video to get the context comes in handy. Basically philosophers/scientists like Descartes and others made a point which I think is very compelling, that the only thing we can be certain exists, because we experience it directly, and it is arguably the only thing we experience directly, is that we have free will, and therefore to presume that it does not exist but then to investigate other things is silly. The concept is closely related to Descartes' "evil demon" thought experiment from which we get the famous though often misunderstood phrase "I think therefore I am". In the video Chomsky even makes a great joke that for someone to argue that free will doesn't exist they have to have, and therefore experience first hand, free will, unless their argument is that they have no choice to argue that point because they were driven to it deterministically.

mvh 6y ago

PSA: Chomsky answers emails.

ineedasername 6y ago

I don't like Chomsky in his main area of expertise of Linguistics. My post-grad work was in NLP, embedded within a linguistics department, and requiring a heavy background in formal linguistics. A fair number of faculty, while appreciative of his contributions to the field, held him in low regard because he & some of his main "acolytes" systematically worked to block any researchers in the U.S. working on ideas that ran counter to his own. Meaning more than a generation or more of advancement has stagnated in the US. Advancement in syntactic theory (his main contribution to linguistics) has tended to come from outside the US. It's possible this has changed somewhat since my formal education, but it was the status quo for quite some time.

Iv 6y ago
"Science progresses one funeral at a time" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
john4532452 6y ago
I find it very hard to believe. Could you please provide any citations.
benjaminjosephw 6y ago
Isn't this more or less how a paradigm shift would look from the perspective of someone who sticks to the old paradigm?
blonde_ocean 6y ago
Hey, can I connect with you 1-1 to discuss your post-grad work? I’ve been playing around with the idea of getting a graduate degree in linguistics, but with a CS-focus. Would love to hear from someone who’s been through it.
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
>> A fair number of faculty, while appreciative of his contributions to the field, held him in low regard because he & some of his main "acolytes" systematically worked to block any researchers in the U.S. working on ideas that ran counter to his own. Meaning more than a generation or more of advancement has stagnated in the US. I've heard this about Chomsky before and I don't get it. It sounds like he's criticised for doing what any researcher would do- defend his work and criticise competing approaches. I know that's what I do and what everybody else I know does (and has done to me too). Of course any researcher worth her salt will defend her work and of course they will criticise competing approaches. Robustly so. That is how research works and that is how researchers work. He "systematically worked to block any researchers in the U.S. working on ideas that ran counter to his own"? Yes, that's precisely what you do when you think the other approach is rubbish, you fight to put it out like a fire that threatens to burn down your beloved field. You only ever stop criticising others' work and promoting your own ideas when you are 100% convinced -no doubts at all- that it's your work that's flawed. Otherwise, how does science advance? Nobody has the absolute truth in any scientific question. Our best chance to know the truth is to try to formulate an answer and then have everybody's answers duke it out, like pit fighters in Conan the Barbarian. The alternative is to let your ideas go without putting up a fight - but then you run the risk of letting ideas that are worse than yours prevail. And I'm probably getting all this from Schopenhauer on the art of dialectic, which I read a while ago, but this is how debates go. And science is a debate. And if you're having a debate, it means there is disagreement- that's the point of having a debate; and the point of having research: that we can't agree about what the truth is in the first place. Otherwise, we wouldn't need research. So I think that those complaints are best explained as sour grapes by those who failed to convince of the merit of their ideas, and blame Chomsky for doing his job as a scientist better than them. Of course you're starting at a disadvantage if you're going up against an established authority in your field, no less one of the size of Chomsky, but that's exactly what everyone else spends all their time trying to become, an established authority in their field. And they want that so that they can defend their own ideas more easily. So that, too, is not such a great piece of criticism.

kashyapc 6y ago

I recently began educating myself about human language acquisition (a rabbit hole I was pursuing from another book, Behave). I learnt that there's two main schools of thought—the "innate instinct" model (Chomsky et al) and its alternative, the "usage-based" model, which posits that language is "an embodied and social human behaviour and seeks explanations in that context". Here's an open-access paper[1] that summarizes and contrasts both the models. And if you, like me, find the "innate instinct" model to be an unsatisfying explanation, check out the following works: - Michael Tomasello. See his excellent work on "joint agency" / "joint attention" (as something that is unique to humans), human developmental psychology, and many other topics. He summarized his most recent book in this talk here[2]. - George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. See their classic work: Metaphors We Live By [1] https://www.intechopen.com/online-first/usage-based-and-universal-grammar-based-approaches-to-second-language-acquisition https://www.intechopen.com/online-first/usage-based-and-univ... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNbeleWvXyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNbeleWvXyQ

ukj 6y ago
The irony in all of this, of course is that you see both theories as two possible models. Which begs the question "What exactly is a model?" And model theory (or if you want, interpretation theory) is Mathematically well formalised and understood in so far as anyone can understand formal languages. And formal language theory is precisely Chomsky's long-standing contribution.
- ribit 6y ago
  Very true, but the problem is in paying these models to the actual study of linguistics and human language. For example, you can approach computation using something like a Turing Machine, but this won't help you understanding how to understand a modern CPU architecture or how to write well-optimized code. Chomsky's work is very interesting and relevant in the domain of formal languages, but as far as human languages goes, it always struck me as a self-indulgent intellectual exercise with little practical relevance.
  - 6y ago

waingake 6y ago

Can someone explain what he means when he says there is no physical?

ukj 6y ago
It's just an all-encompassing word that's not subject to testability/falsification. Some people say the universe is physical. Other people say the universe is material. Other people yet say it's neither of those two. Nobody can explain what the observable difference would between a physical and a material universe.
tsimionescu 6y ago
The main point he is making is that this notion of "the physical universe" comes from pre-Newtonian science's attempts to model the world as a mechanical machine, where every interaction can be explained by direct physical contact between parts of the system, and the laws of motion. This project seemed largely promising and successful, especially once Descartes came up with the idea of separating the mind, which didn't seem mechanical, from the physical world. So, after Descartes, the world looked pretty simple: there is a physical world that all works like a bunch of gears, and a mental/spiritual world where the mind exists, and these two together explain the universe. However, Newton came along and discovered the law of universal attraction (gravity), which meant that the "physical world" does not in fact work like a machine, that there is no kind of physical contact that can explain the motion of the heavens. Of course, that also opened the way to the possibility that many other interactions are similarly immaterial, so the whole project falls apart. We do not in fact have a theory of the "physical world" and what it is. I would note that Quantum Mechanics, even though it is highly unsatisfactory to our intuition, does get us back to a conception of a purely mechanical physical world (though with wave-like mechanics instead of gears). Unfortunately, for now, it STILL, 400 years later, hasn't solved the problem that Newton discovered. Gravity is still not accountable for in a mechanical, contact based way like the other forces are, even though GR has given a much more detailed model of how it works, and we have discovered gravity waves that prove it is not instantaneous action at a distance. Of course, the main interpretations of QM have also given up realism , so while we do have an account of a physical world, it is unreal in a sense (that is, the world does not have any definite properties until you measure something; in QM a tree falling a in a forest really doesn't make any sound unless someone/something hears it). We also don't yet have any idea of how to define measurement, even though it is a kind of physical process.

mcprwklzpq 6y ago

Here is a later text version of this lecture: Noam Chomsky - Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding. https://chomsky.info/201401__/ https://chomsky.info/201401__/ I tried to edit for brevity and summarise the main point here, too: Mechanical philosophy originated with Galileo and his contemporaries, held that the world is a machine (device with gears, levers, and other mechanical components, interacting through direct contact) and could in principle be constructed by a super-skilled artisan. The way they viewed these machines is similar to the way we view computers today (compare with "we live in a simulation"). Galileo insisted that theories are intelligible, only if we can “duplicate [their posits] by means of appropriate artificial devices.” The same conception, was developed by Descartes, Leibniz, Huygens, Newton, and others. Descartes recognised “the creative aspect of language use” (and thought), a capacity unique to humans that cannot be duplicated by machines. The use of language is: 1) innovative without bounds, 2) appropriate to circumstances but not caused by them, 3) can engender thoughts in others that they recognize they could have expressed themselves. Descartes invoked a new principle to accommodate these phenomena, a kind of creative principle (mind), res cogitans, which stood alongside of res extensa (body) (Cartesian dualism). Newton showed that to account for the properties of matter (or res extensa or body) it is necessary to resort to interaction without contact, therefore matter is not a machine, and we do not have any definition of matter. The properties of the material world are “inconceivable to us,” but real nevertheless. Since then in science we do not conceive of the world as a mechanism (the world is a machine that we explore and map) but we construct intelligible (the one that a machine can compute) theories about the world. In summary: we can not know what the world is but we build theories about it that a machine can compute. The world is not a machine - our mind is a machine. Also in there Chomsky subscribes to cognitive neuroscientists C.R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King critiques of neuroscience (mind is not computed by neural nets, but mabe by some chemical reaction inside cells, maybe by RNA, which may provide Turing complete set of operations).

slim 6y ago
thank you
ngcc_hk 6y ago
Is the interaction without contact was later solved by the field theory? Both Newton and Einstein did not believe in this action in a spooky distance. (Qm one is different .)

jokoon 6y ago

What was this quote where he said that age was caused by sedentary lifestyle? Or something similar? I can't find it.