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Yes, we have sophisticated digital systems that interface with our (analogue) sensory systems - a screen and keyboard are examples of this. Maybe these sensory

Yes, we have sophisticated digital systems that interface with our (analogue) sensory systems - a screen and keyboard are examples of this. Maybe these sensory interfaces involve some machine learning (maybe they don't). In the future, we might stimulate the sensory systems directly. But with any advances in technology in this domain we won't get closer to understanding the "logic between input and output" as you put it - i.e. what are the atoms of thought, how do they combine, and how these internal thoughts relate to external language. We can only meaningfully tackle these questions by linguistic theorising and experiments.

wombatmobile 5y ago
> But with any advances in technology in this domain we won't get closer to understanding the "logic between input and output" We gain a pathway for investigation backwards. What neural substrate is active in generating the speech data? Work backwards from there.
- tikwidd 5y ago
  As a proponent of biolinguistics, my bet is that as we study those neural substrates more closely, we'll probably just learn more about the sensorimotor systems (which we largely share in common with other mammals) that have been coopted for expression of language in humans. We already have a useful pathway for investigation: data from speech/sign of a speaker of a particular language. In fact this already yields a kind of overabundance of data. The tricky part is finding the right kind of data via careful experimentation and organising it, by building explanatory theories of language that meet the conditions of evolvability and learnability. (Which is not to say that cognitive sciences can't shed any light on this, but studying the brain independently of linguistic experimentation is a dead end IMO. Brain imaging studies coupled with linguistic studies have yielded interesting results - see Andrea Moro's work on "impossible languages").

wombatmobile 5y ago

> But with any advances in technology in this domain we won't get closer to understanding the "logic between input and output" We gain a pathway for investigation backwards. What neural substrate is active in generating the speech data? Work backwards from there.

tikwidd 5y ago
As a proponent of biolinguistics, my bet is that as we study those neural substrates more closely, we'll probably just learn more about the sensorimotor systems (which we largely share in common with other mammals) that have been coopted for expression of language in humans. We already have a useful pathway for investigation: data from speech/sign of a speaker of a particular language. In fact this already yields a kind of overabundance of data. The tricky part is finding the right kind of data via careful experimentation and organising it, by building explanatory theories of language that meet the conditions of evolvability and learnability. (Which is not to say that cognitive sciences can't shed any light on this, but studying the brain independently of linguistic experimentation is a dead end IMO. Brain imaging studies coupled with linguistic studies have yielded interesting results - see Andrea Moro's work on "impossible languages").