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> "While it’s still unclear exactly how the brain processes and learns language, the linguist Noam Chomsky proposed in the 1950s that humans are born with an in

by ftxbro 3y ago

> "While it’s still unclear exactly how the brain processes and learns language, the linguist Noam Chomsky proposed in the 1950s that humans are born with an innate and unique capacity to understand language. That ability, Chomsky argued, is literally hard-wired into the human brain. The new work, which uses general-purpose neurons not designed for language, suggests otherwise. “The paper definitely provides evidence against the notion that speech requires special built-in machinery and other distinctive features,” Kapatsinski said." chomsky isn't going to like this

canjobear 3y ago
He's not going to care about it.
- ftxbro 3y ago
  I mean he is writing articles titled like "The False Promise of ChatGPT" he might care a little bit https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...
  - canjobear 3y ago
    "Language" for Chomsky is an abstraction that is intentionally designed to exclude anything statistical. His most likely response to this would be that neither the neural network nor the brain data collected reflects anything that could be called language.
tgv 3y ago
Chomsky didn't mean overt producing of sound, but rather syntax and semantics.
pessimizer 3y ago
> which uses general-purpose neurons not designed for language, I'm not sure about this. We've probably designed general-purpose "neurons" to talk to us, even if we didn't think of it that way. They aren't emulators of physical neurons, they're abstractions of speculative neurons. The way we figure out if they work is by making them talk to us.
nborwankar 3y ago
This line of thinking may be confusing “sufficient” with “necessary”. I don’t believe Chomsky’s thesis and Kapatsinki’s statement are mutually exclusive. They could both be true. Chomsky didn’t appear to have made a general statement about language acquisition in all and every mechanism. And the existence of language acquisition via other mechanisms does not say anything definitive about humans. The use of the word “neuron” is not enough to define how an actual neuron might work aside from its first order activation behavior. And Chomsky’s thesis implies a genetic ability of language acquisition that is outside the scope of wiring up hardware and software neurons. Note that transfer learning is very loosely analogous to inheritance of language capability and the expected widespread use of such models in future may actually validate not disprove Chomsky.
- yyyk 3y ago
  Is there anything at all that could disprove Chomsky using your definition? And does Chomsky rise beyond the level of trivialness using this definition ('humans can learn language and have some specializations in the form of neurons to do so')?
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    Chomsky was contradicting Skinner's thesis, which was that children acquire language through reward/punishment mechanisms like in reinforcement learning. What he showed was that children don't get nearly enough examples of language use to learn it from an a priori blank slate. Thus, the way to disprove his argument would be to take a blank slate model and give it the kind of input a human child would receive, and show that it can learn to the same level as the human child. Ideally, you would also give it some language that is completely non-human and show that it learns that as well, to prove that nothing in its structure accidentally biased it towards human language (since part of the argument is that children always pick up a certain type of language that obeys certain rules of Universal Grammar). Of course, we are very far away from any experiment of this kind, given that current models actually require much more examples of language than any human has ever been given for an entire lifetime. Which itself tends to lend credence to Chomsky's argument. It's also very unlikely that Chomsky is wrong, given that all other parts of human and animal ability work via ingrained structures in the brain - look at how horses are able to run a few minutes after being born. So the right prior is that language acquisition, same as sight, spacial awareness, balance, movement, digestion, hormone balance, pain avoidance etc. is not learned from scratch by each newly born, it is only fine tuned based on an existing structure (which was itself trained by evolution of course, over millions of years).
mikojan 3y ago
I do not recall Chomsky contesting the final statement. It does not strike me as contradictory, either. To the best of my knowledge, Chomsky argued quite the opposite: If you are going to contend that language acquisition work the same in humans and "New AI", show that "New AI" is incapable of learning "impossible languages" just like humans are incapable of learning them. The paper is not addressing that issue.
- cma 3y ago
  The paper is about processing of isolated syllables, it might find the same thing for dog brains, since it is also all at the level of the brainstem. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with Chomsky's work or fMRI stuff Chomsky has talked about.

by ftxbro 3y ago

canjobear 3y ago

He's not going to care about it.

ftxbro 3y ago
I mean he is writing articles titled like "The False Promise of ChatGPT" he might care a little bit https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...
- canjobear 3y ago
  "Language" for Chomsky is an abstraction that is intentionally designed to exclude anything statistical. His most likely response to this would be that neither the neural network nor the brain data collected reflects anything that could be called language.

tgv 3y ago

Chomsky didn't mean overt producing of sound, but rather syntax and semantics.

pessimizer 3y ago

> which uses general-purpose neurons not designed for language, I'm not sure about this. We've probably designed general-purpose "neurons" to talk to us, even if we didn't think of it that way. They aren't emulators of physical neurons, they're abstractions of speculative neurons. The way we figure out if they work is by making them talk to us.

nborwankar 3y ago

This line of thinking may be confusing “sufficient” with “necessary”. I don’t believe Chomsky’s thesis and Kapatsinki’s statement are mutually exclusive. They could both be true. Chomsky didn’t appear to have made a general statement about language acquisition in all and every mechanism. And the existence of language acquisition via other mechanisms does not say anything definitive about humans. The use of the word “neuron” is not enough to define how an actual neuron might work aside from its first order activation behavior. And Chomsky’s thesis implies a genetic ability of language acquisition that is outside the scope of wiring up hardware and software neurons. Note that transfer learning is very loosely analogous to inheritance of language capability and the expected widespread use of such models in future may actually validate not disprove Chomsky.

yyyk 3y ago
Is there anything at all that could disprove Chomsky using your definition? And does Chomsky rise beyond the level of trivialness using this definition ('humans can learn language and have some specializations in the form of neurons to do so')?
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  Chomsky was contradicting Skinner's thesis, which was that children acquire language through reward/punishment mechanisms like in reinforcement learning. What he showed was that children don't get nearly enough examples of language use to learn it from an a priori blank slate. Thus, the way to disprove his argument would be to take a blank slate model and give it the kind of input a human child would receive, and show that it can learn to the same level as the human child. Ideally, you would also give it some language that is completely non-human and show that it learns that as well, to prove that nothing in its structure accidentally biased it towards human language (since part of the argument is that children always pick up a certain type of language that obeys certain rules of Universal Grammar). Of course, we are very far away from any experiment of this kind, given that current models actually require much more examples of language than any human has ever been given for an entire lifetime. Which itself tends to lend credence to Chomsky's argument. It's also very unlikely that Chomsky is wrong, given that all other parts of human and animal ability work via ingrained structures in the brain - look at how horses are able to run a few minutes after being born. So the right prior is that language acquisition, same as sight, spacial awareness, balance, movement, digestion, hormone balance, pain avoidance etc. is not learned from scratch by each newly born, it is only fine tuned based on an existing structure (which was itself trained by evolution of course, over millions of years).

mikojan 3y ago

I do not recall Chomsky contesting the final statement. It does not strike me as contradictory, either. To the best of my knowledge, Chomsky argued quite the opposite: If you are going to contend that language acquisition work the same in humans and "New AI", show that "New AI" is incapable of learning "impossible languages" just like humans are incapable of learning them. The paper is not addressing that issue.

cma 3y ago
The paper is about processing of isolated syllables, it might find the same thing for dog brains, since it is also all at the level of the brainstem. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with Chomsky's work or fMRI stuff Chomsky has talked about.