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Children are definitely not a 'blank' neural network. They spend ~6 months staring off into nowhere, looking, listening, and slowly developing the skills to res

• sp332 14y ago
  By "blank" of course I mean that they begin blank and immediately start learning from their environment. You say they develop skills "slowly" but it's still much faster than you would expect, unless children have some innate skill at language built in instead of being "blank." Edit: sorry if this is vague, this is what I'm talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_nativism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_nativism
  • knowtheory 14y ago
    You are being way too vague. What is setting your expectations of "slowly"? What rate would you expect children to learn language at? Even if that were to be the case, your argument is essentially a god of the gaps argument. Not P therefor Q is not sound reasoning. The whole notion of the Universal Grammar and innate language faculties which instantiate subsets of the Universal Grammar is weird.
    • gnaritas 14y ago
      No, he's right, check out Pinkers the language instinct for the full treatment on the issue. Children learn at a rate impossible from just what they hear and imitate. We are pre-wired for language.
      • Retric 14y ago
        30,000+ hours using more computing power than the fastest computer on the planet to get the a 3 year olds grasp of language is hardly 'fast'. PS: Language acquisition starts before birth, and continues 24/7 after that until we 'learn' it.
        • gnaritas 14y ago
          "Pinker explains that a universal grammar represents specific structures in the human brain that recognize the general rules of other humans' speech, such as whether the local language places adjectives before or after nouns, and begin a specialized and very rapid learning process not explainable as reasoning from first principles or pure logic. This learning machinery exists only during a specific critical period of childhood and is then disassembled for thrift, freeing resources in an energy-hungry brain." Having read the book, his arguments are far more convincing than your assertions.
          • Retric 14y ago
            However, unlike his arguments I limited myself to using actual facts. If you just want a compelling argument: Biology is a vary important component in the creation and evolution of language, because the fine motor control required to say "linguistic" vs "mommy" or "stop" has a lot to do with how languages are learned and evolve. As baby's practice how to say thing babble converts to simple words but in doing so there are pattern as to which sounds are easier to produce and therefore enable them to probe their environment by reproducing. This paralls the evolution of language where the most important and simplist ideas where the first to be communicated and therefore take up the 'root' address space in the language with more complex words and ideas like 'chemist' being tacked on over time. PS: Sure, it sounds great. But how many assumptions am I stringing together in just those few sentences.
            • gnaritas 14y ago
              Look, if you haven't read the book, I'm not interested in your opinions of his arguments; you don't know them. When someone recommends a book, you don't kill the messenger when your disagreement is with the author; don't be an ass.
              • Retric 14y ago
                I have read most of the language instinct. I get why people find it compelling, but that has little to do with being accurate. My point was his style tends to be convincing vs. his actual evidence being compelling. PS: Think of it like this A -> B, B -> C therefore A -> C is all well in good most of the time. A -> B .... Y -> Z therefore A -> Z only really works with math, build a chain that long and it's unlikely for all those steps to be accurate.
• cma 14y ago
  A newborn baby will recoil away from a dark circle growing larger on a screen. Where did he learn to associate a growing share with an object approaching near enough to collide? We have certain built in behaviors and reflexes.
  • ckg 14y ago
    This strikes me as the old nature vs. nurture debate - trying to determine which human behaviors are hard wired and which are learned. Like most complex questions I don't think there is a single right answer, but my current theory is that humans have more hard wired behavior than most people like to admit. It is precisely because of our language skills that we can rationalize behavior that has it's root cause in the more animal regions of the brain. To put it another way - most people think they are rational. Most people act irrationally. To me it is animal instinct that is cause of greed, war, social hierarchy, etc. and it is so ingrained in society that we don't question it's root cause which most likely boils down to atavistic tendencies.
  • agumonkey 14y ago
    To me this fall in the reptilian reflexes box. Accelerating signal related to increasing proximity => act.