I had the same notion from the first part of the interview - wondering whether Chomsky would actually bring something to the table to "unriddle" this mystical m

I had the same notion from the first part of the interview - wondering whether Chomsky would actually bring something to the table to "unriddle" this mystical machine in our head. Leaving his aversion to computational systems aside, I believe he makes a good point about our language being computationally inefficient (at least externally). maybe his insight [that our language is computationally inefficient] can be explained by molecular mechanisms that are efficient in terms of energy consumption (rather than on a computational level). looking which neural systems are most likely to evolve given a simple genetic code and reengineering (computationally inefficient and obscure) algorithms based on that might provide some valuable insight into the human brain - whereas probability measures alone might fail to explain underlying mechanisms.