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Chomsky's surprisingly insightful thinking on the limits of human knowledge, and the consequences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0&t=2953s

⬐ ineedasername

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.

⬐ YeGoblynQueenne

>> 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.

⬐ mensetmanusman

Exactly, science is vigorous debate.

When ever you see someone trying to quell debate, you should immediately recognize it as counter to the scientific method.

⬐ wrnr

Thanks it is good to know there are still those who think there is a truth to be settled by politicking like real gentleman. Still I love how his favourite question of universal grammar was utterly sidelined when it was shown that problems of parser ambiguity also show up in the vision system, a much older neural structure.

⬐ foldr

Parser ambiguities have never really been a major focus of Chomsky’s research. He’s certainly never argued for the existence of UG on the basis of parser ambiguities.

⬐ mistermann

What if some of the ideas that Chomsky "put out like a fire" were actually correct, and would have been discovered to be so if more time and (collaborative) effort had gone into them?

⬐ YeGoblynQueenne

Then everybody loses, of course. But we can't know that beforehand and our best chance to arrive at the truth is to let competing ideas actually compete- and hope that the ones that surive the ordeal are the ones closest to the truth.

⬐ mistermann

There is a lot of variability available within the vague expression "let competing ideas actually compete".

⬐ YeGoblynQueenne

I don't know what you mean by that. Could you please explain?

⬐ mistermann

Ideas can compete on a level playing field, purely on their merits, or they can be "put out like a fire" by someone with power and influence, and many variations in between.

⬐ DSingularity

Are you accusing his sincerity? The correctness of the ideas which failed to gain traction is irrelevant. The burden is on the authors of those works to explain and decent the merit of their ideas. If they failed to convince their peer reviewers then that is on them. Unless you are accusing the peer-reviewers of acting in bad-faith.

⬐ mistermann

> Are you accusing his sincerity?

No, I am pointing out the shortcomings in this statement:

>> 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.

-

> The correctness of the ideas which failed to gain traction is irrelevant.

Do you perceive yourself to have knowledge of what difference an alternative outcome would have made in the world?

> The burden is on the authors of those works to explain and decent the merit of their ideas. If they failed to convince their peer reviewers then that is on them.

It is also "on" anyone else who would have been affected by good ideas not being "put out like a fire". Things that do not happen are not stored in your mind, therefore it is quite natural for them to not exert much influence on your thinking.

> Unless you are accusing the peer-reviewers of acting in bad-faith.

I have no knowledge of their actions and therefore no opinion, I am simply pointing out shortcomings in thinking.

⬐ Iv

"Science progresses one funeral at a time"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

⬐ cptaj

I hold him in low regard because he defended Chavez for years while his dictatorship destroyed my country.

⬐ toiletfuneral

Hang in there buddy, I’m sure the US & oil industry is still working super hard to get a Pinochet in there ASAP

⬐ eyelidlessness

Disclaimers: It’s inevitable that his political activism will be a topic here, and I’m sensitive to the harm Chavez did, and I may very well be out of the loop.

That said I’m not aware of Chomsky defending Chavez, though I’m certainly aware of him challenging US intervention. And his general stance of non-intervention is often interpreted as support for the would-be intervened regime.

Is there a more clear position of support/defense on record? I know that I’ve been disappointed by some of his later in life positions dismissing Palestinian efforts, it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s regressed on other topics, I’m just not familiar in this case. And asking sincerely.

⬐ aborsy

Chomsky has more citations to his peer-reviewed work, than your whole former department or maybe university.

I don’t agree with him on numerous topics, but that doesn’t mean that I have a credible critic of his work.

⬐ justicezyx

This is not a critic. This is a complaint that that dominance sucked up a lot of mental freedom and dareness to break out established regime. That's not even complaint to most people who are doing professional research, i.e., modern professional research is just like any other industrialized profession, it requires profit. Of course, with that comes conscious or unconscious desire to follow the lead. That inevitably manifests into low esteem to some prominent figure, but when you look closely, that low esteem is nothing but a sentiment towards the lack of resources; you almost never see any well regarded openly criticize people without different views, because intellectual ideas being different is just the inherent situation of any academic research, everyone knows that, otherwise one would not actually want to be in that profession in the first place.

⬐ benjaminjosephw

Isn't this more or less how a paradigm shift would look from the perspective of someone who sticks to the old paradigm?

⬐ john4532452

I find it very hard to believe. Could you please provide any citations.

⬐ loceng

Eric Weinstein (The Portal podcast on Youtube) has run into a similar problem with physics. He's a mathematician by trade and over the last 37 years has developed a new theory of everything he calls Geometric Unity. He wasn't able to make any headway into the physics community for a long time - and so now instead he's educating people about what he calls DISC and GIN - about the problems with these systems, and building his own audience of people while waiting for peers to get interested in learning/understanding his theory.

It's happened in health too, arguably it has in all subjects, whether due to regulatory capture of government policy and/or academic capture influencing what research gets done via funding - the system is broken, well - it works for industrial complexes who generally have ulterior motive than wanting the very best for society.

Edit to add: why the hell would anyone downvote this comment?

⬐ typon

Can't speak for everyone else, but I personally think you are misrepresented the Eric Weinstein story. From all that I have read about him, it seems like the academic peer review system did it's job: kept a charlatan with half baked ideas out of reputable journals. Sometimes when no one takes you seriously it doesn't necessarily mean there is a conspiracy against you.

⬐ loceng

"kept a charlatan with half baked ideas out of reputable journals."

LOL. Citations needed. Please point to the peer reviewed criticism that disproved his math. You've clearly never watched him speak to people about mathematics - there hasn't been a person he hasn't been able to dance with when discussing mathematics/physics principles.

⬐ andrekandre

  criticism that disproved his math

has weinstein made any testable predictions with his theory/math?

⬐ loceng

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7rd04KzLcg - him releasing the video of his multi-hour long guest lecture.

He's working on publishing a paper version soon to hash out all the math for people.

As far as I know predictions wise, all of the math equations fit within his foundation, allowing a connection between string theory and relatively - which AFAIK didn't previously have math that allowed them to interconnect/co-exist.

He's been trying for 15 years to get people in physics interested in it - and realized he has run into what he calls DISC and GIN, as mechanisms that keep outsiders ideas out and status quo narratives perpetuated. And so he's built an audience to educate, to share interviews/talks with high level conversation with a wide range of people, and build momentum/attention for his Geometric Unity theory because the existing institutions seem so indoctrinated into the last 50 years that they aren't looking into other ideas (yet); and an example of this is right here on HN, the previous commenter who called him a charlatan - with what experience are they themselves basing that off of, or who did they hear that narrative from, and how much time did that person invest investigating [interesting how invest is in the word investigating, it takes time which is an investment] and did they actually engage with Eric to see if they perhaps weren't understanding themselves and so then Eric could help them understand, etc.

⬐ typon

Fortunately science is not about being able to dance with people in a conversation or showmanship of any sort - it's about making falsifiable hypotheses and then carrying out experiments to test them. It requires a lot of tedious work where you have to convince your peers that your ideas are solid and worthy of publication. If someone fails to do that, maybe, just maybe, the reason is not a vast conspiracy against this person because his ideas are too powerful and academia too stupid to see the truth, but rather the ideas could just be wrong.

⬐ blonde_ocean

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.

⬐ shp0ngle

I studied NLP in Prague on Charles University, with some folks from the "Prague linguistic circle" still surviving and teaching there.

Yes. I fully agree. :)

⬐ ribit

I fully agree with you. I started studying linguistics since I come from a math background and Chomskian promise of mathematical linguistics was something I found very enticing. I quickly became disillusioned. Most of the Chomsky-inspired research boils down to fitting carefully selected data into an artificial formal machine and manipulating the said machine into accepting more and more data, until the machinery ends up being turing complete therefore rendering any result trivial. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of very smart people working in that particular field and they have produced some very interesting results and observations, but IMO the real academic value of these models if very limited. It's all about solving intellectual puzzles in a theoretical void. But does it advance our understanding of human brain, learnability or language change? After being a linguist for over 15 years, I'd say "not really".

And yes, as you say, Chomsian followers are a highly guarded, closed camp. There is a strong tradition of giving maximal support to acolyte who wants to work in this area while casting out the "heretics".

⬐ foldr

As another (ex but not disillusioned) linguist, can I ask what’s the alternative? Say I’m puzzled by the acquisition of Antecedent Contained Deletion structures. I know how to tell a broadly Chomskian story about it. What other options are on the table?

I hear lots of broad brush criticism of generative linguistics, but in almost all cases it turns out that the proposed alternative approaches are just working on different problems, and aren’t really alternatives at all.

⬐ shp0ngle

I studied NLP in Prague, and we tend to use "dependency grammars" more than "phrase structure grammars" of Chomsky

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar

I didn't work in the field at all after finishing the studies, so I cannot really tell you any actual implications of the different grammar approach anymore.

⬐ foldr

Dependency grammars are just another grammar formalism. They’re an alternative to Chomsky’s specific technical proposals but not to his overall approach.

⬐ ribit

I don't think that you will find my answer satisfactory, but does there have to be an alternative? I think that many syntactic mysteries are mysterious only because syntacticians assume that they work in particular ways. Once you start looking at these problems from the perspective of pragmatics, competing interpretations and conventionalisation, many of these mysteries disappear.

The point to make is that interpretation makes use of multiple sources of information, of which syntax is just one. You don't need an elegant, tight fitting, constrained syntactic structure to use language. Which incidentally is why we can understand things even they are not grammatical. I firmly believe that the issue of "grammaticality" simply boils down to convention. Not to mention that many constructed examples used to motivate formal grammar research (be it syntax or semantics) are borderline acceptable themselves to many native speakers.

⬐ foldr

Ok. How would you apply this approach to ACD? It is not clear to me how to make the mystery “disappear” in this case.

⬐ tralarpa

> Most of the Chomsky-inspired research boils down to fitting carefully selected data into an artificial formal machine and manipulating the said machine into accepting more and more data, until the machinery ends up being turing complete therefore rendering any result trivial.

Ah, that's interesting. Because that describes very well what I felt when I read the early Chomskian works. Very cool theories and models with very little data to support them. At some point, I was wonderering whether the authors of those theories had any practical experience with languages apart from their own (English) mother tongue. And then the models became more and more complex, seemingly in an attempt to make them somehow work with real data, and at the end they became so complex that any data could be matched and no scientifically verifiable predictions could be made.

⬐ guram11

somehow reminds me of the epicycle model astronomy used back then

⬐ foldr

I don't think astronomers were using epicycles in the 1960s :)

⬐ waingake

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

⬐ jswizzy

Is in his prime code for before everything he made up about langue was debunked?

⬐ dgellow

I think the OP hints to Chomsky’s age. He’s 93 years old, which obviously impacts his talking and presentation skills.

I’m really impressed every time I see a recent video of Chomsky, he seems to still have his full cognition and is still energetic and motivated by his political goals. At his age that’s not a given.

⬐ kgarten

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.

⬐ lookingforsome

TL;DR of the idea of an Information Super Highway?

⬐ krapp

It's what some people were calling the internet/Worldwide Web in the early 1990s[0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway

⬐ leejoramo

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

⬐ kashyapc

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-univ...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNbeleWvXyQ

⬐ johnchristopher

Is that Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky ?

⬐ kashyapc

Yes, indeed; sorry for not spelling it out. I picked up some 24 books from it. Definitely worth a careful reading.

⬐ float4

> I picked up some 24 books from it

Any books in particular that you'd recommend?

⬐ kashyapc

Besides the three excellent authors I've already mentioned above, I can share a selection of what I found curious. (Not all books I wrote down were mentioned by name; I picked some based on combing through the index.)

If you've completed Behave, these can be worthwhile. I haven't read them all, but slow-juggling a few of 'em over several months. These range from neuroscience to game theory to primate behaviour to human culture and more:

• Descartes' Error by Antonio Damasio

• Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene

• Chimpanzee Politics by Frans de Waal

• Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga

• The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod

• A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness by Pumla Gobo-Madikizela

⬐ ukj

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

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.

⬐ foldr

> it always struck me as a self-indulgent intellectual exercise with little practical relevance.

It largely is. But you could say that of most work in pure mathematics or physics, or of pure research in any number of other disciplines.

Generative grammar led to an enormous leap in our understanding of the grammatical structure of human languages. For example, we now know with a high degree of confidence that all natural languages have mildly context-sensitive string languages. There wasn’t even the glimmer of that result in the 1950s.

It’s also worth noting that any rule-based NLP system makes use of a wealth of syntactic, semantic and phonological knowledge gained from Chomsky’s research program and its outshoots.

⬐ ribit

This is very true. There is no denying that Chomsky and colleagues have contributed significantly to our understanding of the language. My comment is more in regards to the current day state of the field, which in my experience is overly driven by dogma. Science should evolve and improve it's methods, and sadly, the modern "generative grammarian" tends to live in the shadow of the glorious 80-ties.

⬐ foldr

Interesting take. I would say that the field is actually less dogmatic than it's ever been. Chomsky's personal influence is waning, and as the prestige of pure generative linguistics fades, younger researchers are having to broaden out their research programs to stay competitive.

⬐ ribit

Maybe you are right. What I am reporting here are the impressions from my early PhD around 10 years ago when I was still actively participating in conferences and workshops on generative grammar. Most contributions I have seen were along the lines of "I am trying to apply the minimalist program to this endangered language X and it doesn't work directly, but if I make the system more powerful, I can fit my examples in!" — and I just didn't see this approach leading us anywhere...

I hope that you are right and that the field is evolving to everyone's benefit. We need different smart people with different opinions and believes to drive the science forward.

⬐ ukj

It all depends on whether you understand what it means "to understand".

There are two schools of thought:

School 1: User's knowledge (this idea goes all the way back to Plato). You know how to use existing CPUs and existing programming language. This is akin to understanding the existing limits of existing technology.

School 2: Maker's knowledge. You know how to invent CPUs and programming languages from first principles.

The latter school inevitably leads to Wadler's law: semantics.

It leads to asking "What is it that I want to express and why?". This mode of thought pre-supposes pragmatic/goal-driven intent.

⬐ betwixthewires

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.

⬐ visarga

> does that not mean there is no free will, and therefore that morality does not exist

Or in other words, free will is necessary for morality to exist. I beg to differ.

Morality can be evaluated at population level - do the actions of an agent hurt or help the others? Punishment can be seen as simply compensating for bad influences in society.

If you look at game theory you can see how behavior relates to cooperation or betrayal, how these are also related to the context, and how society needs to weed out those who betray it.

⬐ betwixthewires

What you're saying makes sense, but then you have to talk about words like "action", "agent", "punish". In my definition it is predicated on the idea of a person making deliberate action, yours is that an occurrence has a negative effect on people and so it's cause should be negated. Even if morality as you use it applies even without free will, the words you are using to describe the scenario imply another word, "decide". Without free will, can one be an agent without agency? Is an action an action or simply an occurrence? Can we even examine morality? We must decide first what to punish, then decide to punish. Or are these behaviors in some way predetermined as well? Was it predetermined for us to ponder whether this conversation was predetermined or not?

Do you require the ability to make decisions in order to adapt to changing conditions? Without free will can we even talk about game theory? I mean, we can talk about whatever we want, but is the concept valid any longer?

⬐ kiba

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.

⬐ tikwidd

Free will can't be explained any more than your sense of smell or taste can be explained. You know you have it because you know that nothing can absolutely determine your own actions. Our actions are neither deterministic nor random.

⬐ Ma8ee

Aren’t they? How do you know?

⬐ dudeman13

I love this reply.

I can't remember hearing of a claim of unknowability that was backed up by actual arguments outside of mathematical subjects

⬐ A12-B

Little late to reply on this, but clearly you can get out of your seat and fetch some water, an action that appears to be free will. Whether our actions actually are pre-programmed is of zero material significance to us, because it feels like they arent' either way.

⬐ hahajk

Haha, probably because there’s no consensus on what it is.

I was about to respond and say “if we teuely are deterministic then no, there can’t be moral actions.” But it turns out like usual I’m totally unequipped to answer the question.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will#Incompatibilism

⬐ betwixthewires

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.

⬐ kiba

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.

That still doesn't make an action any less harmful or beneficial just because we don't have free will, nor does it makes examination of morality a pointless exercise.

⬐ dudeman13

>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.

How would non-deterministic actions be any more subject to morality than deterministic ones?

Surely randomness isn't subject to morals?

⬐ betwixthewires

Alright, replace "deterministic" with "not decided by us" then and your answer is in the part you quoted. What I was focusing on was not deterministic v random, it is whether the individual makes the decision to do something or not.

⬐ dudeman13

Fair enough about not focusing on dereministic/not deterministic, although I would still like to know your opinion on it.

As far as I can see it, both a deterministic and non deterministic reality can't possibly have free will. Is this fundamentally a false dichotomy then (there's some other category or interval to reality that isn't covered by deterministic/non-deterministic)?

You can't really use your free will as an argument for reality not being ( deterministic OR not deterministic ) since your feelings of being free to pick X instead of Y could potentially be an illusion.

I.E. you think you have free will, but enough computing power would be able to predict all the things you'll decide or the relevant probability distribution

⬐ red75prime

> they have no choice to argue that point because they were driven to it deterministically

In the same vein: why bother running deterministic programs, if we know that their results are completely predetermined?

⬐ dorfsmay

> Morality is predicated on free will

Yes, and this is key, but it works both ways.

We have free will, for example I 100% chose to make this comment, but people don't grow up outside of a context, don't make their decision without being influenced by their local culture, education, and personal history. Ever wondered why social science is able to predict political allegiance, religions, life choices and outcome, etc... based on socioeconomic groups?

Check Sam Harris' lectures on free will for a counter argument. Here's an example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzj1helboAE

⬐ red75prime

> it is arguably the only thing we experience directly, is that we have free will

If you unpack that statement, you'll get something like "I can't know my choice until I make it" and "I determine my choice". Both statements are compatible with determinism.

First, you cannot get information from the future about your choice, because it creates paradoxes in a deterministic universe. Second, the same physical state of your body can arise from different starting conditions, hence it's the state of your body, which uniquely determines your actions, not initial conditions of the universe.

⬐ parhamn

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.

⬐ alexashka

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

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.

⬐ leephillips

This is the first time I've heard him described as a renowned (or any kind of) analytic philosopher. And I’m not sure he’s contributed anything that’s taken seriously by mainstream cognitive science. Also: “It’s”?

⬐ tsimionescu

> And I’m not sure he’s contributed anything that’s taken seriously by mainstream cognitive science.

If nothing else, he single-handedly tore down behaviorism as a serious theory of the mind, which at one point was status quo and gaining traction. Chomsky used his observations from the study of language to show that behaviorism simply can't explain most of how we acquire language.

So even if his own theories of mind had not gained traction (I don't know enough about this to comment), he definitely had a major contribution to cognitive science.

⬐ dgellow

Then you might want to look deeper into his work. Regarding cognitive science, check the first entry from this list: http://web.mnstate.edu/schwartz/cogsci100.htm.

(If the link to his book is dead, you can check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_Structures directly if you prefer).

> Also: “It’s”?

Autocorrect typo, I fixed it.

⬐ yesenadam

Maybe they read his wikipedia page, the third sentence of which is:

"Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science."

But that's just wikipedia, you say, so I looked at the (very "analytic philosophy") article on Philosophy of Linguistics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Chomsky is mentioned by name 78 times.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/linguistics/

A quick glance at just the titles of the 94 other articles on there mentioning Chomsky gives an idea of the range of his ideas/writing/influence:

https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=noam+cho...

⬐ stjohnswarts

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.

⬐ dgellow

People remove accents from recording? That feels very insulting to be honest, I would hate for people to do this to me. Take me (and my strong accent and weird pacing) as I am or move on.

⬐ jhanschoo

A person who is not used to a strong accent finds it difficult to understand similar to how a person not used to a dialect can find it difficult to understand the local speech. I don't think it should be considered insulting in the same way you may expect a translator.

⬐ dgellow

You can use subtitles, or you do what every foreigner has to do: you adapt and learn to deal with different accents.

I would personally find it really insulting to have someone translating my English because of my pace or my swiss-french accent.

⬐ jhanschoo

> You can use subtitles, or you do what every foreigner has to do: you adapt and learn to deal with different accents.

I realize that my position is extreme against current practice, but I do think that it's logical for some content. It's possible that automatic accent standardization is more feasible for computers than automatic transcription of accented speech. In that case, the former might be a cheaper substitute for people who cannot understand your accent.

As for why you would want to cater to people who cannot understand your accent, perhaps weak ESL speakers with little exposure and little opportunity for exposure are part of the audience of your content.

As for another reason for changing accents that I did not previously supply: some people may have accents that place them, but want that privacy maintained in the recording.

⬐ dgellow

I think I get your point, and to be honest reading the thread again now I cannot say exactly why I felt so strong about it, but that was my reaction at the moment. It feels patronizing and wrong to assume that en_US language and accent (or en_GB, or whatever) should be assumed to be _the actual standard_, and something too foreign should be adapted without the involvement of the actual speaker.

⬐ Slow_Hand

Haha yeah. Funny story about his pacing:

I last saw him speak at an event in Cambridge back in 2009 when he was giving an interview on American foreign policy to a church of 500+ people. At one point he spoke a sentence to the effect of "...it was retarded by their efforts to disrupt..."

However, as a speaker, he doesn't fill his pauses with "ummm" or "uhhh". Rather, he stops cold in the middle of a sentence until he has the right word and then proceeds again.

So the sentence instead came out as "It was retarded ... (pause) ...by their efforts to disrupt the..."

I was already nodding off a bit, so imagine my surprise at someone of Noam's seriousness seemingly resorting to calling something "retarded" like an immature teen. The confusion of it blindsided me and had me dumbfounded for what felt like a small eternity before he completed the sentence and I figured out what had just happened. It was a weird feeling. Like the momentary falling sensation when you're expecting one last stair step that isn't there.

I'm confident that it was unintentional, but wittingly or not, it was probably the single funniest thing I ever heard come out of his mouth.

⬐ Mizza

I was at this event, and because I was friends with the organizers, I got to go to reception afterwords. Noam was far more interested in the shrimp buffet than he was in talking to me, but it was very funny to watch Noam Chomsky suffer through my friend's dad describing to him the plot of Oliver Stone's 'JFK'.

⬐ slibhb

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

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-com...

⬐ AndrewKemendo

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

⬐ TaylorAlexander

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.

⬐ alecco

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

>his criticism of the raise of (Maoist) Posmodernism in academia (interviews and lectures from the 80s)

Are there links you can recommend?

⬐ alecco

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

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.

⬐ TaylorAlexander

Ah yes Manufacturing Consent is a good one! And you’re right I should start pulling down some backups of these videos.

⬐ sudosysgen

Be very wary of people trying to somehow link postmodernism with Maoism/Marxist modes of analysis.

Indeed, postmodernism itself was a reaction to the perceived failure of Marxism (the failure of liberalism was already accepted in most academic circles), and the two are violently opposed.

Attempts to somehow liken the two are generally motivated by classical liberals trying to guilt-by-association all post-liberal ideologies and critical frameworks.

⬐ alecco

[edited]

Instead of a bunch of links to academic works, why don't you go to "liberal" academia and see what is imprinted in tshirts and who they have in their portraits.

⬐ alecco

Chomsky says once the atrocities of Mao and USSR were known in the 70s, the millions murdered, these intellectuals morphed into Posmodernism. He stated it's the same people. He even gives the specific names. Watch the interviews and lectures from the 80s and early 90s.

⬐ sudosysgen

Go ahead, give me specific names.

There were a lot of people that after the atrocities of the USSR and Mao simply stopped being hard-line Marxists and became Postmodernists. Others became revionist Marxists to attempt to learn from those disasters. That doesn't mean being both at the same time, and Postmodernism itself is quite a ways older than them.

⬐ krapp

>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.

⬐ abalone

This is a completely reasonable and realistic premise. Within the Left community there are plenty of Marxist-Leninist academics and there was a significant overlap with postmodernists, perhaps owing to its roots in the Parisian intellectual scene. Chomsky is a Libertarian Socialist.

⬐ tsimionescu

Can you find a single marxist-leninist who is also a postmodernist??

Postmodernism rejects any theories of the world that have any kind of absolute structure, while marxism is explicitly about defining such absolutes. In marxism, all people are either workers or capitalists (or outside the system); any good has an intrinsic value, and any work has an intrinsic plus-value; and on and on.

You can also see this in the art favored by countries which liked to claim to be marxist-leninist (though they weren't). Far from being post-modern, it was in fact traditionalist and realist.

⬐ abalone

Sure, Kristeva, famously.[1]

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/was-the-philosopher-...

⬐ tsimionescu

As far as I can tell, she is a postmodernist who started out as a Marxist, but has later abandoned it. At the very least, it doesn't seem to have had any prominence in her works, which are focused on personal psychology and feminist theory.

I do admit that I may be completely off base, I know very little of her beyond what I could find on Wikipedia (which does list her as Marxist, but provides no further insight on why) and a handful of scholarly articles.

Note: a much better example you could have given was Slavoj Žižek, to which I have no answer..

⬐ a0-prw

Chomsky identifies himself as an anarchist not a "libertarian socialist".

⬐ alecco

This is correct. On paper he identifies as anarcho-sindicalist. But in mainstream terms "libertarian socialist" would be easier to understand.

On the other hand, Chomsky supported many socialist and even marxist leaders. Like Chavez nationalizing every profitable sector of the economy. Note this is very not anarchist as it concentrates power in the state and a rulin elite. Perhaps he was blinded by his anti-war and anti Western establishment feelings. Who knows.

⬐ a0-prw

Of course he "supported many socialist and even marxist leaders". That's often been the direction to go to support actual, suffering, real people practically. It doesn't mean he thinks that's the ideal. Yes, compromises are made constantly.

⬐ abalone

Here is Chomsky describing what Libertarian Socialism is, how such a highly organized society would be constructed, and that it is “traditional anarchism” while noting that “anarchism” is a broad term.[1]

[1] https://youtu.be/b3m4aRQ9QvQ

⬐ sudosysgen

Marxist-Leninst academics are quite ferociously opposed to Postmodernists - postmodernism is completely incompatible with Marxist intellectual frameworks which are thoroughly modernist.

It's not a reasonable and realistic premise - it's word salad trying to scare.

⬐ alecco

Many of those self proclaimed Postmodernists have Che Guevara t-shirts and portraits of Mao, unironically. What they say does not match what they actually support and do.

⬐ a0-prw

> It's not a reasonable and realistic premise - it's word salad trying to scare.

Thank you for that, sir :) True and funny at the same time.

⬐ alecco

This was 30 years ago. And Chomsky is far left. I’m not. I like to read far and wide, as long as it’s not propaganda. Older works tend to be better.

⬐ sudosysgen

Have you read enough to realize that Maoism is incompatible with postmodernism?

⬐ abalone

Source? Chomsky has been quite critical of Chavez.[1] As with most things in the world there are pros and cons but I would be interested if you could cite an example of “unconditional support.”

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/03/noam-chomsky-h...

⬐ alecco

Please read your own link. Chavez waved Chomsky's work at UN and asked for him to be named ambassador to Venezuela.

Chomsky supported Chavez' oil sector and other seizures. He turned a blind eye when Chavez armed civilian militias in 2005. Ignored all the blatant election fraud and growing corruption, and the long list of growing human rights abuses.

But he took issue when Chavez jailed an opposition journalist. He did this 180 turn in 2011, as per your own link. After over a decade of support and close friendship.

That's why I said, too little, too late.

Chomsky also supported many other messianic personalistic murderers like that in Latin America. It's sad, but he is just human and very, very old.

⬐ abalone

That is Chavez supporting Chomsky, not Chomsky “unconditionally” supporting Chavez. You offer no support or citation for your claims.

⬐ bnbond

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

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

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.

⬐ tikwidd

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].

⬐ disqard

Thank you for making the effort to write up and share this succinct and very intelligible summary. I appreciated it, a lot!

⬐ tikwidd

You're welcome, it was good practice! Hopefully I represented those ideas somewhat correctly..

⬐ pierrebai

I think Feynman take on this is more interesting and less muddled. For example, in the video series "The Pleasure of finding things out", he clearly lays out that something can only ever be explained by taking something else for granted, and at some point you need to stop the regression and just admit that you have to take something as true on faith (or simply admit that you cannot know.) [1]

You also get to understand that all there is is always action at a distance. The mechanical philosophy as based on an error: that direct action (a physical object pushing another for example) exists. In reality, again as Feynman brilliantly explains, it just electromagnetism between atoms, so action at a distance.

I'm not even going to go into what "intelligible" theories is even supposed to mean. Again, it's either intellectual fappery or infinite philosophical regression. The notion that someone could know something as an absolute truth as never existed. Every explanation at every epoch was based on assumptions, It's just that at times, people were not aware of their own limits.

Also, who pretends that nature is reducible to physics? We can't even calculate precisely the interaction of three atomic particles. These kind of claim are always an annoying strawman.

[1] https://vimeo.com/340695809

⬐ tsimionescu

> The mechanical philosophy [w]as based on an error: that direct action (a physical object pushing another for example) exists. In reality, again as Feynman brilliantly explains, it['s] just electromagnetism between atoms, so action at a distance.

To be fair, even that is not entirely accurate, right? Electromagnetic interaction involves a photon being "fired" by an electron or proton and "hitting" another electron or proton. So in some sense QM and the standard model do contain "physical contact". Of course, the electrons and protons and photons can't be conceived of as simple physical objects that would follow our intuitions of what an object is, even in something like the MWI, so there is no hope of intelligibility/intuitive understanding there.

Also, while we do have a "direct physical contact" theory for 3 of the fundamental forces, we do not have a definitive one for gravity, so we are, from this point of view, right where Newton left this debate.

⬐ mcprwklzpq

Chomsky refers to Galileo, who thought that theories are intelligible, only if we can “duplicate [their posits] by means of appropriate artificial devices.” So in modern terms - compute.

⬐ foldr

> I'm not even going to go into what "intelligible" theories is even supposed to mean

The idea seems silly now because we know that fundamental physics isn’t directly intelligible to us. But before Newton, the hard-headed ‘scientific’ approach was to analyze nature without any appeal to magical hidden forces, action at a distance, etc. etc. Turns out that’s not possible, but who could have known?

⬐ tikwidd

I think Feynman illustrates the failure of the Mechanical Philosophy very well, but that is not incompatible with what Chomsky is saying here. In physics, you can model action at a distance with waves, fields and so on, which are part of a model. An intelligible theory means a genuine explanation, of the kind that Feynman refers to, which he admits is a difficult or impossible problem. We have abandoned a genuine explanation of nature that is intuitive to us (i.e. a mechanical view of the world), and now use models to explain the natural world.

Models of physics for example include concepts like waves and forces, which we don't observe directly, but build into the model because they make concepts like gravitation intelligible to us. If gravitation did not involve action at a distance (e.g. a universe with aether), physicists probably wouldn't even study it (the most interesting things to study are usually things that only occur in controlled conditions, that do not conform to our [mechanical] intuitions).

That we can't form intelligible theories of concepts like gravitation without these models, is not really surprising, since we did not evolve to study quantum physics or organic chemistry (could not possibly be selected for by evolution). Instead our science-forming cognitive capacities, which determine what counts as a genuine explanation to us, are shaped/limited by our evolutionary heritage, which is trained on the kinds of phenomena that animals like us normally encounter. [edited]

⬐ ilaksh

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

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

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.

⬐ jokoon

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

⬐ waingake

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

⬐ ukj

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

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.

⬐ mvh

PSA: Chomsky answers emails.

⬐ ketamine__

Could someone link some good parts?

⬐ tikwidd

Here is my TL;DR (disclaimer: going from memory; watched this and related lectures during my MA thesis last year. I recommend watching the whole thing at 1.5 speed):

- 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].

⬐ EdwardCoffin

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

You're not the only one! :D

⬐ mcprwklzpq

Here is a later text version of this lecture: Noam Chomsky - Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding. 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

thank you

⬐ ngcc_hk

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 .)

⬐ mcprwklzpq

Einstein explained gravity without action at a distance with general relativity theory. I wonder what would Newton thought about that one since about his own theory he said "so great an Absurdity, that I believe no Man who has in philosophical matters a competent Faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.". So this action at a distance was solved but certainly not in the way that could revive mechanical philosophy.

Edit: There were a lot of mechanical explanations of gravity in 2 centuries between Newton and Einstein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_explanations_of_gra...

⬐ typon

Einstein did not "explain" action at a distance. He merely refined the model. The hard problem of explaining what it is still remains (as Chomsky has eloquently explained)

Maybe off-topic, but Prof. Chomsky always mention how important Newton was in the history of science and how significant his giving up on the mechanical philosophy when he failed to explain gravity in a mechanical way, how "lowering the bar" was important to set a realistic direction for science.

He has many lectures about it, I like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0, one of the best lectures ever.

⬐ mrwnmonm

Hugs to everyone loves this lecture, you are a wonderful human being.

⬐ rjbwork

I greatly enjoyed that, thank you. It's much easier to follow Chomsky @ 1.25x speed, lol. I found his assertion and explanation during the questions section about the meaninglessness of "the physical" to be rather illuminating.

⬐ pierrebai

You did? Maybe you can explain it to me, because I rather thought it was a pure semantic game. Saying that "material" is no longer considered relevant was just a typical intellectual game of stripping words from their usual definitions.

(I also despise his continual use of the rhetoric device during his lecture of claiming that a particular philosophical debate has been settled and the "evident" correct answer is his own position on the subject. He keeps using that turn of phrase where his opinion is presented as the only tenable one by an intelligent thinker. He always does that. I think it's a weak trick so silence critics.)

⬐ DiggyJohnson

I believe that’s just a different perspective on effective communication. Otherwise he would constantly need to hedge his points.

Mechanical: the contact theory, that one thing can only affect another by being in contact with it e.g. the teeth of gears.

Unfortunately, gravity ("spooky action at a distance") does not require contact, so the mechanical theory fails. Which can be stated figuratively as "the world is not a machine".

"The machine, the ghost, and the limits of understanding: Newton's contributions to the study of mind" at the University of Oslo, September 2011 https://youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0

⬐ sgt101

Gravity is not spooky action at a distance, Einstein showed us how the fabric of space time implements Gravity in a mechanistic way. Some quantum processes (I don't dare to elaborate - read Wikipedia and then do 6 years of physics to find out more!) are referred to as "spooky action as a distance" or non locality. This is simply not understood - hence the bloody bloody Copenhagen interpretation and the bloody bloody people who chant "look at my sums it's all fine and I have no responsibility to understand and because I can't I will try and stop anyone who wants to".

I feel bad about all of this. And ignorant, but I am confident that Gravity is a mechanistic force. And I think that the jury is out about the world as a machine, but as far as I know everything that we understand about it is mechanistic. The other bits may be non-mechanistic, but we may never understand that.

⬐ ealloc

I've read Chomsky's opinion on this before in his essay ""Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding", and I think he misunderstands the physics.

He seems to think Newton accidentally disproved the concept of locality through his theory of gravity. It's true that philosophers largely gave up on locality in the 18th century because of Newton, but that was only temporary: In the 19th century the principle of locality came back with a vengance after Maxwell.

Today the principle of locality is a key component of the Standard model: The Hamiltonian of the standard model is local, meaning you can compute what happens at a point in spacetime knowing only what is going on in an infinitesimal region around it. Even outside the standard model, LIGO proved that graviational waves exist, and therefore gravity is a local phenomenon.

Einstein was famously prepared to give up on quantum mechanics because it seemed to violate the principle of locality, which he thought was more important. That is still debated sometimes, though whether quantum nonlocality exists seems to be a matter of interpretation and is also different from the kind of locality chomsky is talking about. Locality is still a key principle in physics.

⬐ TheOtherHobbes

Non-locality in QM is directly implied by Bell’s inequality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

⬐ ealloc

No it isn't. There is still plenty of debate about the philosophical implications of Bells' inequality.

See for example this 2014 PNAS article "Quantum nonlocality does not exist": http://www.pnas.org/content/111/31/11281

You can find plenty more if you google. I personally agree with the ideas of that paper in a broad sense if not in detail, as do many people.

Second, if you are trying to argue that locality is no longer a guiding principle, note how the standard model is quantum-mechanical so obeys bell's inequality, yet we still call it "local". Locality was a key guiding principle of the standard model.

⬐ hyperpallium

> what is going on in an infinitesimal region around it

A "field" is just a name for spooky action at a distance. It's a description, not an explanation. There is no mechanical contact, only "locality" of a field.

Or are you saying that fields are really mediated by particles... so there is mechanical contact?

⬐ ealloc

Yes, forces transmitted through fields act "at a distance", but is that really "spooky"? Do you think it is "spooky" that if you make a wave at one end of a pond, the wave reaches the other end? I don't. I consider the propagation of waves to be a "local" non-spooky phenomenon.

Disturbances in a field propagate through space similarly. A disturbance of the field at a point only affects the value of the field in the immediate spacetime surroundings, just like a water wave. I would call that "local" and non-spooky. Whether or not there is "mechanical contact", whatever that means, is irrelevant.

This is in contrast to Newton's theory of gravity, where the force of gravity was spookily felt instantaneously across space.

⬐ hyperpallium

> A disturbance of the field at a point only affects the value of the field in the immediate spacetime surroundings, just like a water wave.

Ok, I see that's local (though not mechanical, as you say).

I think a magnetic field (as from a magnet, not a wave) is not local though? So, the transmissiin of modulation is "local", but the field itself is "at a distance"?

⬐ meikos

When you move the magnet, the field change takes a while to propogate outwards. So, yes also local

⬐ sgt101

People call these thing gravitons but they are particles in the sense that light and electricity are particle based - which is to say that in the limit it turns out that a discrete particle doesn't describe everything that's happening and some wave like properties in space and time are a good fit too. The particles are sort of like a manifestation or a partial mathematical description of the thing that's underneath. The particle is an excitation of a field - all particles are, so mechanical interactions reduce to fields. The thing to remember is that your intuitive and perceptual apparatus was largely evolved to help you get fruit in a forest, and later to help you catch rabbits and shell fish. The ideas that are obvious are approximations that allow you to navigate the world of the past - but they are not "right".

A mechanical universe was the prevailing theory at the time, because nothing else made sense. "Mechanical" meaning that for one thing to cause another, it had to be in physical contact (like the teeth of a cog).

That theory has since been abandoned, and everyone now accepts action at a distance - which still doesn't make any sense.

Noam Chomsky - "The machine, the ghost, and the limits of understanding", 1½ hours https://youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0 [2012]

⬐ TangoTrotFox

We still very much view the universe as mechanical. Gravity, for instance, is still seen as the bending of spacetime. The typical analogy being a bowling ball on a trampoline. The weighty bowling ball bends the fabric of spacetime causing 'attraction' to anything nearby.

Quantum mechanics is enough of flux that I certainly would not say it itself is justification for such grand claims.

⬐ Steuard

We don't actually buy in to action at a distance anymore, not really. In Einstein's general relativity, the "fabric of spacetime" is an active participant in the dynamics of the universe, and for one object to affect another by gravity its influence has to ripple through spacetime to reach its target. So it's very thoroughly a "local" theory.

And for the rest of the interactions, our best models are described by Quantum Field Theory, and QFT is also emphatically "local" in this sense. Interactions between any two particles are mediated by the exchange of "virtual particles" that carry the force: photons carry electromagnetic interactions, gluons carry the strong nuclear interaction, and W and Z bosons carry the weak nuclear interaction. The detailed rules are pretty weird, but every interaction in QFT can be framed as "interactions happen when and only when particles touch each other".

(I haven't watched your Chomsky video. But it's a little odd to look to a linguist for an explanation of modern physics.)

⬐ hyperpallium

I don't know much about this, so how does the "fabric of spacetime" compare to "field" explanations of action-at-a-distance? e.g. a magnetic field accurately predicts observations, but doesn't actually explain them.

Is the fabric is any way more real than a field?

(I didn't look to Chomsky for this; that video is just where I happened to first hear this "mechanical" idea explained, and it's still the only place. A better citation would be the sources he cites in the video.

My main point was not about modern physics, but the history of science i.e. "mechanical".

And, for history of science, an elder respected academic is probably best to look to, anyway. It's hard to think of a specialist in history of science, because by nature it is not a hot, progressive field full of exciting new discoveries, which is what scientists usually get known for.

BTW Do have a listen to the start of the lecture, it really is quite interesting.)

⬐ Steuard

Very belated reply:

I don't consider a magnetic field to be an "action at a distance" explanation at all, so I'm not sure how to answer your first question. In classical E&M, a magnetic field is a local property of space at every point. Moving electric charges affect and are affected by the magnetic field at their location in a specific way, and disturbances or changes in that field propagate outward in accordance with a local wave equation. Nothing is ever "action at a distance", because the field itself carries influences and signals from point to point. (I suppose it could look like "action at a distance" if you pretended that the field was just a made-up theoretical construct that wasn't really there. But that's very much contrary to the accepted perspective on fields at least as I understand it. Things like "fields carrying energy density" and "finite-speed propagation of field changes through empty space" seem to argue strongly for taking fields seriously.)

So I guess I'd say that the "fabric of spacetime" explanation is on roughly the same footing, though my own intuition feels like the spacetime variant is a bit more concrete, somehow. (I suspect a fair number of people would lean the other way, mind you.) Spacetime is very clearly here and real, and Einstein taught us that its structure is definitely dynamical. Adding a magnetic field is, mathematically, basically arbitrarily stapling a gauge bundle onto that spacetime manifold: it's one step more abstract and arbitrary.

Unlikely. The main problem is that calling a tradition "non-scientific" or "not hard science" also has a pejorative meaning. And there's an unfortunate mystification of science as something other than a mode of inquiry, with its limitations and advantages. Plus, people gain funding by hitching themselves to the social respectability of science.

In the case of psychology, they're studying something of great interest which happens to be far too complex for easy scientific study. (Take for example the physicist; once the object or system under study becomes too complex, it's tossed to the chemist, who in turn tosses overly complex things down the line...)

(I've heard similar analysis from some scientists. I vaguely recall Chomsky recently gave a lucid explanation in his talk "The machine, the ghost and the limits of understanding: Newton's contribution to the study of mind", as well in a couple books he wrote. For his part, he thinks linguistics is in a pre-galilean phase. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0)