I was excited to see this, thought it was recent but it's not, thought maybe Noam got back to okay health, he has not been doing well lately and i fear we will hear news of his passing any time now, it breaks my heart he is my intellectual hero.
How did you find out he was sick? I assumed he was since he hasn’t made any public appearances for the last few months, but I couldn’t find anything about it online. Even all the news articles about him that came out on his birthday didn’t mention anything about it.
the problem with behaviorism this essentially this in behaviorist language. if you want to build a machine that understands the world in various abstract ways and is not just a very direct induction machine based on simple experience, you need it to have an internal model of the world that is creative and generative. therefore induction based on experience is not enough to characterize and predict behavior of such a machine, because if it has a specific novel experience it must be capable not only of running the tape of the example back the same way, but to take the novelty and modify it in arbitrary ways, so such a systems functioning would have to be a finite or infinite set of variations of experiential novelties being run inside the world of the machine, then the behavior of the machine would depend on experience in an exponential way whether its internal model reflects truths about the world or falsehoods about the world, it has to behave like its own world of variations. this is the only way to build a machine that takes a tiny set of experiences and turns it into an arbitrary set of variations on themes or also that is able to generate novelty of at least some kinds, or this property of impossible.
I think perhaps communal superintelligence is a better metaphor for AI/AGI than individual, human intelligence. Would you believe that humans were especially intelligent if it weren't for a common language? Then, part of the problem is solved over generations by the language itself, the culture that supports it, and the body of knowledge written in it. I suspect you could come up with a behaviorist communal superintelligence along these lines. The role of individual intelligence isn't determinative. All varieties of contradictions, paradoxes, and other incoherencies are common on an individual level. The communal intelligence, if well organized, benefits from this diversity. Say what you want about behaviorism, it's a really good lens if you're looking for observables. (I think if you came up with a machine that took 25 years of intensive education to MAYBE make a small contribution to mathematics, you'd be disappointed. The individual intelligence problem looks more like artificial stupidity, to a behaviorist!)
If you have Chomsky on in the future, please ask him about Daniel Everett and his claims about Piraha. I don't think there's much about those claims, but I think it would be good if Chomsky could adress them more. I have seen very little from Chomsky on that issue.
Mind bomb of an episode. Language as thought, to Saussure and structuralism and behaviourism (shock to see Quine here), linguistic relativity and their demise in linguistics , with their obliviousness to the idea of finite objects generating an infinite number of objects. Shades of confusion already to be made apparent in LLMs. The horror of methodological dualism. Inbuilt universal grammar, which holds linearity in contempt, in favor of structural dependence. Impossible languages expose the limits if indecisive plagiaristic LLMs, which cannot decide definitively in the name all that is science. We need only possible systems! A podcast without Pins is an impossible podcast , we need a definitive choice, so in the name of love keep Pins Cat 🐈. Robinson, my man, your innate structural intelligence sifts through the multitudinous linear chaff and produces gems. Geesling Bernardo.
if it was all pure induction, then a variation on a theme would just mean two different themes are remembered and that is all you could think about. saying think about is somewhat incoherent because the ability to think is the ability to not rely on simple induction.
I'm an early milleniall/late Gen xr and there is no one I can think of (in the public sphere) in my class that speaks truth to power. My question is, who is the Noam Chomsky of my generation? Even to critique it in the most subtle of ways is enough to get you depersoned, deplatformed, expelled, fired. I know there are Noam Chomsky's out there my age, but they probably aren't many of them, and I know they aren't given a platform. And that says alot with todays technology. How bad will it get going forward?
Hilariously, Chomsky cites Vietnam and the sixties as exemplary of ways in which the public changed the system. Even though literally nothing changed and everything got worse.
the ability to generate variations on themes cannot be learned from experience, it is something dependent on the hardware and software working together to change representations of experience, without experience supplying the function necessary to do so.
i think the internal modeling the human brain does of the world is similar to other mammals, it is just radically more powerful in two important ways. they are both based on the externalization of language in two different ways. let us think about the problem russell put forth, as noam put it "how is it that we know so much from so little" the problem of an individual person coming up with novel and complicated ideas and understandings of the world compared to animals is one side of the problem, that is explained by experience plus the architecture, that much is obvious, but part of that problem is illustrated by thinking about what a caveman or a person isolated form other people would think about the world, the structure of his internal thought would be the same, but his knowledge and ability to generate and come upon new complicated experiences as those generated in other human brains and transmitted through language would be limited by the lack of experience, we are indeed impoverished on data in comparison with out ability and result of reasoning and comprehension, but because we live in collectives and we have the externalization we can build up hierarchies of abstraction and formalization of the result of thought that can be thought of as a richer data set for the brain to absorb and abstract from. the first important bit is that the faculty corresponding to our language and reasoning faculties in animals do not have any such strong externalization architecture, the degree of heritability of data set to be reinterpreted is much less rich than in humans, that means that the evolutionary advantage of the power of the internal generative faculty is greatly impoverished. when you reach a certain level of trivial communication of ideas, paired with a powerful enough reasoning faculty, you then have a much greater evolutionary gradient towards ever more powerful reasoning and variable tools of communicating and remembering it, the key i think is that the ability to externalize what reasoning and novel modeling capability has a utility that is tied to the externalization, it is in no way defined by the externalization, but the two are joined at the hip in terms of evolutionary advantage, so we have a sort of two sided architecture, the modeling and reasoning side and the communication side has utility in all mammals, but when they both reach a certain point of development you get heritability of complicated ideas, which supports a larger tendency to gain advantage by getting smarter and better at communicating it, as the data set and the faculties of the two sides of the coin gain the ability to co evolve. lets say in a herd of chimps, there is this notion of culture related to social norms and violence, evidence of this exists, this is a rather primitive version of the same thing, but it is not at the level of sophistication where a religious idea might develop over time, the norms of the chimps simply oscillate rather randomly over long time scales between more and less violence, while when you reach a certain point the data set involved in communication with other similar members of your own species can evolve over generations, this provides the possibility of an advantage to be gained by radically changing and expanding on the internal modeling capacities. the externalization is therefor critical to the evolutionary advantage of the internal generative structure, but it is so in a rather trivial way, the generative structure is what keeps track of and generates novelty in the evolving state of knowledge in a group, the externalization is just a medium of evolution for the generative structure in collectives, the generative structure has to evolve to a point where it has something transmittable to say that can later be reabsorbed, reinterpreted and re transmitted recursively, it is the generative structure alone that provides all the utility necessary for its advantage to be present, the externalization just mediates it, but the mediation is another recursive avenue for the generative structures to evolve along side the information and knowledge attained, and these two are separate, the generative structure as it gets more powerful if able to generate a lot of ideas and concepts with very little of the information carried through the generations, and the information that is carried along is carried along inside it, but when it is transmitted from person to person it is radically changed each time and the complex of novelty and variation of it is still based on very impoverished versions of the information in the generative structures. when i tell you about an idea for example you are building your own idea of it while i am speaking to you as if you were reconstructing an old tattered treasure map based on novel assumptions and representations that i never transmitted to you, this is what is necessary for the corpus of knowledge to be co evolving with the generative and communicative structure. if we consider the man who is totally isolated from any other person, he would likely not speak very much, but he would think and behave like what he is absent his proper environment, a really smart animal capable of behavior only explicable by a much much richer internal generative structure of thought compared to other animals. it is the co evolution of these three things, the datasets, externalization and internal generative structure that must lead to our faculties today. a simple generative structure capable of understanding social relations and mediating actions from emotional connection is necessary in animals like mammals, that requires also a certain externalization that is as sophisticated as wolves or other mammals, they make noises, they comfort each other, and they communicate in quite complicated ways, like whales or dolphins, i think the evolution of land mammals reaches a critical point of cognition related to the generative structure being able to come up with stuff like strategies of hunting and tool use and so on, which is depending on physiological happen stance to reach a point where the internal generative structure is sophisticated enough for all three factors to start co evolving, where strategies of hunting can turns into traditions, and tool manufacturing can turn into transmitted expertise, once you reach a rather primitive level where this is possible, then there is room for the growths of the evolution of data sets and externalization to co-evolve with the necessary generative structure needed to expand upon the possible capabilities of all three in group settings . you need a bunch of stuff to align just right i think to start the process of language development and data set development in the form and tradition and that requires a certain level of generative structure to begin as well as the right physiology to get going with doing anything advantageous with it. it is very possible that by preferring trainable dogs we have started a similar process in them where they could eventually understand and use language, if we bred them based on the right complex of properties, but this is more complicated to do in a short time compared to hundreds of thousands of generations. dogs could only evolve along a similar path given human companionship thought and the process and likely outcome would be different. but i do think we have altered the internal generative structure of dogs while hunting with them and breeding them. in slight ways ofc.
I have great respect for noams ability to identify necessary and unnecessary evils in the world . I've always enjoyed his line of thought here. And i do give this attribute much credibility most of the time. This part is like fist in the air saying hell yeah ,yeah preach on brother hallelujah .. The But, Oh yeah the but always comes in the next part, more of a categorical blame and the physical prescriptions that solutions tend to circle back or imo feed back to causation, imo feedback in a miss characterized justice. Lol Its always some truth and facts there. I will always support the right to be and do its our personal responsibility to take the good with the bad and filter our accordingly.
@@terencedenman702 Noam chomsky says that evolution in language is impossible it only exists in nature . It's nothing wrong with my shade tree text. Something within it is triggering in you tho
@terencedenman702 your literally touching on one of the cause & effect lack of credibility areas of my post on Noam. The foundational curriculum problems where it looks good on paper but once put in practice fails over the slightest variations where even experts talk past one another.
@terencedenman702 What part about cause and effect credibility of Noam chomsky are you confused by? On one hand, he is smart & wise on the other he drives some agendas that lack credibility or lead to bad & poor outcomes. What confuses you? I have respect & admiration but also witness avenues that are very questionable.
@terencedenman702 It's a video chat thread reply by a guy outside under a shade tree . You shouldn't even waist your time being confused about anything here
Pin is lovely, glad she's around. i love your artwork. My dog Marx lays next to meas i watch your show. It is a privilege to get to see Chomsky and to hear him talk about language, the way he does one learns so much.
Heirs and our Beautiful what is required concerning feet in FRONT? Noam will say, Remembering ye once born, to crawling, to walking, and till now thy feet resting upon the very tip of time! Mileage from thy feet is recognize! Has an Aim. Comes with be mindful unto all shared HIS FEET RESTING UPON....yet from us but not of us keep taking advantage! As far to provoke and tempt to GRIEVE for God of the Living to quake ....to awaken knows belongs? Unfamiliar ways of speaking unto many but yet is clear as water unto Whom BELONGS upon all dry grounds nor the world. Given New Feet.
What is difficult nor why difficult needed to be understood? Now asked my Heirs Hosts commanded to provide space, and to grow! Now what is Time nor from? Why? Obviously Time given has an Aim. Students will say what is flat, round, nor time unto WHO? What is WHO students? Can't exist in front! Why? Let them speak. Why students? What is conversations without another like Who? A little child "i" will say? While all thy Heirs Hosts made NEW sitting upon the NEW Table. Given. What is a subject? Shared "i" Am will say, what is an idol? Students what is an idol? Students will say can't speak, walk, breathe, see, nor hear. Indeed. Some will say yet who is that? Walking on water upon the sea of glass a ROCK! Even God of the Living can make a ROCK SPEAK AND WALK! Is HE REAL a PERSONAL? Can we able to wipe HIS SINCERE TEARS? WITH OUR OWN HANDS?
26:10 “[Scott Shapiro] described your review of _Verbal Behavior,_ Skinner’s book…as ‘among one of the greatest philosophical take-downs.’” That’s a travesty, really, but Shapiro is a law professor so he might not be well-versed in the field of psychology. One has only to look at Kenneth MacCorquodale’s “On Chomsky's Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior” (1970) and David C. Palmer’s “On Chomsky’s Appraisal of Skinner’s _Verbal Behavior:_ A Half Century of Misunderstanding” (2006) to see what an inaccurate, bad-faith hit job Chomsky’s review was. As just one (out of many) examples of Chomsky’s errors, a major one, in the review, he mischaracterized the conditioning underlying Skinner’s behaviorism as being of the S-R/classical type, which was roughly 30 years out of date at the time Chomsky wrote his review. (Skinner was clearly and obviously referring to _operant_ conditioning.) As Palmer put it, “If Skinner's prose permitted an absurd interpretation, then Chomsky embraced it.” And, as just a very brief example of just how badly Chomsky mischaracterizes Skinner, in a different review: in a 1971 _NYRB_ review of Skinner’s _Beyond Freedom and Dignity,_ Chomsky wrote: “Consider Skinner’s claim that ‘we sample and change verbal behavior, not opinions’ (so a behavioral analysis reveals). Taken literally, this means that if, under a credible threat of torture, I force someone to say, repeatedly, that the Earth stands still, then I have changed his opinion. Comment is unnecessary…” No. Skinner says *explicitly* you’re _not_ changing opinions. So, according to Skinner (and “taken literally”), if someone says repeatedly, under credible threat of torture, that the Earth stands still, you _haven’t_ “changed his opinion,” you’ve changed his verbal behavior (and you _have_ - that’s exactly what Chomsky’s example, meant to discredit Skinner’s statement, shows). Chomsky can’t even make a legitimate, coherent argument in the space of two sentences. (And his smug, dismissive “Comment is unnecessary…” just adds to the absurd cluelessness.)
@@terencedenman702 _NOTE:_ Mr Denman deleted his responses to my comments. (Whether that has to do with a reevaluation of their merit on his part I can’t say.) I think readers can surmise, more or less, from my replies the general gist of those comments. Behaviorism doesn't need any revival. Just check out the Association for Behavior Analysis International. (And, in any case, that’s not really relevant to Chomsky’s shoddy and dishonest treatment of Skinner, as those articles I referred to amply shows.)
@@terencedenman702 Skinner didn’t respond to Chomsky because he didn’t think Chomsky deserved the dignity of a response-it was clear Chomsky didn’t understand what Skinner was talking about. (If you read MacCorquodale’s and Palmer’s takes on Chomsky’s review, it is perfectly clear that Chomsky didn’t-and, as I mentioned in my first comment, Chomsky couldn’t even get the type of conditioning that Skinner was talking about right.) You only have to read those two sentences from Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s _Beyond Freedom and Dignity_ to see how at once dismissive _and_ incoherent Chomsky’s attacks were. (If I were Skinner, I wouldn’t have responded either to any of Chomsky’s reviews.) And, far from being broken, he worked right up until his death in 1990, giving a speech before a huge crowd at the American Psychological Association ten days before he died. Skinner _never_ said “there is no core to human nature (or biological gender!)” or that “everything is 'normative' or socially conditioned.” (Stephen Pinker, in his _The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature,_ promoted that strawman argument thoughout his book. _See_ “Why Pinker Needs Behaviorism: a Critique of The Blank Slate” by Elliot Ludvig.) In fact, Skinner pointed, in his book _About Behaviorism,_ to the notion that behaviorism “neglects innate endowment and argues that all behavior is acquired during the lifetime of the individual” as one of the many ideas that were simply wrong about behaviorism.
@@terencedenman702 I dunno-you don’t have to read much of the review to see what an off-base piece it is. MacCorquodale says Chomsky attacked “an amalgam of some rather outdated behavioristic lore including reinforcement by drive reduction, the extinction criterion for response strength, a pseudo-incompatibility of genetic and reinforcement processes, and other notions which have nothing to do with Skinner’s account.” Whatever MacCorquodale says about Chomsky’s tone, his critique covers several major substantive claims that Chomsky made. And Skinner was under no obligation to reply-I don’t think we can infer anything from his not doing so. (I doubt Chomsky’s aggressive tone made it more likely for Skinner to engage him. Skinner, in a personal communication, later cited in a published paper, said ““I have never been able to understand why Chomsky became…angry when writing about me” so there is a fair question as to who, exactly, failed to exhibit a scholarly attitude.) As for the “political dangers of a belief in behaviourism,” that frame ignores that an analysis of behavior such as Skinner advocated makes it very clear how behavior can be controlled in ways that are highly aversive (i.e, via punishment) and that result in effects detrimental the organism (e.g., “stretching the ratio” via piece work, gambling are just two obvious examples). Skinner was _against_ these practices and he always asserted the need for countervailing control. Kids are _invariably_ conditioned to have certain ideas and behaviors-that’s how culture works. Skinner was delineating a behavioral analysis of how people influence the behavior of others-they and other organisms have been doing that for millions of years-and part of his goal was to help people shape environments in better, less aversive, more effective ways. That seems better than sticking one’s head in the sand and not understanding how behavior works. _Again,_ I come back to that two-line quote (about “changing opinions”) in Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s _Beyond Freedom and Dignity_ because nothing demonstrates in as short a space the incoherence, along with smugness and dismissiveness, that Chomsky evinced in his diatribes towards Skinner. He _was,_ as Palmer put it, “relentlessly shrill” in his critiques but, worse than that, he was wrong a lot, if not practically all, of the time, and, true to form, would never own it.
Pretty funny to think there was really anything Chomsky read at the height of his powers that he didn't understand. You have to remember Chomsky is attacking behaviorism especially from the perspective of linguists. And by now it's essentially a forgone conclusion you could not inculcate language without specific neurolinguistic systems.
Not that this has anything to do with what was discussed, but Noam's position on the Ukraine War is dreadful. He's gone over the abyss as far as I'm concerned.
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wonderful episode. have followed chomsky from early 60s when i met him . remember prof quine with great fondness.
subscribed and shared.
I was excited to see this, thought it was recent but it's not, thought maybe Noam got back to okay health, he has not been doing well lately and i fear we will hear news of his passing any time now, it breaks my heart he is my intellectual hero.
Yep. Within 3 years, 100%. Keep jinxing it
NO
I share your concern but at least Kissinger went first.
How did you find out he was sick? I assumed he was since he hasn’t made any public appearances for the last few months, but I couldn’t find anything about it online. Even all the news articles about him that came out on his birthday didn’t mention anything about it.
@@bopulist7221his wife said he isn't available for appearances because of health issues
"Entertaining him under the table"...that remark somehow brought chuckles to my otherwise serious mindset whenever I listened to Noam.
lmao
any one that doesn't like your co host can go fly a kite. Thanks for all you do.
God bless you Professor!
Enjoying seeing the podcast grow and the podcat well defended from the ravages of fame!
Can’t believe someone would leave such a rude comment about your wonderful cohost
the problem with behaviorism this essentially this in behaviorist language. if you want to build a machine that understands the world in various abstract ways and is not just a very direct induction machine based on simple experience, you need it to have an internal model of the world that is creative and generative. therefore induction based on experience is not enough to characterize and predict behavior of such a machine, because if it has a specific novel experience it must be capable not only of running the tape of the example back the same way, but to take the novelty and modify it in arbitrary ways, so such a systems functioning would have to be a finite or infinite set of variations of experiential novelties being run inside the world of the machine, then the behavior of the machine would depend on experience in an exponential way whether its internal model reflects truths about the world or falsehoods about the world, it has to behave like its own world of variations. this is the only way to build a machine that takes a tiny set of experiences and turns it into an arbitrary set of variations on themes or also that is able to generate novelty of at least some kinds, or this property of impossible.
I think perhaps communal superintelligence is a better metaphor for AI/AGI than individual, human intelligence.
Would you believe that humans were especially intelligent if it weren't for a common language?
Then, part of the problem is solved over generations by the language itself, the culture that supports it, and the body of knowledge written in it.
I suspect you could come up with a behaviorist communal superintelligence along these lines.
The role of individual intelligence isn't determinative. All varieties of contradictions, paradoxes, and other incoherencies are common on an individual level.
The communal intelligence, if well organized, benefits from this diversity.
Say what you want about behaviorism, it's a really good lens if you're looking for observables.
(I think if you came up with a machine that took 25 years of intensive education to MAYBE make a small contribution to mathematics, you'd be disappointed. The individual intelligence problem looks more like artificial stupidity, to a behaviorist!)
If you have Chomsky on in the future, please ask him about Daniel Everett and his claims about Piraha. I don't think there's much about those claims, but I think it would be good if Chomsky could adress them more. I have seen very little from Chomsky on that issue.
Who can possibly fill Noam’s shoes? It can’t be done!
Mind bomb of an episode. Language as thought, to Saussure and structuralism and behaviourism (shock to see Quine here), linguistic relativity and their demise in linguistics , with their obliviousness to the idea of finite objects generating an infinite number of objects. Shades of confusion already to be made apparent in LLMs. The horror of methodological dualism. Inbuilt universal grammar, which holds linearity in contempt, in favor of structural dependence. Impossible languages expose the limits if indecisive plagiaristic LLMs, which cannot decide definitively in the name all that is science. We need only possible systems!
A podcast without Pins is an impossible podcast , we need a definitive choice, so in the name of love keep Pins Cat 🐈. Robinson, my man, your innate structural intelligence sifts through the multitudinous linear chaff and produces gems. Geesling Bernardo.
95 Years strong! He is still going is Noam!
He will live forever, out living us all
Thank you.
if it was all pure induction, then a variation on a theme would just mean two different themes are remembered and that is all you could think about. saying think about is somewhat incoherent because the ability to think is the ability to not rely on simple induction.
What date was this interview? I can see that it was posted a day ago. Noam seemed to have disappeared over the last few months.
Chomsky is still alive? Wow. I was studying him in college and that was 30 years ago. I thought he was old back then.
Noam Chomsky is a huge one.
I'm an early milleniall/late Gen xr and there is no one I can think of (in the public sphere) in my class that speaks truth to power. My question is, who is the Noam Chomsky of my generation? Even to critique it in the most subtle of ways is enough to get you depersoned, deplatformed, expelled, fired. I know there are Noam Chomsky's out there my age, but they probably aren't many of them, and I know they aren't given a platform. And that says alot with todays technology. How bad will it get going forward?
i keep asking myself the same question. maybe chomsky knows
Hilariously, Chomsky cites Vietnam and the sixties as exemplary of ways in which the public changed the system. Even though literally nothing changed and everything got worse.
Legend
I really hope Noam is ok. I want to hear his recent thoughts on Palestine.
the ability to generate variations on themes cannot be learned from experience, it is something dependent on the hardware and software working together to change representations of experience, without experience supplying the function necessary to do so.
That was superb, well done.
i think the internal modeling the human brain does of the world is similar to other mammals, it is just radically more powerful in two important ways. they are both based on the externalization of language in two different ways. let us think about the problem russell put forth, as noam put it "how is it that we know so much from so little" the problem of an individual person coming up with novel and complicated ideas and understandings of the world compared to animals is one side of the problem, that is explained by experience plus the architecture, that much is obvious, but part of that problem is illustrated by thinking about what a caveman or a person isolated form other people would think about the world, the structure of his internal thought would be the same, but his knowledge and ability to generate and come upon new complicated experiences as those generated in other human brains and transmitted through language would be limited by the lack of experience, we are indeed impoverished on data in comparison with out ability and result of reasoning and comprehension, but because we live in collectives and we have the externalization we can build up hierarchies of abstraction and formalization of the result of thought that can be thought of as a richer data set for the brain to absorb and abstract from. the first important bit is that the faculty corresponding to our language and reasoning faculties in animals do not have any such strong externalization architecture, the degree of heritability of data set to be reinterpreted is much less rich than in humans, that means that the evolutionary advantage of the power of the internal generative faculty is greatly impoverished. when you reach a certain level of trivial communication of ideas, paired with a powerful enough reasoning faculty, you then have a much greater evolutionary gradient towards ever more powerful reasoning and variable tools of communicating and remembering it, the key i think is that the ability to externalize what reasoning and novel modeling capability has a utility that is tied to the externalization, it is in no way defined by the externalization, but the two are joined at the hip in terms of evolutionary advantage, so we have a sort of two sided architecture, the modeling and reasoning side and the communication side has utility in all mammals, but when they both reach a certain point of development you get heritability of complicated ideas, which supports a larger tendency to gain advantage by getting smarter and better at communicating it, as the data set and the faculties of the two sides of the coin gain the ability to co evolve. lets say in a herd of chimps, there is this notion of culture related to social norms and violence, evidence of this exists, this is a rather primitive version of the same thing, but it is not at the level of sophistication where a religious idea might develop over time, the norms of the chimps simply oscillate rather randomly over long time scales between more and less violence, while when you reach a certain point the data set involved in communication with other similar members of your own species can evolve over generations, this provides the possibility of an advantage to be gained by radically changing and expanding on the internal modeling capacities. the externalization is therefor critical to the evolutionary advantage of the internal generative structure, but it is so in a rather trivial way, the generative structure is what keeps track of and generates novelty in the evolving state of knowledge in a group, the externalization is just a medium of evolution for the generative structure in collectives, the generative structure has to evolve to a point where it has something transmittable to say that can later be reabsorbed, reinterpreted and re transmitted recursively, it is the generative structure alone that provides all the utility necessary for its advantage to be present, the externalization just mediates it, but the mediation is another recursive avenue for the generative structures to evolve along side the information and knowledge attained, and these two are separate, the generative structure as it gets more powerful if able to generate a lot of ideas and concepts with very little of the information carried through the generations, and the information that is carried along is carried along inside it, but when it is transmitted from person to person it is radically changed each time and the complex of novelty and variation of it is still based on very impoverished versions of the information in the generative structures. when i tell you about an idea for example you are building your own idea of it while i am speaking to you as if you were reconstructing an old tattered treasure map based on novel assumptions and representations that i never transmitted to you, this is what is necessary for the corpus of knowledge to be co evolving with the generative and communicative structure. if we consider the man who is totally isolated from any other person, he would likely not speak very much, but he would think and behave like what he is absent his proper environment, a really smart animal capable of behavior only explicable by a much much richer internal generative structure of thought compared to other animals. it is the co evolution of these three things, the datasets, externalization and internal generative structure that must lead to our faculties today. a simple generative structure capable of understanding social relations and mediating actions from emotional connection is necessary in animals like mammals, that requires also a certain externalization that is as sophisticated as wolves or other mammals, they make noises, they comfort each other, and they communicate in quite complicated ways, like whales or dolphins, i think the evolution of land mammals reaches a critical point of cognition related to the generative structure being able to come up with stuff like strategies of hunting and tool use and so on, which is depending on physiological happen stance to reach a point where the internal generative structure is sophisticated enough for all three factors to start co evolving, where strategies of hunting can turns into traditions, and tool manufacturing can turn into transmitted expertise, once you reach a rather primitive level where this is possible, then there is room for the growths of the evolution of data sets and externalization to co-evolve with the necessary generative structure needed to expand upon the possible capabilities of all three in group settings . you need a bunch of stuff to align just right i think to start the process of language development and data set development in the form and tradition and that requires a certain level of generative structure to begin as well as the right physiology to get going with doing anything advantageous with it. it is very possible that by preferring trainable dogs we have started a similar process in them where they could eventually understand and use language, if we bred them based on the right complex of properties, but this is more complicated to do in a short time compared to hundreds of thousands of generations. dogs could only evolve along a similar path given human companionship thought and the process and likely outcome would be different. but i do think we have altered the internal generative structure of dogs while hunting with them and breeding them. in slight ways ofc.
When was this recorded?
March 2023
@@EyeByBrian Thanks
Amazing
Terrific!
I have great respect for noams ability to identify necessary and unnecessary evils in the world .
I've always enjoyed his line of thought here.
And i do give this attribute much credibility most of the time.
This part is like fist in the air saying hell yeah ,yeah preach on brother hallelujah ..
The But,
Oh yeah the but always comes in the next part, more of a categorical blame and the physical prescriptions that solutions tend to circle back or imo feed back to causation, imo feedback in a miss characterized justice. Lol
Its always some truth and facts there.
I will always support the right to be and do its our personal responsibility to take the good with the bad and filter our accordingly.
@terencedenman702 Then your struggling with where chomsky is or isn't credible then
@@terencedenman702 Noam chomsky says that evolution in language is impossible it only exists in nature .
It's nothing wrong with my shade tree text. Something within it is triggering in you tho
@terencedenman702 your literally touching on one of the cause & effect lack of credibility areas of my post on Noam.
The foundational curriculum problems where it looks good on paper but once put in practice fails over the slightest variations where even experts talk past one another.
@terencedenman702 What part about cause and effect credibility of Noam chomsky are you confused by?
On one hand, he is smart & wise on the other he drives some agendas that lack credibility or lead to bad & poor outcomes.
What confuses you?
I have respect & admiration but also witness avenues that are very questionable.
@terencedenman702 It's a video chat thread reply by a guy outside under a shade tree .
You shouldn't even waist your time being confused about anything here
Pin is lovely, glad she's around. i love your artwork. My dog Marx lays next to meas i watch your show. It is a privilege to get to see Chomsky and to hear him talk about language, the way he does one learns so much.
Love your cat❤
He has connections to ep steen
noam was being entertained under the table by a dog 😂
Cat is ❤️🔥
Im deeply offended by the cat!
Heirs and our Beautiful what is required concerning feet in FRONT? Noam will say, Remembering ye once born, to crawling, to walking, and till now thy feet resting upon the very tip of time! Mileage from thy feet is recognize! Has an Aim. Comes with be mindful unto all shared HIS FEET RESTING UPON....yet from us but not of us keep taking advantage! As far to provoke and tempt to GRIEVE for God of the Living to quake ....to awaken knows belongs? Unfamiliar ways of speaking unto many but yet is clear as water unto Whom BELONGS upon all dry grounds nor the world. Given New Feet.
1:30 "Over the past 94 years"? Meaning what? Do you mean that he was a prominent linguist when he was a suckling baby?
What is difficult nor why difficult needed to be understood? Now asked my Heirs Hosts commanded to provide space, and to grow! Now what is Time nor from? Why? Obviously Time given has an Aim. Students will say what is flat, round, nor time unto WHO? What is WHO students? Can't exist in front! Why? Let them speak. Why students? What is conversations without another like Who? A little child "i" will say? While all thy Heirs Hosts made NEW sitting upon the NEW Table. Given. What is a subject? Shared "i" Am will say, what is an idol? Students what is an idol? Students will say can't speak, walk, breathe, see, nor hear. Indeed. Some will say yet who is that? Walking on water upon the sea of glass a ROCK! Even God of the Living can make a ROCK SPEAK AND WALK! Is HE REAL a PERSONAL? Can we able to wipe HIS SINCERE TEARS? WITH OUR OWN HANDS?
26:10 “[Scott Shapiro] described your review of _Verbal Behavior,_ Skinner’s book…as ‘among one of the greatest philosophical take-downs.’”
That’s a travesty, really, but Shapiro is a law professor so he might not be well-versed in the field of psychology. One has only to look at Kenneth MacCorquodale’s “On Chomsky's Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior” (1970) and David C. Palmer’s “On Chomsky’s Appraisal of Skinner’s _Verbal Behavior:_ A Half Century of Misunderstanding” (2006) to see what an inaccurate, bad-faith hit job Chomsky’s review was. As just one (out of many) examples of Chomsky’s errors, a major one, in the review, he mischaracterized the conditioning underlying Skinner’s behaviorism as being of the S-R/classical type, which was roughly 30 years out of date at the time Chomsky wrote his review. (Skinner was clearly and obviously referring to _operant_ conditioning.) As Palmer put it, “If Skinner's prose permitted an absurd interpretation, then Chomsky embraced it.”
And, as just a very brief example of just how badly Chomsky mischaracterizes Skinner, in a different review: in a 1971 _NYRB_ review of Skinner’s _Beyond Freedom and Dignity,_ Chomsky wrote:
“Consider Skinner’s claim that ‘we sample and change verbal behavior, not opinions’ (so a behavioral analysis reveals). Taken literally, this means that if, under a credible threat of torture, I force someone to say, repeatedly, that the Earth stands still, then I have changed his opinion. Comment is unnecessary…”
No. Skinner says *explicitly* you’re _not_ changing opinions. So, according to Skinner (and “taken literally”), if someone says repeatedly, under credible threat of torture, that the Earth stands still, you _haven’t_ “changed his opinion,” you’ve changed his verbal behavior (and you _have_ - that’s exactly what Chomsky’s example, meant to discredit Skinner’s statement, shows). Chomsky can’t even make a legitimate, coherent argument in the space of two sentences. (And his smug, dismissive “Comment is unnecessary…” just adds to the absurd cluelessness.)
@@terencedenman702 _NOTE:_ Mr Denman deleted his responses to my comments. (Whether that has to do with a reevaluation of their merit on his part I can’t say.) I think readers can surmise, more or less, from my replies the general gist of those comments.
Behaviorism doesn't need any revival. Just check out the Association for Behavior Analysis International. (And, in any case, that’s not really relevant to Chomsky’s shoddy and dishonest treatment of Skinner, as those articles I referred to amply shows.)
@@terencedenman702 Skinner didn’t respond to Chomsky because he didn’t think Chomsky deserved the dignity of a response-it was clear Chomsky didn’t understand what Skinner was talking about. (If you read MacCorquodale’s and Palmer’s takes on Chomsky’s review, it is perfectly clear that Chomsky didn’t-and, as I mentioned in my first comment, Chomsky couldn’t even get the type of conditioning that Skinner was talking about right.) You only have to read those two sentences from Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s _Beyond Freedom and Dignity_ to see how at once dismissive _and_ incoherent Chomsky’s attacks were. (If I were Skinner, I wouldn’t have responded either to any of Chomsky’s reviews.)
And, far from being broken, he worked right up until his death in 1990, giving a speech before a huge crowd at the American Psychological Association ten days before he died.
Skinner _never_ said “there is no core to human nature (or biological gender!)” or that “everything is 'normative' or socially conditioned.” (Stephen Pinker, in his _The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature,_ promoted that strawman argument thoughout his book. _See_ “Why Pinker Needs Behaviorism: a Critique of The Blank Slate” by Elliot Ludvig.) In fact, Skinner pointed, in his book _About Behaviorism,_ to the notion that behaviorism “neglects innate endowment and argues that all behavior is acquired during the lifetime of the individual” as one of the many ideas that were simply wrong about behaviorism.
@@terencedenman702 I dunno-you don’t have to read much of the review to see what an off-base piece it is. MacCorquodale says Chomsky attacked “an amalgam of some rather outdated behavioristic lore including reinforcement by drive reduction, the extinction criterion for response strength, a pseudo-incompatibility of genetic and reinforcement processes, and other notions which have nothing to do with Skinner’s account.” Whatever MacCorquodale says about Chomsky’s tone, his critique covers several major substantive claims that Chomsky made. And Skinner was under no obligation to reply-I don’t think we can infer anything from his not doing so. (I doubt Chomsky’s aggressive tone made it more likely for Skinner to engage him. Skinner, in a personal communication, later cited in a published paper, said ““I have never been able to understand why Chomsky became…angry when writing about me” so there is a fair question as to who, exactly, failed to exhibit a scholarly attitude.)
As for the “political dangers of a belief in behaviourism,” that frame ignores that an analysis of behavior such as Skinner advocated makes it very clear how behavior can be controlled in ways that are highly aversive (i.e, via punishment) and that result in effects detrimental the organism (e.g., “stretching the ratio” via piece work, gambling are just two obvious examples). Skinner was _against_ these practices and he always asserted the need for countervailing control. Kids are _invariably_ conditioned to have certain ideas and behaviors-that’s how culture works. Skinner was delineating a behavioral analysis of how people influence the behavior of others-they and other organisms have been doing that for millions of years-and part of his goal was to help people shape environments in better, less aversive, more effective ways. That seems better than sticking one’s head in the sand and not understanding how behavior works.
_Again,_ I come back to that two-line quote (about “changing opinions”) in Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s _Beyond Freedom and Dignity_ because nothing demonstrates in as short a space the incoherence, along with smugness and dismissiveness, that Chomsky evinced in his diatribes towards Skinner. He _was,_ as Palmer put it, “relentlessly shrill” in his critiques but, worse than that, he was wrong a lot, if not practically all, of the time, and, true to form, would never own it.
@@terencedenman702 Wrong with regard to Skinner and Skinner’s view of behaviorism, that is.
Pretty funny to think there was really anything Chomsky read at the height of his powers that he didn't understand. You have to remember Chomsky is attacking behaviorism especially from the perspective of linguists. And by now it's essentially a forgone conclusion you could not inculcate language without specific neurolinguistic systems.
Why you having Epstein’s buddy on here
Trump next.
What's your opinion of Trump and Epstein partying together? No way you could vote for someone like that right?
@@TheCorrectionist1984 lol who said I would vote for Trump
Not that this has anything to do with what was discussed, but Noam's position on the Ukraine War is dreadful. He's gone over the abyss as far as I'm concerned.