back to indexNoam Chomsky: Language, Cognition, and Deep Learning | Lex Fridman Podcast #53
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The following is a conversation with Noam Chomsky.
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He's truly one of the great minds of our time
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and is one of the most cited scholars
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in the history of our civilization.
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He has spent over 60 years at MIT
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and recently also joined the University of Arizona,
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where we met for this conversation.
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But it was at MIT about four and a half years ago
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when I first met Noam.
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My first few days there,
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I remember getting into an elevator at Stata Center,
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pressing the button for whatever floor,
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looking up and realizing it was just me and Noam Chomsky
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riding the elevator,
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just me and one of the seminal figures of linguistics,
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cognitive science, philosophy,
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and political thought in the past century, if not ever.
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I tell that silly story because I think life is made up
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of funny little defining moments that you never forget
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for reasons that may be too poetic to try and explain.
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That was one of mine.
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Noam has been an inspiration to me and millions of others.
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It was truly an honor for me
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to sit down with him in Arizona.
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I traveled there just for this conversation.
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And in a rare, heartbreaking moment,
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after everything was set up and tested,
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the camera was moved and accidentally,
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the recording button was pressed, stopping the recording.
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So I have good audio of both of us, but no video of Noam.
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Just the video of me and my sleep deprived but excited face
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that I get to keep as a reminder of my failures.
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Most people just listen to this audio version
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for the podcast as opposed to watching it on YouTube.
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But still, it's heartbreaking for me.
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I hope you understand and still enjoy this conversation
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The depth of intellect that Noam showed
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and his willingness to truly listen to me,
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a silly looking Russian in a suit.
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It was humbling and something I'm deeply grateful for.
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As some of you know, this podcast is a side project for me,
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where my main journey and dream is to build AI systems
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that do some good for the world.
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This latter effort takes up most of my time,
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but for the moment has been mostly private.
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But the former, the podcast,
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is something I put my heart and soul into.
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And I hope you feel that, even when I screw things up.
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I recently started doing ads
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at the end of the introduction.
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I'll do one or two minutes after introducing the episode
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and never any ads in the middle
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that break the flow of the conversation.
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I hope that works for you
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and doesn't hurt the listening experience.
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This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
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If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube,
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give it five stars on Apple Podcast,
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support it on Patreon,
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or simply connect with me on Twitter,
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at Lex Friedman, spelled F R I D M A N.
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This show is presented by Cash App,
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inspire girls and boys to dream of engineering a better world.
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And now here's my conversation with Noam Chomsky.
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I apologize for the absurd philosophical question,
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but if an alien species were to visit Earth,
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do you think we would be able to find a common language
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or protocol of communication with them?
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There are arguments to the effect that we could.
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In fact, one of them was Marv Minsky's.
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Back about 20 or 30 years ago,
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he performed a brief experiment with a student of his,
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Dan Bobrow, they essentially ran
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the simplest possible touring machines,
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just free to see what would happen.
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And most of them crashed,
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either got into an infinite loop or stopped.
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The few that persisted,
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essentially gave something like arithmetic.
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And his conclusion from that was that
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if some alien species developed higher intelligence,
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they would at least have arithmetic,
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they would at least have what the simplest computer would do.
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And in fact, he didn't know that at the time,
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but the core principles of natural language
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are based on operations which yield something
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like arithmetic in the limiting case, in the minimal case.
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So it's conceivable that a mode of communication
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could be established based on the core properties
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of human language and the core properties of arithmetic,
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which maybe are universally shared.
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So it's conceivable.
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What is the structure of that language,
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of language as an internal system inside our mind
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versus an external system as it's expressed?
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It's not an alternative,
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it's two different concepts of language.
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It's a simple fact that there's something about you,
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a trait of yours, part of the organism, you,
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that determines that you're talking English
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and not Tagalog, let's say.
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So there is an inner system.
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It determines the sound and meaning
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of the infinite number of expressions of your language.
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It's not on your foot, obviously, it's in your brain.
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If you look more closely, it's in specific configurations
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And that's essentially like the internal structure
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of your laptop, whatever programs it has are in there.
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Now, one of the things you can do with language,
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it's a marginal thing, in fact,
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is use it to externalize what's in your head.
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Actually, most of your use of language
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is thought, internal thought.
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But you can do what you and I are now doing.
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We can externalize it.
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Well, the set of things that we're externalizing
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are an external system.
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They're noises in the atmosphere.
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And you can call that language
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in some other sense of the word.
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But it's not a set of alternatives.
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These are just different concepts.
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So how deep do the roots of language go in our brain?
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Our mind, is it yet another feature like vision,
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or is it something more fundamental
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from which everything else springs in the human mind?
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Well, in a way, it's like vision.
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There's something about our genetic endowment
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that determines that we have a mammalian
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rather than an insect visual system.
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And there's something in our genetic endowment
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that determines that we have a human language faculty.
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No other organism has anything remotely similar.
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So in that sense, it's internal.
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Now there is a long tradition,
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which I think is valid going back centuries
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to the early scientific revolution,
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at least that holds that language
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is the sort of the core of human cognitive nature.
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It's the source, it's the mode for constructing thoughts
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and expressing them.
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That is what forms thought.
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And it's got fundamental creative capacities.
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It's free, independent, unbounded, and so on.
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And undoubtedly, I think the basis
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for our creative capacities
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and the other remarkable human capacities
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that lead to the unique achievements
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and not so great achievements of the species.
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The capacity to think and reason,
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do you think that's deeply linked with language?
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Do you think the way we,
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the internal language system is essentially the mechanism
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by which we also reason internally?
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It is undoubtedly the mechanism by which we reason.
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There may also be other fact,
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there are undoubtedly other faculties involved in reasoning.
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We have a kind of scientific faculty,
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nobody knows what it is,
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but whatever it is that enables us
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to pursue certain lines of endeavor and inquiry
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and to decide what makes sense and doesn't make sense
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and to achieve a certain degree
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of understanding of the world,
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that uses language, but goes beyond it.
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Just as using our capacity for arithmetic
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is not the same as having the capacity.
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The idea of capacity, our biology, evolution,
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you've talked about it defining essentially our capacity,
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our limit and our scope.
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Can you try to define what limit and scope are?
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And the bigger question,
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do you think it's possible to find the limit
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of human cognition?
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Well, that's an interesting question.
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It's commonly believed, most scientists believe
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that human intelligence can answer any question
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I think that's a very strange belief.
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If we're biological organisms,
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which are not angels,
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then our capacities ought to have scope
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and limits which are interrelated.
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Can you define those two terms?
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Well, let's take a concrete example.
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Your genetic endowment determines
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that you can have a male in visual system,
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arms and legs and so on,
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but it therefore become a rich, complex organism.
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But if you look at that same genetic endowment,
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it prevents you from developing in other directions.
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There's no kind of experience
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which would yield the embryo
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to develop an insect visual system
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or to develop wings instead of arms.
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So the very endowment that confers richness and complexity
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also sets bounds on what can be attained.
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Now, I assume that our cognitive capacities
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are part of the organic world.
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Therefore, they should have the same properties.
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If they had no built in capacity
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to develop a rich and complex structure,
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we would understand nothing.
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Just as if your genetic endowment
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did not compel you to develop arms and legs,
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you would just be some kind of random amoeboid creature
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with no structure at all.
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So I think it's plausible to assume that there are limits
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and I think we even have some evidence as to what they are.
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So for example, there's a classic moment
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in the history of science at the time of Newton.
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There was a from Galileo to Newton modern science
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developed on a fundamental assumption
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which Newton also accepted.
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Namely that the world is an entire universe
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is a mechanical object.
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And by mechanical, they meant something like
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the kinds of artifacts that were being developed
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by skilled artisans all over Europe,
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the gears, levers and so on.
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And their belief was well,
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the world is just a more complex variant of this.
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Newton, to his astonishment and distress,
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proved that there are no machines,
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that there's interaction without contact.
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His contemporaries like Leibniz and Huygens
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just dismissed this as returning to the mysticism
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of the neo scholastics.
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And Newton agreed.
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He said it is totally absurd.
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No person of any scientific intelligence
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could ever accept this for a moment.
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In fact, he spent the rest of his life
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trying to get around it somehow,
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as did many other scientists.
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That was the very criterion of intelligibility
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for say Galileo or Newton.
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Theory did not produce an intelligible world
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unless you could duplicate it in a machine.
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He showed you can't, there are no machines, any.
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Finally, after a long struggle, took a long time,
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scientists just accepted this as common sense.
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But that's a significant moment.
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That means they abandoned the search
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for an intelligible world.
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And the great philosophers of the time
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understood that very well.
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So for example, David Hume in his encomium to Newton
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wrote that who was the greatest thinker ever and so on.
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He said that he unveiled many of the secrets of nature,
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but by showing the imperfections
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of the mechanical philosophy, mechanical science,
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he left us with, he showed that there are mysteries
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which ever will remain.
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And science just changed its goals.
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It abandoned the mysteries.
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It can't solve it, we'll put it aside.
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We only look for intelligible theories.
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Newton's theories were intelligible.
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It's just what they described wasn't.
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Well, Locke said the same thing.
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I think they're basically right.
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And if so, that showed something
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about the limits of human cognition.
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We cannot attain the goal of understanding the world,
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of finding an intelligible world.
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This mechanical philosophy Galileo to Newton,
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there's a good case that can be made
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that that's our instinctive conception of how things work.
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So if say infants are tested with things that,
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if this moves and then this moves,
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they kind of invent something that must be invisible
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that's in between them that's making them move and so on.
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Yeah, we like physical contact.
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Something about our brain seeks.
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Makes us want a world like that.
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Just like it wants a world
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that has regular geometric figures.
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So for example, Descartes pointed this out
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that if you have an infant
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who's never seen a triangle before and you draw a triangle,
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the infant will see a distorted triangle,
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not whatever crazy figure it actually is.
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Three lines not coming quite together,
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one of them a little bit curved and so on.
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We just impose a conception of the world
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in terms of geometric, perfect geometric objects.
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It's now been shown that goes way beyond that.
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That if you show on a tachistoscope,
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let's say a couple of lights shining,
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you do it three or four times in a row.
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What people actually see is a rigid object in motion,
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not whatever's there.
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We all know that from a television set basically.
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So that gives us hints of potential limits
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I think it does, but it's a very contested view.
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If you do a poll among scientists,
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it's impossible we can understand anything.
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Let me ask and give me a chance with this.
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So I just spent a day at a company called Neuralink
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and what they do is try to design
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what's called the brain machine, brain computer interface.
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So they try to do thousands readings in the brain,
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be able to read what the neurons are firing
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and then stimulate back, so two way.
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Do you think their dream is to expand the capacity
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of the brain to attain information,
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sort of increase the bandwidth
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of which we can search Google kind of thing?
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Do you think our cognitive capacity might be expanded
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our linguistic capacity, our ability to reason
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might be expanded by adding a machine into the picture?
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Can be expanded in a certain sense,
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but a sense that was known thousands of years ago.
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A book expands your cognitive capacity.
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Okay, so this could expand it too.
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But it's not a fundamental expansion.
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It's not totally new things could be understood.
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Well, nothing that goes beyond
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their native cognitive capacities.
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Just like you can't turn the visual system
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into an insect system.
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Well, I mean, the thought is,
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the thought is perhaps you can't directly,
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but you can map sort of.
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You couldn't, but we already,
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we know that without this experiment.
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You could map what a bee sees and present it in a form
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so that we could follow it.
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In fact, every bee scientist does that.
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But you don't think there's something greater than bees
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that we can map and then all of a sudden discover something,
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be able to understand a quantum world, quantum mechanics,
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be able to start to be able to make sense.
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Students at MIT study and understand quantum mechanics.
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But they always reduce it to the infant, the physical.
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I mean, they don't really understand.
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Oh, you don't, there's thing, that may be another area
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where there's just a limit to understanding.
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We understand the theories,
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but the world that it describes doesn't make any sense.
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So, you know, the experiment, Schrodinger's cat,
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for example, can understand the theory,
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but as Schrodinger pointed out,
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it's an unintelligible world.
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One of the reasons why Einstein
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was always very skeptical about quantum theory,
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was that he described himself as a classical realist,
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in one's intelligibility.
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He has something in common with infants in that way.
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So, back to linguistics.
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If you could humor me, what are the most beautiful
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or fascinating aspects of language
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or ideas in linguistics or cognitive science
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that you've seen in a lifetime of studying language
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and studying the human mind?
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Well, I think the deepest property of language
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and puzzling property that's been discovered
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is what is sometimes called structure dependence.
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We now understand it pretty well,
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but it was puzzling for a long time.
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I'll give you a concrete example.
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So, suppose you say the guy who fixed the car
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carefully packed his tools, it's ambiguous.
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He could fix the car carefully or carefully pack his tools.
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Suppose you put carefully in front,
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carefully the guy who fixed the car packed his tools,
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then it's carefully packed, not carefully fixed.
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And in fact, you do that even if it makes no sense.
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So, suppose you say carefully,
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the guy who fixed the car is tall.
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You have to interpret it as carefully he's tall,
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even though that doesn't make any sense.
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And notice that that's a very puzzling fact
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because you're relating carefully
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not to the linearly closest verb,
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but to the linearly more remote verb.
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A linear closeness is an easy computation,
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but here you're doing a much more,
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what looks like a more complex computation.
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You're doing something that's taking you essentially
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to the more remote thing.
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It's now, if you look at the actual structure
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of the sentence, where the phrases are and so on,
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turns out you're picking out the structurally closest thing,
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but the linearly more remote thing.
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But notice that what's linear is 100% of what you hear.
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You never hear structure, can't.
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So, what you're doing is,
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and certainly this is universal, all constructions,
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all languages, and what we're compelled to do
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is carry out what looks like the more complex computation
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on material that we never hear,
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and we ignore 100% of what we hear
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and the simplest computation.
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By now, there's even a neural basis for this
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that's somewhat understood,
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and there's good theories by now
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that explain why it's true.
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That's a deep insight into the surprising nature of language
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with many consequences.
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Let me ask you about a field of machine learning,
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There's been a lot of progress in neural networks based,
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neural network based machine learning in the recent decade.
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Of course, neural network research goes back many decades.
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What do you think are the limits of deep learning,
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of neural network based machine learning?
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Well, to give a real answer to that,
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you'd have to understand the exact processes
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that are taking place, and those are pretty opaque.
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So, it's pretty hard to prove a theorem
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about what can be done and what can't be done,
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but I think it's reasonably clear.
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I mean, putting technicalities aside,
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what deep learning is doing
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is taking huge numbers of examples
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and finding some patterns.
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Okay, that could be interesting in some areas it is,
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but we have to ask here a certain question.
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Is it engineering or is it science?
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Engineering in the sense of just trying
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to build something that's useful,
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or science in the sense that it's trying
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to understand something about elements of the world.
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So, take, say, a Google parser.
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We can ask that question.
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Is it useful, yeah, it's pretty useful.
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I use a Google translator, so on engineering grounds,
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it's kind of worth having, like a bulldozer.
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Does it tell you anything about human language?
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Zero, nothing, and in fact, it's very striking.
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From the very beginning,
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it's just totally remote from science.
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So, what is a Google parser doing?
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It's taking an enormous text,
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let's say the Wall Street Journal corpus,
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and asking how close can we come
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to getting the right description
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of every sentence in the corpus.
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Well, every sentence in the corpus
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is essentially an experiment.
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Each sentence that you produce is an experiment
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which says, am I a grammatical sentence?
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The answer is usually yes.
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So, most of the stuff in the corpus
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is grammatical sentences.
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But now, ask yourself, is there any science
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which takes random experiments
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which are carried out for no reason whatsoever
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and tries to find out something from them?
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Like if you're, say, a chemistry PhD student,
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you wanna get a thesis, can you say,
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well, I'm just gonna mix a lot of things together,
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no purpose, and maybe I'll find something.
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You'd be laughed out of the department.
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Science tries to find critical experiments,
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ones that answer some theoretical question.
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Doesn't care about coverage of millions of experiments.
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So, it just begins by being very remote from science
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and it continues like that.
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So, the usual question that's asked about,
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say, a Google parser is how well does it do,
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or some parser, how well does it do on a corpus?
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But there's another question that's never asked.
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How well does it do on something
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that violates all the rules of language?
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So, for example, take the structure dependence case
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Suppose there was a language
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in which you used linear proximity
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as the mode of interpretation.
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These deep learning would work very easily on that.
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In fact, much more easily on an actual language.
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Is that a success?
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No, that's a failure from a scientific point of view.
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It shows that we're not discovering
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the nature of the system at all,
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because it does just as well or even better
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on things that violate the structure of the system.
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And it goes on from there.
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It's not an argument against doing it.
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It is useful to have devices like this.
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So, yes, so neural networks are kind of approximators
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that look, there's echoes of the behavioral debates, right?
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Many of the people in deep learning
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say they've vindicated Terry Sanyosky, for example,
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in his recent books,
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as this vindicates Skinnerian behaviors.
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It doesn't have anything to do with it.
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Yes, but I think there's something
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actually fundamentally different
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when the data set is huge.
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But your point is extremely well taken.
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But do you think we can learn, approximate
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that interesting complex structure of language
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with neural networks
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that will somehow help us understand the science?
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I mean, you find patterns that you hadn't noticed,
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let's say, could be.
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In fact, it's very much like a kind of linguistics
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that's done, what's called corpus linguistics.
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When you, suppose you have some language
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where all the speakers have died out,
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but you have records.
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So you just look at the records
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and see what you can figure out from that.
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It's much better than,
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it's much better to have actual speakers
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where you can do critical experiments.
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But if they're all dead, you can't do them.
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So you have to try to see what you can find out
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from just looking at the data that's around.
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You can learn things.
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Actually, paleoanthropology is very much like that.
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You can't do a critical experiment on
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what happened two million years ago.
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So you're kind of forced just to take what data's around
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and see what you can figure out from it.
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Okay, it's a serious study.
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So let me venture into another whole body of work
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and philosophical question.
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You've said that evil in society arises from institutions,
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not inherently from our nature.
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Do you think most human beings are good,
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they have good intent?
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Or do most have the capacity for intentional evil
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that depends on their upbringing,
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depends on their environment, on context?
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I wouldn't say that they don't arise from our nature.
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Anything we do arises from our nature.
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And the fact that we have certain institutions, not others,
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is one mode in which human nature has expressed itself.
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But as far as we know,
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human nature could yield many different kinds
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The particular ones that have developed
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have to do with historical contingency,
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who conquered whom, and that sort of thing.
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They're not rooted in our nature
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in the sense that they're essential to our nature.
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So it's commonly argued that these days
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that something like market systems
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is just part of our nature.
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But we know from a huge amount of evidence
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that that's not true.
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There's all kinds of other structures.
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It's a particular fact of a moment of modern history.
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Others have argued that the roots of classical liberalism
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actually argue that what's called sometimes
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an instinct for freedom,
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the instinct to be free of domination
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by illegitimate authority is the core of our nature.
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That would be the opposite of this.
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And we don't know.
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We just know that human nature can accommodate both kinds.
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If you look back at your life,
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is there a moment in your intellectual life
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or life in general that jumps from memory
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that brought you happiness
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that you would love to relive again?
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Falling in love, having children.
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What about, so you have put forward into the world
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a lot of incredible ideas in linguistics,
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in cognitive science, in terms of ideas
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that just excites you when it first came to you
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that you would love to relive those moments.
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Well, I mean, when you make a discovery
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about something that's exciting,
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like, say, even the observation of structure dependence
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and on from that, the explanation for it.
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But the major things just seem like common sense.
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So if you go back to take your question
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about external and internal language,
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you go back to, say, the 1950s,
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almost entirely languages regarded an external object,
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something outside the mind.
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It just seemed obvious that that can't be true.
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Like I said, there's something about you
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that determines you're talking English,
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not Swahili or something.
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But that's not really a discovery.
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That's just an observation, what's transparent.
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You might say it's kind of like the 17th century,
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the beginnings of modern science, 17th century.
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They came from being willing to be puzzled
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about things that seemed obvious.
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So it seems obvious that a heavy ball of lead
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will fall faster than a light ball of lead.
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But Galileo was not impressed by the fact
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that it seemed obvious.
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So he wanted to know if it's true.
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They carried out experiments, actually thought experiments,
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never actually carried them out,
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which that can't be true.
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And out of things like that, observations of that kind,
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why does a ball fall to the ground instead of rising,
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let's say, seems obvious, till you start thinking about it,
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because why does steam rise, let's say.
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And I think the beginnings of modern linguistics,
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roughly in the 50s, are kind of like that,
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just being willing to be puzzled about phenomena
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that looked, from some point of view, obvious.
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And for example, a kind of doctrine,
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almost official doctrine of structural linguistics
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in the 50s was that languages can differ
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from one another in arbitrary ways,
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and each one has to be studied on its own
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without any presuppositions.
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In fact, there were similar views among biologists
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about the nature of organisms, that each one's,
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they're so different when you look at them
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that almost anything, you could be almost anything.
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Well, in both domains, it's been learned
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that that's very far from true.
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There are narrow constraints on what could be an organism
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or what could be a language.
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But these are, that's just the nature of inquiry.
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Inquiry. Science in general, yeah, inquiry.
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So one of the peculiar things about us human beings
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Ernest Becker explored it in general.
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Do you ponder the value of mortality?
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Do you think about your own mortality?
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I used to when I was about 12 years old.
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I wondered, I didn't care much about my own mortality,
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but I was worried about the fact that
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if my consciousness disappeared,
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would the entire universe disappear?
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That was frightening.
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Did you ever find an answer to that question?
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No, nobody's ever found an answer,
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but I stopped being bothered by it.
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It's kind of like Woody Allen in one of his films,
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you may recall, he starts, he goes to a shrink
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when he's a child and the shrink asks him,
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what's your problem?
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He says, I just learned that the universe is expanding.
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I can't handle that.
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And then another absurd question is,
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what do you think is the meaning of our existence here,
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our life on Earth, our brief little moment in time?
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That's something we answer by our own activities.
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There's no general answer.
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We determine what the meaning of it is.
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The action determine the meaning.
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Meaning in the sense of significance,
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not meaning in the sense that chair means this.
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But the significance of your life is something you create.
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No, thank you so much for talking to me today.
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It was a huge honor.
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Thank you so much.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Noah Chomsky
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