back to indexNoam Chomsky: Language, Cognition, and Deep Learning | Lex Fridman Podcast #53
link |
The following is a conversation with Noam Chomsky.
link |
He's truly one of the great minds of our time
link |
and is one of the most cited scholars
link |
in the history of our civilization.
link |
He has spent over 60 years at MIT
link |
and recently also joined the University of Arizona
link |
where we met for this conversation.
link |
But it was at MIT about four and a half years ago
link |
when I first met Noam.
link |
In my first few days there,
link |
I remember getting into an elevator status center,
link |
pressing the button for whatever floor,
link |
looking up and realizing it was just me
link |
and Noam Chomsky riding the elevator.
link |
Just me and one of the seminal figures of linguistics,
link |
cognitive science, philosophy,
link |
and political thought in the past century, if not ever.
link |
I tell that silly story because I think
link |
life is made up of funny little defining moments
link |
that you never forget for reasons
link |
that may be too poetic to try and explain.
link |
That was one of mine.
link |
Noam has been an inspiration to me
link |
and millions of others.
link |
It was truly an honor for me
link |
to sit down with him in Arizona.
link |
I traveled there just for this conversation.
link |
And in a rare heartbreaking moment,
link |
after everything was set up and tested,
link |
the camera was moved and accidentally
link |
the recording button was pressed,
link |
stopping the recording.
link |
So I have good audio of both of us,
link |
but no video of Noam.
link |
Just the video of me and my sleep deprived
link |
but excited face that I get to keep
link |
as a reminder of my failures.
link |
Most people just listen to this audio version
link |
for the podcast as opposed to watching it on YouTube.
link |
But still, it's heartbreaking for me.
link |
I hope you understand and still enjoy
link |
this conversation as much as I did.
link |
The depth of intellect that Noam showed
link |
and his willingness to truly listen to me,
link |
a silly looking Russian in a suit.
link |
It was humbling and something I'm deeply grateful for.
link |
As some of you know,
link |
this podcast is a side project for me.
link |
Where my main journey and dream is to build AI systems
link |
that do some good for the world.
link |
This latter effort takes up most of my time,
link |
but for the moment has been mostly private.
link |
But the former, the podcast,
link |
is something I put my heart and soul into.
link |
And I hope you feel that, even when I screw things up.
link |
I recently started doing ads
link |
at the end of the introduction.
link |
I'll do one or two minutes after introducing the episode
link |
and never any ads in the middle
link |
that break the flow of the conversation.
link |
I hope that works for you.
link |
It doesn't hurt the listening experience.
link |
This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
link |
If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube,
link |
give it five stars on Apple Podcast,
link |
support it on Patreon,
link |
or simply connect with me on Twitter.
link |
Alex Friedman, spelled F R I D M A N.
link |
This show is presented by Cash App,
link |
the number one finance app in the App Store.
link |
I personally use Cash App to send money to friends,
link |
but you can also use it to buy, sell,
link |
and deposit Bitcoin in just seconds.
link |
Cash App also has a new investing feature.
link |
You can buy fractions of a stock,
link |
say $1 worth, no matter what the stock price is.
link |
Brokerage services are provided by Cash App Investing,
link |
a subsidiary of Square, and member SIPC.
link |
I'm excited to be working with Cash App
link |
to support one of my favorite organizations called the First,
link |
best known for their first robotics and Lego competitions.
link |
They educate and inspire hundreds of thousands of students
link |
in over 110 countries
link |
and have a perfect rating on Charity Navigator,
link |
which means the donated money is used
link |
to maximum effectiveness.
link |
When you get Cash App from the App Store,
link |
Google Play, and use code LEX Podcast,
link |
you'll get $10 and Cash App will also donate $10 to First,
link |
which again is an organization that I've personally seen
link |
inspire girls and boys to dream of engineering a better world.
link |
And now, here's my conversation with Noam Chomsky.
link |
I apologize for the absurd philosophical question,
link |
but if an alien species were to visit Earth,
link |
do you think we would be able to find a common language
link |
or protocol of communication with them?
link |
There are arguments to the effect that we could.
link |
In fact, one of them was Marv Minsky's.
link |
Back about 20 or 30 years ago,
link |
he performed a brief experiment with a student of his,
link |
Dan Bobrow, who essentially ran the simplest possible
link |
touring machines, just for you to see what would happen.
link |
And most of them crashed,
link |
either got into an infinite loop or stopped.
link |
The few that persisted essentially gave something
link |
like arithmetic, and his conclusion from that was that
link |
if some alien species developed higher intelligence,
link |
they would at least have arithmetic.
link |
They would at least have what the simplest computer would do.
link |
And in fact, he didn't know that at the time,
link |
but the core principles of natural language
link |
are based on operations which yield something like arithmetic
link |
in the limiting case and the minimal case.
link |
So it's conceivable that a mode of communication
link |
could be established based on the core properties
link |
of human language and the core properties of arithmetic,
link |
which maybe are universally shared.
link |
So it's conceivable.
link |
What is the structure of that language,
link |
of language as an internal system inside our mind
link |
versus an external system as it's expressed?
link |
It's not an alternative.
link |
It's two different concepts of language.
link |
It's a simple fact that there's something about you,
link |
a trait of yours, part of the organism you,
link |
that determines that you're talking English
link |
and not Tagalog, let's say.
link |
So there is an inner system.
link |
It determines the sound and meaning
link |
of the infinite number of expressions of your language.
link |
It's not in your foot, obviously.
link |
It's in your brain.
link |
If you look more closely, it's in specific configurations
link |
And that's essentially like the internal structure
link |
of your laptop, whatever programs it has are in there.
link |
Now, one of the things you can do with language,
link |
it's a marginal thing, in fact, is use it to externalize
link |
what's in your head.
link |
Actually, most of your use of language
link |
is thought, internal thought.
link |
But you can do what you and I are now doing.
link |
We can externalize it.
link |
Well, the set of things that we're externalizing
link |
are an external system that there are noises in the atmosphere.
link |
And you can call that language in some other sense of the word.
link |
But it's not a set of alternatives.
link |
These are just different concepts.
link |
So how deep do the roots of language go in our brain?
link |
Is it yet another feature like vision,
link |
or is it something more fundamental from which everything
link |
else springs in the human mind?
link |
Well, in a way, it's like vision.
link |
And there's something about our genetic endowment
link |
that determines that we have a mammalian rather
link |
than an insect visual system.
link |
And there's something in our genetic endowment
link |
that determines that we have a human language faculty.
link |
No other organism has anything remotely similar.
link |
So in that sense, it's internal.
link |
Now, there is a long tradition, which I think
link |
is valid going back centuries, to the early scientific
link |
revolution, at least, that holds that language
link |
is the core of human cognitive nature.
link |
It's the mode for constructing thoughts
link |
and expressing them.
link |
That is what forms thought.
link |
And it's got fundamental creative capacities.
link |
It's free, independent, unbounded, and so on.
link |
And undoubtedly, I think the basis
link |
for our creative capacities and the other remarkable human
link |
capacities that lead to the unique achievements
link |
and not so great achievements of the species.
link |
The capacity to think and reason.
link |
Do you think that's deeply linked with language?
link |
Do you think the way the internal language system
link |
is essentially the mechanism by which we also reason
link |
It is undoubtedly the mechanism by which we reason.
link |
There may also be other fact there are undoubtedly
link |
other faculties involved in reasoning.
link |
We have a kind of scientific faculty.
link |
Nobody knows what it is.
link |
But whatever it is that enables us
link |
to pursue certain lines of endeavor and inquiry
link |
and to decide what makes sense and doesn't make sense
link |
and to achieve a certain degree of understanding
link |
of the world, that uses language but goes beyond it.
link |
Just as using our capacity for arithmetic
link |
is not the same as having the capacity.
link |
The idea of capacity, our biology, evolution,
link |
you've talked about it defining essentially our capacity,
link |
our limit, and our scope.
link |
Can you try to define what limit and scope are?
link |
And the bigger question, do you think
link |
it's possible to find the limit of human cognition?
link |
Well, that's an interesting question.
link |
It's commonly believed, most scientists believe,
link |
that a human intelligence can answer any question in principle.
link |
I think that's a very strange belief.
link |
If we're biological organisms, which are not angels,
link |
then our capacities ought to have scope and limits,
link |
which are interrelated.
link |
Can you define those two terms?
link |
Well, let's take a concrete example.
link |
Your genetic endowment determines
link |
that you can have a male in visual system, arms and legs
link |
And therefore become a rich, complex organism.
link |
But if you look at that same genetic endowment,
link |
it prevents you from developing in other directions.
link |
There's no kind of experience which
link |
would yield the embryo to develop an insect visual system
link |
or to develop wings instead of arms.
link |
So the very endowment that confers richness and complexity
link |
also sets bounds on what can be attained.
link |
Now, I assume that our cognitive capacities
link |
are part of the organic world.
link |
Therefore, they should have the same properties.
link |
If they had no built in capacity to develop
link |
a rich and complex structure, we would have understand nothing.
link |
Just as if your genetic endowment did not
link |
compel you to develop arms and legs,
link |
you would just be some kind of a random amoeboid creature
link |
with no structure at all.
link |
So I think it's plausible to assume that there are limits.
link |
And I think we even have some evidence as to what they are.
link |
So for example, there's a classic moment
link |
in the history of science.
link |
At the time of Newton, there was from Galileo to Newton,
link |
modern science, developed on a fundamental assumption, which
link |
Newton also accepted, namely that the world,
link |
as the entire universe, is a mechanical object.
link |
And by mechanical, they meant something
link |
like the kinds of artifacts that were being developed
link |
by skilled artisans all over Europe, the Gears, the Leavers,
link |
And their belief was, well, the world
link |
is just a more complex variant of this.
link |
Newton, to his astonishment and distress,
link |
proved that there are no machines,
link |
that there's interaction without contact.
link |
His contemporaries, like Leibniz and Huygens,
link |
just dismissed this as returning to the mysticism
link |
of the Neoscholastics.
link |
And Newton agreed.
link |
He said, it is totally absurd.
link |
No person of any scientific intelligence
link |
could ever accept this for a moment.
link |
In fact, he spent the rest of his life
link |
trying to get around it somehow, as did many other scientists.
link |
That was the very criterion of intelligibility,
link |
for say, Galileo or Newton theory did not
link |
produce an intelligible world unless you
link |
get duplicated in a machine.
link |
He said, you can't.
link |
There are no machines.
link |
And finally, after a long struggle, took a long time,
link |
scientists just accepted this as common sense.
link |
But that's a significant moment.
link |
That means they abandoned the search
link |
for an intelligible world.
link |
And the great philosophers of the time
link |
understood that very well.
link |
So for example, David Hume, in his encomium to Newton,
link |
wrote that he was the greatest thinker ever and so on.
link |
He said that he unveiled many of the secrets of nature.
link |
But by showing the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy,
link |
mechanical science, he left us with,
link |
he showed that there are mysteries which ever will remain.
link |
And science just changed its goals.
link |
It abandoned the mystery.
link |
He said, can't solve it.
link |
We'll put it aside.
link |
We only look for intelligible theories.
link |
Newton's theories were intelligible.
link |
It's just what they described wasn't.
link |
Well, Locke said the same thing.
link |
I think they're basically right.
link |
And if so, that should something about the limits
link |
of human cognition.
link |
We cannot attain the goal of understanding
link |
the world, of finding an intelligible world.
link |
This mechanical philosophy, Galileo to Newton,
link |
this good case can be made that that's
link |
our instinctive conception of how things work.
link |
So if say infants are tested with things that, if this moves,
link |
and then this moves, they kind of invent something
link |
that must be invisible that's in between them
link |
that's making the move and so on.
link |
Yeah, we like physical contact.
link |
Something about our brain seeks.
link |
Makes us want a world like that.
link |
Just like it wants a world that has regular geometric figures.
link |
So for example, Descartes pointed this out,
link |
that if you have an infant who's never seen a triangle before
link |
and you draw a triangle, the infant
link |
will see a distorted triangle.
link |
Not whatever crazy figure it actually is.
link |
Three lines not coming quite together.
link |
One of them a little bit curved and so on.
link |
We just impose a conception of the world
link |
in terms of geometric, perfect geometric objects.
link |
It's now been shown that goes way beyond that.
link |
That if you show on a tachistoscope,
link |
let's say a couple of lights shining,
link |
you do it three or four times in a row,
link |
what people actually see is a rigid object in motion,
link |
not whatever is there.
link |
We all know that from a television set basically.
link |
So that gives us hints of potential limits to our cognition.
link |
I think it does, but it's a very contested view.
link |
If you do a poll among scientists, it's impossible.
link |
We can understand anything.
link |
Let me ask and give me a chance with this.
link |
So I just spent a day at a company called Neuralink.
link |
And what they do is try to design what's called a brain machine,
link |
brain computer interface.
link |
So they try to do thousands readings in the brain,
link |
be able to read what the neurons are firing,
link |
and then stimulate back, so two way.
link |
Do you think their dream is to expand the capacity of the brain
link |
to attain information, sort of increase the bandwidth
link |
to which we can search Google kind of thing?
link |
Do you think our cognitive capacity
link |
might be expanded, our linguistic capacity,
link |
our ability to reason might be expanded
link |
by adding a machine into the picture?
link |
It can be expanded in a certain sense,
link |
but a sense that was known thousands of years ago.
link |
A book expands your cognitive capacity.
link |
So this could expand it too.
link |
But it's not a fundamental expansion.
link |
It's not totally new things could be understood.
link |
Well, nothing that goes beyond our native cognitive capacities,
link |
just like you can't turn the visual system
link |
into an insect system.
link |
Well, I mean, the thought is perhaps you can't directly,
link |
You could, but we already know that without this experiment.
link |
You could map what a bee sees and present it in a form
link |
so that we could follow it.
link |
In fact, every bee scientist does it.
link |
But you don't think there's something greater than bees
link |
that we can map and then all of a sudden discover something,
link |
be able to understand a quantum world, quantum mechanics,
link |
be able to start to be able to make sense.
link |
Students at MIT study and understand quantum mechanics.
link |
But they always reduce it to the infant, the physical.
link |
I mean, they don't really understand it.
link |
Oh, there's a thing.
link |
That may be another area where there's just
link |
a limit to understanding.
link |
We understand the theories, but the world that it describes
link |
doesn't make any sense.
link |
So the experiment, Schrodinger's cat, for example,
link |
can understand the theory.
link |
But as Schrodinger pointed out, it's an unintelligible world.
link |
One of the reasons why Einstein was always
link |
very skeptical about quantum theory.
link |
He described himself as a classical realist in one's
link |
He has something in common with infants in that way.
link |
So back to linguistics.
link |
If you could humor me, what are the most beautiful
link |
or fascinating aspects of language or ideas
link |
in linguistics or cognitive science
link |
that you've seen in a lifetime of studying language
link |
and studying the human mind?
link |
Well, I think the deepest property of language
link |
and puzzling property that's been discovered
link |
is what is sometimes called structure dependence.
link |
We now understand it pretty well,
link |
but it was puzzling for a long time.
link |
I'll give you a concrete example.
link |
So suppose you say the guy who fixed the car carefully
link |
packed his tools, it's ambiguous, he could fix the car
link |
carefully or carefully pack his tools.
link |
Suppose you put carefully in front,
link |
carefully the guy who fixed the car packed his tools,
link |
then it's carefully packed, not carefully fixed.
link |
And in fact, you do that even if it makes no sense.
link |
So suppose you say carefully the guy who fixed the car is tall.
link |
You have to interpret it as carefully he's tall,
link |
even though that doesn't make any sense.
link |
And notice that that's a very puzzling fact,
link |
because you're relating carefully not
link |
to the linearly closest verb, but to the linearly more
link |
Linear approach closeness is an easy computation.
link |
But here you're doing much more of what
link |
looks like a more complex computation.
link |
You're doing something that's taking you essentially
link |
to the more remote thing.
link |
If you look at the actual structure of the sentence,
link |
where the phrases are and so on, turns out
link |
you're picking out the structurally closest thing,
link |
but the linearly more remote thing.
link |
But notice that what's linear is 100% of what you hear.
link |
You never hear structure.
link |
So what you're doing is, instantly,
link |
this is universal, all constructions, all languages.
link |
And what we're compelled to do is
link |
carry out what looks like the more complex computation
link |
on material that we never hear.
link |
And we ignore 100% of what we hear
link |
and the simplest computation.
link |
But by now, there's even a neural basis
link |
for this that's somewhat understood.
link |
And there's good theories by now that explain
link |
That's a deep insight into the surprising nature
link |
of language with many consequences.
link |
Let me ask you about a field of machine learning,
link |
There's been a lot of progress in neural networks based,
link |
neural network based machine learning in the recent decade.
link |
Of course, neural network research
link |
goes back many decades.
link |
What do you think are the limits of deep learning,
link |
of neural network based machine learning?
link |
Well, to give a real answer to that,
link |
you'd have to understand the exact processes that
link |
And those are pretty opaque.
link |
So it's pretty hard to prove a theorem about what can be done
link |
and what can't be done.
link |
But I think it's reasonably clear.
link |
I mean, putting technicalities aside,
link |
what deep learning is doing is taking huge numbers of examples
link |
and finding some patterns.
link |
OK, that could be interesting in some areas it is.
link |
But we have to ask here a certain question.
link |
Is it engineering or is it science?
link |
Engineering in the sense of just trying
link |
to build something that's useful,
link |
or science in the sense that it's
link |
trying to understand something about elements of the world.
link |
So it takes a Google parser.
link |
We can ask that question.
link |
It's pretty useful.
link |
I use a Google translator.
link |
So on engineering grounds, it's kind of worth having,
link |
Does it tell you anything about human language?
link |
And in fact, it's very striking.
link |
From the very beginning, it's just totally remote from science.
link |
So what is a Google parser doing?
link |
It's taking an enormous text, let's say,
link |
the Wall Street Journal corpus, and asking,
link |
how close can we come to getting the right description
link |
of every sentence in the corpus?
link |
Well, every sentence in the corpus
link |
is essentially an experiment.
link |
Each sentence that you produce is an experiment,
link |
which is, am I a grammatical sentence?
link |
The answer is usually yes.
link |
So most of the stuff in the corpus is grammatical sentences.
link |
But now ask yourself, is there any science
link |
which takes random experiments, which
link |
are carried out for no reason whatsoever,
link |
and tries to find out something from them?
link |
Like if you're, say, a chemistry PhD student,
link |
you want to get a thesis, can you say, well,
link |
I'm just going to mix a lot of things together, no purpose.
link |
And maybe I'll find something.
link |
It'd be left out of the department.
link |
Science tries to find critical experiments, ones
link |
that answer some theoretical question.
link |
Doesn't care about coverage of millions of experiments.
link |
So it just begins by being very remote from science,
link |
and it continues like that.
link |
So the usual question that's asked
link |
about, say, a Google parser, is how well does it do,
link |
or some parser, how well does it do on a corpus?
link |
But there's another question that's never asked.
link |
How well does it do on something that violates
link |
all the rules of language?
link |
So for example, take the structure dependence case
link |
Suppose there was a language in which
link |
you used linear proximity as the mode of interpretation.
link |
These deep learning would work very easily on that.
link |
In fact, much more easily on an actual language.
link |
Is that a success?
link |
No, that's a failure.
link |
From a scientific point of view, it's a failure.
link |
It shows that we're not discovering
link |
the nature of the system at all, because it does just as well,
link |
or even better on things that violate the structure
link |
And it goes on from there.
link |
It's not an argument against doing it.
link |
It is useful to have devices like this.
link |
So yes, neural networks are kind of approximators that look.
link |
There's echoes of the behavioral debates, right?
link |
Many of the people in deep learning
link |
say they've vindicated Terry Sanyosky, for example,
link |
in his recent books.
link |
This vindicates skinnerian behaviors.
link |
It doesn't have anything to do with it.
link |
Yes, but I think there's something actually fundamentally
link |
different when the data set is huge.
link |
But your point is extremely well taken.
link |
But do you think we can learn, approximate,
link |
that interesting complex structure of language
link |
with neural networks that will somehow help us
link |
understand the science?
link |
I mean, you find patterns that you hadn't noticed, let's say.
link |
In fact, it's very much like a kind of linguistics
link |
that's done, what's called corpus linguistics.
link |
When you suppose you have some language where all the speakers
link |
have died out, but you have records.
link |
So you just look at the records and see
link |
what you can figure out from that.
link |
It's much better than, it's much better
link |
to have actual speakers where you can do critical experiments.
link |
But if they're all dead, you can't do them.
link |
So you have to try to see what you
link |
can find out from just looking at the data that's around.
link |
You can learn things.
link |
Actually, paleoanthropology is very much like that.
link |
You can't do a critical experiment
link |
on what happened two million years ago.
link |
So you kind of force just to take what data is around
link |
and see what you can figure out from it.
link |
OK, it's a serious study.
link |
So let me venture into another whole body of work
link |
and philosophical question.
link |
You've said that evil in society arises from institutions,
link |
not inherently from our nature.
link |
Do you think most human beings are good?
link |
They have good intent?
link |
Or do most have the capacity for intentional evil
link |
that depends on their upbringing,
link |
depends on their environment, on context?
link |
I wouldn't say that they don't arise from our nature.
link |
Anything we do arises from our nature.
link |
And the fact that we have certain institutions, not others,
link |
is one mode in which human nature has expressed itself.
link |
But as far as we know, human nature
link |
could yield many different kinds of institutions.
link |
The particular ones that have developed
link |
have to do with historical contingency, who conquered whom,
link |
and that sort of thing.
link |
They're not rooted in our nature in the sense
link |
that they're essential to our nature.
link |
So it's commonly argued that these days that something
link |
like market systems is just part of our nature.
link |
But we know from a huge amount of evidence
link |
that that's not true.
link |
There's all kinds of other structures.
link |
It's a particular fact of a moment of modern history.
link |
Others have argued that the roots of classical liberalism
link |
actually argue that what's called sometimes
link |
an instinct for freedom, an instinct
link |
to be free of domination by illegitimate authority
link |
is the core of our nature.
link |
That would be the opposite of this.
link |
And we don't know.
link |
We just know that human nature can accommodate both kinds.
link |
If you look back at your life, is there
link |
a moment in your intellectual life, or life in general,
link |
that jumps from memory that brought you happiness,
link |
that you would love to relive again?
link |
Falling in love, having children.
link |
What about, so you have put forward into the world
link |
a lot of incredible ideas in linguistics,
link |
in cognitive science, in terms of ideas
link |
that just excites you when it first came to you,
link |
that you would love to relive those moments?
link |
Well, I mean, when you make a discovery about something
link |
that's exciting, like, say, even the observation
link |
of structured dependence and on from that,
link |
the explanation for it.
link |
But the major things just seem like common sense.
link |
So if you go back to take your question
link |
about external and internal language,
link |
you go back to, say, the 1950s, almost entirely languages
link |
regarded an external object, something outside the mind.
link |
It just seemed obvious that that can't be true.
link |
Like I said, there's something about you
link |
that determines you're talking English, not Swahili or something.
link |
But that's not really a discovery.
link |
That's just an observation that's transparent.
link |
You might say it's kind of like the 17th century,
link |
the beginnings of modern science, 17th century.
link |
They came from being willing to be puzzled about things
link |
that seemed obvious.
link |
So it seems obvious that a heavy ball of ladle
link |
fall faster than a light ball of ladle.
link |
But Galileo was not impressed by the fact
link |
that it seemed obvious.
link |
So he wanted to know if it's true.
link |
He carried out experiments, actually thought experiments,
link |
never actually carried them out, which
link |
could that can't be true.
link |
And out of things like that, observations of that kind,
link |
why does a ball fall to the ground instead of rising,
link |
let's say, seems obvious.
link |
Do you start thinking about it?
link |
Because why does it, why does steam rise, let's say?
link |
And I think the beginnings of modern linguistics, roughly
link |
in the 50s, are kind of like that,
link |
just being willing to be puzzled about phenomena that
link |
looked, from some point of view, obvious.
link |
For example, a kind of doctrine, almost official doctrine,
link |
of structural linguistics in the 50s
link |
was that languages can differ from one another
link |
in arbitrary ways.
link |
And each one has to be studied on its own
link |
without any presuppositions.
link |
In fact, there were similar views among biologists
link |
about the nature of organisms, that each one is,
link |
they're so different when you look at them,
link |
that almost anything, you could be almost anything.
link |
Well, in both domains, it's been learned
link |
that that's very far from true.
link |
They're very narrow constraints on what
link |
could be an organism or what could be a language.
link |
But these are, that's just the nature of inquiry.
link |
Science in general, yeah, inquiry.
link |
So one of the peculiar things about us human beings
link |
Ernest Becker explored it in general.
link |
Do you ponder the value of mortality?
link |
Do you think about your own mortality?
link |
I used to when I was about 12 years old.
link |
I wondered, I didn't care much about my own mortality,
link |
but I was worried about the fact that if my consciousness
link |
disappeared, would the entire universe disappear?
link |
That was frightening.
link |
Did you ever find an answer to that question?
link |
No, nobody's ever found an answer.
link |
But I stopped being bothered by it.
link |
It's kind of like Woody Allen in one of his films,
link |
you may recall, he starts, he goes to a shrink
link |
when he's a child and the shrink asks him,
link |
what's your problem?
link |
He says, I just learned that the universe is expanding.
link |
I can't handle that.
link |
And then another absurd question is,
link |
what do you think is the meaning of our existence here,
link |
our life on Earth, our brief little moment in time?
link |
It's something we answer by our own activities.
link |
There's no general answer.
link |
We determine what the meaning of it is.
link |
The action determine the meaning.
link |
Meaning in the sense of significance,
link |
not meaning in the sense that a chair means this,
link |
but the significance of your life is something you create.
link |
No, thank you so much for talking today.
link |
It was a huge honor.
link |
Thank you so much.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Noam Chomsky
link |
and thank you to our presenting sponsor, Cash App.
link |
Download it, use code LEX Podcast.
link |
You'll get $10 and $10 will go to first.
link |
A STEM education nonprofit that inspires hundreds
link |
of thousands of young minds to learn
link |
and to dream of engineering our future.
link |
If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube,
link |
give us five stars on Apple Podcasts,
link |
support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter.
link |
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.