Definition of Consciousness: 2nd Poll

[Copernicus]

Unter, I have no doubt that you would have seen the debate differently, given that you lack even a rudimentary understanding of the subject matter and its historical context.

I actually felt some sympathy for both sides, because Chomsky was talking about an "ideal speaker-hearer" in those days. However, he has always seen the subject matter of linguistics as fundamentally psychological in nature. IMO, he makes a fairly obvious mistake there, because language can be studied from two very different perspectives: a psychological system and a social system. When you talk about "language change" or "discourse theory", it is impossible to ignore the social perspective, but Chomsky tends to dismiss it as not very relevant to "real" linguistics, i.e. the psychological aspect of language that he is interested in. Katz focused on Chomsky's frequent use of the term "ideal", which pretty much allowed Chomsky to insert a backdoor reference to the social systemic nature of language without actually consciously admitting it.

So, on balance, I think that Jerry ought to have won his bet, but I have other differences with Chomsky on the nature of the so-called "Grammar". I think that he has an impossibly muddled concept of the separation between grammatical structure and behavioral strategies. He used to refer to the former as "linguistic competence" and the latter as "linguistic performance", but he pretty much stopped using those terms after so many of his colleagues poked holes in his distinction. Nowadays, he is a lot vaguer on the distinction, but he doesn't seem to have entertained the thought that this distinction was simply mistaken from the very beginning.

 

[untermensche]

I asked a question. It was totally ignored.

If you make claims and I ask for some clarification and am totally ignored then of course this goes nowhere.

How is the visual capacity platonic?

How is the language capacity a psychological theory?

How is the minimalist program a psychological theory?

Chomsky's theories are biological.

He talks of an evolved capacity that allows for language acquisition. Like a system that allows for vision, or a system that allows for walking, or a system that allows hearing. A biological system. Supposedly a functional subsystem of the brain.

And he has been trying and possibly even badly at times to define the nature of that capacity. He is working totally in the dark. Nothing is known about how the brain does things like allow for language acquisition at a certain stage of development.

He is looking for the language capacity like somebody studying vision would be looking for the visual capacity in the brain. How the brain does it.

 

[Subsymbolic]

I am not interested at all in post #218.

It stimulates no thoughts.

I posted a video and in it Chomsky schools some "linguists" about what they are doing.

It is you making an explicit claim that Chomsky explicitly states is false. In any normal person this would be the point you concede you were wrong. But you just posted another video and carried on as if nothing had happened.

 

[Copernicus]

Be patient, unter. You aren't asking the right questions, because you lack the background to understand what terms like "language capacity" mean. As I told you earlier, the term can have different meanings in different contexts. Chomsky often uses it in a very specific way, and that has to do with his views on the fundamental nature of how we perceive well-formed linguistic structures. You are trying to interpret his language in plain English, but it is really highly technical.

 

[fromderinside]

<snip>

Chomsky's theories are biological.

He talks of an evolved capacity that allows for language acquisition. Like a system that allows for vision, or a system that allows for walking, or a system that allows hearing. A biological system. Supposedly a functional subsystem of the brain.

And he has been trying and possibly even badly at times to define the nature of that capacity. He is working totally in the dark. Nothing is known about how the brain does things like allow for language acquisition at a certain stage of development.

He is looking for the language capacity like somebody studying vision would be looking for the visual capacity in the brain. How the brain does it.

You make a claim then you go on and misstate how vision and hearing study os pursued. Apparently this is done to avoid actually examining the biological basis for vision and hearing which, you claim he employs as models for understanding linguistics.

Then you admit he does his analysis badly, but, follow that right up a misstatement of how neuroscientists look for visual capacity. They don't look for it in the brain. They connect the sense capacity of receptors and their representations of visual scene to the nervous system and how animals, including humans, physically navigate as a result.

For most of those who study the nervous system they start at sense and effector relationships then try to work their way back to neural processing . They do this for the obvious reason that sensor and effector are directly accessible whilst neural processes are hidden inside the organism.

Seems to me that would require connecting articulation and acoustic and visual symbol processing in the sense and response aspects of language to and from the nervous system. Unless systems for articulation are studied it seems rather dubious that the brain would demand them to work a particular way. Rather the nervous system would probably adapt to those peripherally determined attributes of language production and reception.

Of course I know nothing since I only study vision, hearing, sound production, visual-auditory guided navigation and responsiveness as as they relate to fitness.

 

[untermensche]

Be patient, unter. You aren't asking the right questions, because you lack the background to understand what terms like "language capacity" mean. As I told you earlier, the term can have different meanings in different contexts. Chomsky often uses it in a very specific way, and that has to do with his views on the fundamental nature of how we perceive well-formed linguistic structures. You are trying to interpret his language in plain English, but it is really highly technical.

I know exactly what Chomsky means by it.

I am very patient.

You have ignored all questions as if you are teaching me something.

You are not.

You are simply rude.

 

[untermensche]

<snip>

Chomsky's theories are biological.

He talks of an evolved capacity that allows for language acquisition. Like a system that allows for vision, or a system that allows for walking, or a system that allows hearing. A biological system. Supposedly a functional subsystem of the brain.

And he has been trying and possibly even badly at times to define the nature of that capacity. He is working totally in the dark. Nothing is known about how the brain does things like allow for language acquisition at a certain stage of development.

He is looking for the language capacity like somebody studying vision would be looking for the visual capacity in the brain. How the brain does it.

You make a claim then you go on and misstate how vision and hearing study os pursued.

I do not. To study how the brain creates the visual experience requires first coming up with models and hypotheses.

That is exactly what Chomsky is doing with the language capacity. He is trying to model what would be required for a system to have the characteristics to generate the human language ability.

Then you admit he does his analysis badly, but, follow that right up a misstatement of how neuroscientists look for visual capacity.

His ideas have evolved over the years. I doubt you are familiar with any aspect of the minimalist program.

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

If his ideas have evolved then it is Chomsky, not me saying that he has gotten things wrong in the past.

 

[bilby]

Be patient, unter. You aren't asking the right questions, because you lack the background to understand what terms like "language capacity" mean. As I told you earlier, the term can have different meanings in different contexts. Chomsky often uses it in a very specific way, and that has to do with his views on the fundamental nature of how we perceive well-formed linguistic structures. You are trying to interpret his language in plain English, but it is really highly technical.

I know exactly what Chomsky means by it.

I am very patient.

You have ignored all questions as if you are teaching me something.

You are not.

You are simply rude.

You REALLY need to READ and to try to UNDERSTAND the article at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection

I cannot overstress how important or how relevant this is, specifically to your comments in the quoted post; and more generally in othrposts to which I have previously responded with this highly relevant link (which I have no doubt you will, once again, either ignore or misinterpret as some kind of insult).

If you really don't grasp its relevance, then you need to read it again, along with your own post(s), until you do understand. Because it's essential to further discussion of any kind that you do understand this concept - you haven't yet engaged in discussion of anything, and cannot do so while you are mired in this cognitive cesspool.

 

[untermensche]

Since you have absolutely nothing to say about Chomsky or his work or my interpretations of his work your post is completely devoid of any pertinent content.

It is a childish rant. A stupidity.

It is ignorant harassment.

Every time you do it it is ignorant harassment.

You clearly have no ideas on this topic.

You should just stay out.

 

[Treedbear]

I find this poll incomprehensible.

Quiet! They'll be no talking in the back.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I find this poll incomprehensible.

Yeah, me too, now.

I guess posters would do well developing their skill at using the ignore feature. We would just have much leaner and more comprehensible discussions. I guess posters are naturally attracted by the Dark Side of the Force.

I'll pray for your souls.
EB

 

[bilby]

I find this poll incomprehensible.

Yeah, me too, now.

I guess posters would do well developing their skill at using the ignore feature. We would just have much leaner and more comprehensible discussions. I guess posters are naturally attracted by the Dark Side of the Force.

I'll pray for your souls.
EB

Our souls? Are souls our souls? Or are souls arseholes?

 

[Subsymbolic]

I find this poll incomprehensible.

Yeah, me too, now.

I guess posters would do well developing their skill at using the ignore feature. We would just have much leaner and more comprehensible discussions. I guess posters are naturally attracted by the Dark Side of the Force.

I'll pray for your souls.
EB

Yeah, you have me bang to rights. Sorry.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Yeah, you have me bang to rights. Sorry.

You're not the main offender. Some posters here are still maintaining a daily routine of trying to bring Him to reason after several years of trying without any improvement.

Ah, it must be something deep down we have in our genes.

As a result of just one mutation would you say?

We'll see how well you resist temptation in the near future.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

I'll pray for your souls.
EB

Our souls? Are souls our souls? Or are souls arseholes?

I'm certainly not going to pray for your arsehole.

There are limits.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

It seems we're not going anywhere with this poll.

Not enough voters, perhaps still too many options, and in any case not one that could please most people.

Still all too true I guess.

Those who can't find any one option they would be pleased to vote for could perhaps try to explain what they think is missing.

No luck here either.

EB

 

[Subsymbolic]

Yeah, you have me bang to rights. Sorry.

You're not the main offender. Some posters here are still maintaining a daily routine of trying to bring Him to reason after several years of trying without any improvement.

Ah, it must be something deep down we have in our genes.

As a result of just one mutation would you say?

We'll see how well you resist temptation in the near future.
EB

Oh I'll do badly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILwZmZdk28Y

 

[Copernicus]

Here is a video where 80 something Chomsky eviscerates so-called working "linguists". I'm sure they all have PhD's.

It is a great video to understand the power of mass delusion.

I've finally had time to listen to the entire lecture, and I see no reason to revise my earlier remarks that you lack the necessary background to understand most of what Chomsky's theory is about. Generative linguistic theory purports to be a psychological theory of language, because it has always been grounded in mental intuitions of well-formedness. That is the nature of the data that it attempts to explain. To say that the theory is "biological" and not "psychological" is nonsensical, because human psychology is grounded in human biology. There is no reason to make such a distinction. Sometimes Chomsky addresses biological issues, e.g. biological evolution, because he believes that our biology plays a huge role in our cognitive development.

The video is simply a guest lecture given to a room full of academics from different disciplines. There is no general criticism of "working linguists", and Chomsky focuses on a fairly narrow range of potboiler issues that have been around since his career began in the mid-1950s as a protege of Zellig Harris. Chomsky's "transformational grammar" bears a superficial similarity of Harris's "transformational grammar", but Chomsky explicitly grounded his approach to language as intuition-based rather than corpus-based. I once attended some lectures by Harris at Columbia Universtiy and was very impressed with the similarity in styles between the two men. Like Chomsky, Harris would lecture with a kind of dismissive tone towards the work of those he was criticizing--as if they were just stating trivialities that were of little interest to serious linguists--and he would not let his questioners finish their sentences without jumping in with a dismissive wave of the hand and set of remarks. Chomsky did that a lot with audience participants at the end of this lecture.

To understand the lecture, one really needs to know about Chomsky's rather long battle against statistical approaches to linguistic analysis. So most of the video was almost identical in content and tone to one that he has been giving since the 1960s. Chomsky is clearly piqued by the fact that statistical approaches suddenly blossomed in the 1980s and actually eclipsed Natural Language Processing techniques based on generative analyses afterwards. In 1988, the late computational linguist, Fred Jelinek, quipped "Anytime a linguist leaves the group the recognition rate goes up", although the popular version of that quote became "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of our speech recognition system goes up." There are very good reasons for that, but the types of statistical methods that were initially so successful could never scale up for the the reasons that Chomsky mentioned (e.g. that important aspects of language tend to rely on structural processing rather than linear processing). So statistical methods are very good at assigning meaningful classifications to text, but they are very limited at so-called "deep understanding" applications. That is, it is possible to achieve the same results with statistical methods if you simply scramble word order within a sequence of text, effectively producing nonsensical strings of words but assigning coherent meaning to them. The problem has always been that approaches based on generative parsing systems are expensive to create and maintain. Basically, you need to achieve full "artificial intelligence" in order to make them work. So work on sophisticated syntactic parsing systems hasn't progressed much since the 1980s, and modern text analysis systems tend to combine shallow parsing techniques with very effective statistical processing. What upsets Chomsky about this is that such hybrid systems do not in any sense replicate the methods that humans actually use in processing natural language.

 

[beero1000]

Duty calls.

 

[beero1000]

Like Chomsky, Harris would lecture with a kind of dismissive tone towards the work of those he was criticizing--as if they were just stating trivialities that were of little interest to serious linguists--and he would not let his questioners finish their sentences without jumping in with a dismissive wave of the hand and set of remarks. Chomsky did that a lot with audience participants at the end of this lecture.

Is that common in the field? I'm in math, and I've never seen anything like it. Was uncomfortable to watch.