But, that's like saying that if the woolly heron flies too close to the Sun before she reaches the gates of Paradise the result will be either an excluded middle or an extruded muddle, or perhaps even a great stinking colonic mud pie, that disappears without further ado down a badly encrusted cosmic s-bend.

(Y) I was gonna go with 'a load of dingo's kidneys' but it looks a bit inadequate now! X-)

But, that's like saying that if the woolly heron flies too close to the Sun before she reaches the gates of Paradise the result will be either an excluded middle or an extruded muddle, or perhaps even a great stinking colonic mud pie, that disappears without further ado down a badly encrusted cosmic s-bend. — John

It implies synergy comes at the price of normalizing the impact of its own individual parts. Like the Hindu Goddess Kali synergy becomes synonymous with destruction and logic itself becomes context dependent. What we call living can also depend upon the context and, for example, IBM's computer "Watson" surprised everyone when it acquired an unsolicited case of potty mouth. Humor itself can be said to be an intrinsic expression of nature rather than exclusive to humanity with humor and beauty becoming complimentary-opposites. In fact, Watson was deliberately designed not to resemble a human mind and brain to avoid just such incidents.

The relationship of ideas to language

Chomsky thinks that language is primarily designed as a system or thought, secondarily as as system of externalization and tertiarily as a system of communication. He thinks the most fundamental formation of language lies in the Merge function. His Merge Theory

Merge (usually capitalized) is one of the basic operations in the Minimalist Program, a leading approach to generative syntax, when two syntactic objects are combined to form a new syntactic unit (a set). Merge also has the property of recursion in that it may apply to its own output: the objects combined by Merge are either lexical items or sets that were themselves formed by Merge

Wikipedia

There are two distinct types of Merge, external which involves the merging of two separate items, and internat which involves merging of two related items, one item within the other.

Interesting theory here is lecture he gave at the end of last year about the Merge Theory


Whether of not language was formed over a long period of gradual changes vs formed quickly, abruptly in evolutionary terms has been a topic of debate for a long time. Chomsky thinks that humans language ability arose from a single mutation about 100,000 years ago and it quickly spread.

Chomsky thinks that humans language ability arose from a single mutation about 100,000 years ago and it quickly spread. — Cavacava

That's an example of where you can go off the rails if you can only think about recursion/negation in crisp computational terms.

To Chomsky, it seems like the basic trick of articulate speech is an all or nothing affair. And therefore, if the ability for language is biologically based, it had to emerge abruptly as a "hopeful monster" mutant.

But neuroscience should tell you that recursion and negation are a generalised feature of brain architecture - brains being organised by dichotomies and hierarchies. So the kind of nested hierarchical organisation that characterises syntactical speech acts is simply the general rule for all motor planning. Even opening a door or chipping away a flint axe is a hierarchically developed plan with general intents and a sequence of sub-acts.

So what Chomsky sees as the hard part - the evolution of recursion - is already a general fact of brains. It is just that other kinds of motor act are less socially programmatic, more fluid and dynamic, than grammatical speech. The rules for opening doors and chipping flints exist, but only in a much vaguer or more localised sense. They are task specific assemblages, not universalised and abstracted.

The far more plausible evolutionary hypothesis is the "singing ape".

Hominids are social species and making emotional or expressive noises communicates a lot of useful information. Chimps screech and howl and chatter. So there would have been selective pressure that would have led to an articulate vocal tract in early humans. A greater complexity of noise-making would have justified changes to the mouth and throat so that air could be vibrated and bitten into phonemic chunks, and chained together with syntactic variety.

It is in fact quite a neural feat to be able to control the vocal cords so that distinctive trains of noise can be produced at the rate of five or more contrasting sounds a second. The underlying morphological changes would have taken at least a few hundred thousand years to evolve, and so must have had a good justification just in terms of the advantages in social co-ordination they allowed.

So we start with apes making analog expressive noises - the screeches and mutters that communicate indexically by how loud or soft they are, how angry or reassuring they sound. There is modulation and pattern, but it varies in continuous fashion and so any communicative distinctions are vague. It is noise making of a kind that couldn't represent the sharp binary distinctions of symbolic logic, for example. Well a chimp could hoot a morse code perhaps, but that level of binariness is unnatural even for us.

Then as an extension of this, hominids developed the trick of vocal digitisation. The voice box, throat, tongue and lips all changed so that rapid and distinctively varied patterns of noise could be produced.

Exactly when this happened is controversial. There used to be good arguments that Neanderthals lacked the vocal equipment of Homo sap - no fat tongue in an arched palate, no dropped larynx and altered hyoid bone. But now the evidence seems to be swinging towards Neanderthals being more human-like both in vocalisation ability and symbolic capacity.

But whatever, the morphological changes involved are all standard gradual genetic adjustments. Nothing new needed to evolve. It was just the shape of existing structures being tweaked. So that argues for a steady reason for a direction of change that pre-existed the cultural development of actual grammatical habits of reference. But once the vocal machinery had been refined, then it would have been only a matter of time before the habit of rules and words got invented.

So in paleolinguistic circles, Chomsky's hopeful monster story seems puzzlingly naive.

However Chomsky is an arch-rationalist/semi-Platonist and he sort of argues what I argued partly in jest - that the Cosmos has ideas it wants to express, and we are its evolutionary vehicle. So the habit of universal grammar is like Turing computation or Boolean logic - something so damn mathematically true that it was just lying there in wait to pounce as final cause. As soon as some creature evolved vocal equipment (or in Chomsky's view, neural circuitry) that contained the basic digital elements of computation, such as the power of recursion and negation, then the whole weight of abstract symbol processing machinery was going to come tumbling out of the closet.

As I say, I agree on this. It is what has happened. Humans lucked into a semiotic regime where suddenly there was all this sequentially ordered, computationally rational,stuff just waiting to exert its machine like grip over the world. The evolutionary leap was not about us humans as thinking individuals. It was about the eruption of a mechanistic social order that could interact with the entropic world in its own new way - a way that expresses universalised abstraction.

But Chomsky is wrong in thinking the genetic advance was about some computational novelty arising in individual brain structure - and that in itself immediately unlocking computational or rational thought capacities.

As I argue, the computational novelty was far more prosaic - the rise of a digital noise-making ability which, with its sequencing demands, put a new kind of constraint on the already hierarchically organised brain. From there, it was a short step at the cultural level to stumble into the vast possibilities opened up by a collection of minds all getting organised to think and speak in a language-structured fashion.

Give or take the interruption of a few ice ages, the exponential development of Homo sapiens in terms of symbolic culture and collective rational control over the environment is then clear in the historical record. A door had been opened and we walked right on through.

However I would think that the emergence of h. sapiens was quite an abrupt transformation, relative to the timescales generally associated with evolutionary development. I mean, some species reach plateaux of stability and then might stay that way for millions of years (crocodiles and sharks would be examples). Whereas the transition from primitive hominid, to upright, language-using, cave-painting hominid was relatively rapid, i.e. the last 100,000 years.

The voice box, throat, tongue and lips all changed so that rapid and distinctively varied patterns of noise could be produced. — Apokrisis

As did, at the same time, the massively-enlarged forebrain that enabled abstract thought and conceptual representation.

And speaking of 'walking through the door', the transformation to the two-legged gait, when combined with the enormous enlargement of the fore-brain, required the development of infants with soft skulls, due to the narrowing of the birth canal (which also lead to large increases in infant and maternal mortality compared to earlier primates) and also the requirement for very long periods of extrasomatic adaption, again very unlike that of the preceding species.

So all in all, I would think the appearance of h. sapiens seems a lot more like an illustration of Gouldian 'punctuated equilibrium' rather than Darwinian evolutionary gradualism.

As did, at the same time, the massively-enlarged forebrain that enabled abstract thought and conceptual representation. — Wayfarer

Does the "massively enlarged fore-brain" enable abstract thought and symbolic representation, or does conceptual thought enable the massively enlarged forebrain?

I would say conceptual thought requires it. But see Apokrisis' second post on this page, above - he makes that point, perhaps rhetorically. (However, there's an interesting philosopher of biology, called Simon Conway-Morris, one of whose books, Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe makes a similar kind of case in elaborate detail.)

Yes, I do see what you mean, but does not the forebrain equally require conceptual thought. I have the Conway-Morris book but i haven't more than dipped into it.

Whereas the transition from primitive hominid, to upright, language-using, cave-painting hominid was relatively rapid, i.e. the last 100,000 years. — Wayfarer

Well upright walking hominids have been around for about 5 million years - an evolutionary response to the retreat of the jungles with climate change.

And then the use of fire is at least 800,000 years old. Stone-tipped spears were being used 500,000 years ago.

And it can be argued that the spectacularly life-like cave paintings of animals betray what is in fact a simpler stage of language sophistication. They seem eidetic, and so painted by minds less structured by a linguistic habit.

If you check kid's art, they paint houses and people as if they are assembling a collection of words. A crude circle for the head. A few dashes to represent hair or fingers. It is the opposite of photographic in being linguistic.

So yes, hominid evolution has been rapid - in ways that can be explained primarily by rapid climate change. Why did Neanderthals die out? Were they too physically adapted to the ice ages and so it was the lighter bodied, but bigger brained, lineage of Homo - us - that had the more general purpose design that could survive through warm and cold abrupt climate shifts?

So it depends on your level of magnification whether the story looks gradual or abrupt. But certainly, the rise of civilised Homo sap - wearing clothes, living in small villages with a hierarchical social organisation and rich ornamental culture - was much too abrupt for it to be explained genetically.

And the most plausible way to account for that degree of shift is that Homo sap was pre-adapted for articulate speech, the climate then allowed Homo sap to flourish in population numbers, and then the social density/complexity was the fertile ground on which a new social habit - speaking in grammatically organised sentences that supported rational trains of thought - could quickly (over just a few hundred generations) get established.

As did, at the same time, the massively-enlarged forebrain that enabled abstract thought and conceptual representation — Wayfarer

Well that might be how you think of the prefrontal cortex. But as you say, there was only the relative enlargement of areas, not new areas evolving. So if you are claiming that some part of the brain is responsible for abstraction and conception in a big way in humans, then by the same logic, it does the same in a small way for squirrel monkeys and lemurs.

What is indisputable when it comes to sharp discontinuities is that the human vocal tract is unique. And the brain changes that went with that are really just an increase in the top-down connectivity needed to have intentional control over what comes out of the mouth.

It is like the opposable thumb in that regard. Or even bipedal walking. Standing up right allowed us to carry stuff across an open landscape. Carrying stuff meant there was a reason for hands to become specialised for manipulation and thus pre-adapted for a culture of tool-making.

So for paleoanthropology, there is a reasonably standard way of explaining the co-evolution of bodies and culture. And it doesn't need to involve hopeful monsters.

And speaking of 'walking through the door', the transformation to the two-legged gait, when combined with the enormous enlargement of the fore-brain, required the development of infants with soft skulls, due to the narrowing of the birth canal (which also lead to large increases in infant and maternal mortality compared to earlier primates) and also the requirement for very long periods of extrasomatic adaption, again very unlike that of the preceding species. — Wayfarer

Again you are ignoring the gradual story. Bipedalism wasn't a problem for early hominids as they still had small brains. But it did then become an issue as brains got larger.

The result was that babies got more immature and helpless at birth. So this would have driven the need for a particular level of sociality and technological sophistication in late hominids (as compared to even extremely social chimps). And being born with barely formed brains would also have made late hominid infants far more "programmable" by whatever their cultural environment happened to be. Again this is a pre-adaptation. There was a natural window of the first 7 years in which the rather unnatural thing of grammatical organisation and phonemic structure could be hardwired by experience.

So there are lots of pieces to the puzzle that fit together quite nicely.

Even adolescence looks to be a relatively recent evolutionary change. The brains of Homo erectus up to 400,000 years ago seem to jump straight from the child to the adult. But we have a further 10 years of teenagehood where the highest levels of impulse control and social thinking are still busy maturing.

So every thing about our brain maturation is stretched out in ways that apparently maximise the chances for culture to get in there and shape the patterns of what goes on.

Again, the popular view of human evolution - to which Chomsky falls prey - is that it is all about the magical development of the thinking and feeling self conscious human individual. This is the romantic picture of the ape that found its rational soul.

But the science supports a much more prosaic co-evolutionary story of culture and biology, All the action when it comes to the impressive intellectual advances are about cultural evolution - the rationally-structured habits of thought that language enables. Human biology - via a mix of accidental pre-adaptation and consequent purposeful fine-tuning - then changed as much as it could to support that cultural evolutionary trajectory.

So it is culture and the collective that led the way, not the genetics and the individual mind.

However, there's an interesting philosopher of biology, called Simon Conway-Morris, one of whose books, Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe makes a similar kind of case in elaborate detail. — Wayfarer

So that is the intelligent design argument? God created our particular kind of Universe because it had the constraints within which Homo sapiens becomes a historical inevitability?

I think I go one step further than that. ;)

I say constraint itself has a logical inevitability sufficient to conjure up worlds. You don't need a God of the Blue Touchpaper to figure out the initial conditions. Platonically, some kind of semiotic organisation or regularity can do it all for itself, no need for a divine maker.

I don't much care for intelligent design arguments, because they denote a certain the need to justify one's faith (to oneself and/or others), whereas for me, a large part of faith is knowing that we don't know (no peeking now!)

Nevertheless, whenever you talk about 'constraints' at all, then - why those constraints? The way I understand it is that, if big bang cosmology is correct (and it sure seems it) then it unfolded in just such a way that stars>matter>life were able to evolve. And it might not have - there is no logical reason why it couldn't have evolved in such a way that nothing existed at all. Why those constraints - those 'six numbers' - I don't think we'll ever know, will we? They're simply givens.

But I don't want to convey the idea that I believe in 'God's plan' in any kind of literalistic sense. There are other religious models - the Hindus see the Universe as 'the creative play of Brahman'. Buddhists don't even really concern themselves with 'how it all began' yet they manage to concieve of an exquisite cosmic order, through such concepts as the Net of Indra. But I'm dead sure, exploring such ideas is a real raison d'être.

I mostly agree with what you have said, but a couple of points.

Thought uses language for itself, to enable it to construct complex ideas, as a tool of thought. You may be right that negation is built into the structure of the brain, as in on/off switches, but I think it is thought that turns these switches off for the most part.

I like the idea of the conjunction of simple words, yielding more complex ideas, a bottom up construction of the hierarchies (interesting bit about this in paper by Shigeru Miyagawa, reference following) in language as the result of the Merge function. I get the mechanism/computational aspect in this, it is almost as though Chomsky were trying to construct a foundation for a machine language. Chomsky's Minimalist Program (they don't call it a theory because it is a position being studied by a variety of specialists) is an attempt to explain language using the fewest possible terms.

There is a paper which touches on your singing hominid explanation:

Researchers from MIT, along with a scholar from the University of Tokyo believe that human language is a grafting of two communication forms found elsewhere in the animal kingdom: first, the elaborate songs of birds, and second, the more utilitarian, information-bearing types of expression seen in a diversity of other animals. http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00071/full

They also argue for the abrupt change happened around the same period around 100,000 years ago. (Shigeru Miyagawa and Chomsky are from MIT, it is not that surprising they agree)

Nevertheless, whenever you talk about 'constraints' at all, then - why those constraints? — Wayfarer

That is focusing on the material questions. And I am stressing the semiotic dimension to existence.

So the fundamental question in that light becomes about the historical inevitability (or conversely, the contingency) of the critical levels of semiosis.

The Planck scale would define the most basic scale at which something pan-semiotic happened. There is a reason why three spatial dimensions was the optimal solution for organising a dissipative chain reaction - the emergence of the Big Bang universe as a cooling-spreading heat sink of radiation.

Then life would be another level of semiosis. And biophysics has indeed discovered that there is a particular nano-scale thermal regime - poised between the quantum and classical scale - where molecular machines can organise cellular metabolism with almost magical effectiveness.

And also over the past decade, biology has realised that another very remarkable semiotic transition had to take place at the scale of bacteria and archea. These simple single cell lifeforms, on their own, could never have evolved into anything more complex. And yet each - in arising as complementary ways of milking work from respiratory chains and proton gradients - could then get combined to allow large multi-cellular life.

In essence, archea could ingest bacteria and turn them into mitrochondrial power-houses. The waste product of one kind of simple life could become the fuel being produced inside the other form of simple life, closing the dissipative loop in the one creature.

So no, you won't see much if you just focus on the material aspects of being like most cosmology does. You have to have the larger semiotic perspective to see what were the critical transition thresholds and so make some judgement about the historical inevitability/historical contingency of what followed.

For example, the theorising about archea and bacteria symbiosis would seem to dramatically narrow the probability of complex life ever arising. Only an organic chemistry that was very earth-like indeed could seem to do the trick.

But anyway, then after single cell genetics and multicellular genetic combos, you then get neural semiosis and linguistic semiosis as further crucial advances in semiotic mechanism. And mathematiical cyberspace could be next.

So what I mean by constraints is the semiotic approach to constraints, not merely a materialist approach.

But I don't want to convey the idea that I believe in 'God's plan' in any kind of literalistic sense. There are other religious models - the Hindus see the Universe as 'the creative play of Brahman'. Buddhists don't even really concern themselves with 'how it all began' — Wayfarer

From memory, it was Conway-Morris who is Christian and so wrote in ways sympathetic to ID. Eastern philosophy is generally more immanent and organic in its thinking as you say.

You may be right that negation is built into the structure of the brain, as in on/off switches, but I think it is thought that turns these switches off for the most part. — Cavacava

Selective attention can certainly modulate the receptive fields of neurons in top-down fashion, either suppressing or enhancing their responses.

So what you say is right - if "thought" is understood in terms of attentional processes. It is certainly what would be meant by thought in pre-linguistic animals.

Researchers from MIT, along with a scholar from the University of Tokyo believe that human language is a grafting of two communication forms found elsewhere in the animal kingdom: first, the elaborate songs of birds, and second, the more utilitarian, information-bearing types of expression seen in a diversity of other animals. — Cavacava

I've only got the time to quickly skim the paper.

But it is certainly reasonable in a general fashion. One of the things we know is that the lower level limbic system control over human expressive noises - our rather involuntary acts of swearing - had to have a higher level motor planning control built over the top.

So that is why you get Tourettes, for example. Humans evolved new connectivity so pre-motor areas - what we now call the grammar areas, but which are just as much tool using or other complex action planning areas - could start to over-ride the more instinctual or emotional level of vocalisation. And Tourettes is where the wiring doesn't quite give full control. And also why we actually shout fuck or shit, or some actual word, when we hit our thumb with a hammer.

So the paper's connecting of bird song and honeybee dances is a bit strained. Not wrong, but you can also talk more directly about the known neuroanatomy of the brain and see that speech is a combination of complex goal-directed planning and simpler emotional social expressiveness.

That is why speaking does always involves both what you say, and how you say it. Prosody feeds in from another part of the brain to give every word an appropriate social inflection.

I like your question , at this point I will not attempt to answer it but would like to jump obliquely and say that I find the (if I may put it this way) questioning behind the question of greater significance..I do a fair amount of ruminating during the night, if I wake up for some reason, I like questions as this one you put because , to me at least, it exposes the action of original thinking as opposed to some reflection on ã quote for instance or ã direct quote from any of the standard philosophers...Thank you

I'm glad you liked it. It was a response to something John said in another thread. Unfortunately a bunch of stuff came up and I didn't end up addressing any of the cool points various people made, but I did think about 'em. Thanks guys!