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
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
WikipediaMerge (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
Chomsky thinks that humans language ability arose from a single mutation about 100,000 years ago and it quickly spread. — Cavacava
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. — Wayfarer
Whereas the transition from primitive hominid, to upright, language-using, cave-painting hominid was relatively rapid, i.e. the last 100,000 years. — Wayfarer
As did, at the same time, the massively-enlarged forebrain that enabled abstract thought and conceptual representation — Wayfarer
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
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
Nevertheless, whenever you talk about 'constraints' at all, then - why those constraints? — Wayfarer
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
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
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
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