Perhaps thinking language is a key aspect of consciousness is wrong.
Chomsky has said human languages themselves are just random sounds we’ve been polishing the meaning of.
So yeah I have no doubt a machine can sort them correctly if we tell it to. They mean what we want and see in them.
That’s hardly proving anything about consciousness. Just that a computer can sort and count syntax, and guess at meaning by frequency of relative placement.
It’s acting on English data sets. Not human biology.
"Chomsky has said human languages themselves are just random sounds we’ve been polishing the meaning of." I've read a lot of Chomsky, and I don't recall him ever saying anything like this. Can you provide a citation?
And I don't think "sorting" has anything to do with language.
Why is it so hard to accept mirror neurons fired when early humans heard birds and animals, each other’s grunts and over time we refined it?
Everyone has some capacity to refine and strengthen muscle. Why do we need some abstract meta-construct to explain where language comes from? It comes from us. Fleshy meat bags that mutate state over a short period then die.
Chomsky diagrams, conceptual organs and the like are useful for “being on the same page” in a particular context, but there’s no reason to believe language is a requirement for consciousness except our own propensity for romanticizing our existing.
Because other animals don't produce sounds which constitute abstract meaning that can be combined into sentences. Possibly a few birds and dolphins or whales might get close. But there's clearly something more going on in the brain than making sounds which contribute to word formation.
Neuroscience and brain imaging still don't tell us how language works--they're at a much to course level of granularity. Even if we could see every single neuron as it fired (which we can't), the volume of data would be overwhelming, far more than if you followed every transistor in a modern computer.
You don't think neuroscience involves theorizing? You think the neuroscientists can just image the neuronal activity and read it out in some complete scientific explanation?
Yes. It’s emergent behavior of a physical universe that has no meaning. It just is.
“Meaning to us” is subjective. That’s how we have conflicting theories in many fields. Science isn’t about meaning. It’s about measuring how matter coalesces at various speeds relative to light.
I make noise because my biology “just has” properties to allow it given the other physical conditions.
Perfectly elegant theory based on the physical structure of reality alone. No ephemeral language organs.
Theory can quickly go from scientific observation to reinforced nonsense used to sell books and bond as species.
That’s fine, it’s how society works. It doesn’t mean anything to reality.
Yep. Babies can add and subtract when they’re days old.
Can they write Shakespeare?
If human language is fundamental, how is it missing from the start? Are we learning language or muscle mechanics? Why can a word or phrase mean one thing in this country and nonsense in another? If language processing has a universal basis, why all the confusing variety and ignorant ideas? 1+1=2 everywhere because we can observe the physical process everywhere, because light, eyes, etc
Who cares?
Like I said back in the day we didn’t know that. We had to theorize these abstract schemes to establish something.
But like religion, doesn’t mean linguistics is building on something that means what we want it to.
Given how hard it is to learn language while arithmetic seems innate, how do we know emphasizing it’s value is leading us where we want?
It’s easier for me to see that long dead scientifically illiterate humans we inherited those ideas from were just stupid.
"If language processing has a universal basis, why all the confusing variety..." Because the universal processing mechanism provides lots of options for individual languages--the option for different words, obviously, but the option to use or not to use morphology (and lots of varieties of morphology), and different syntax rules, etc. etc.
To use an analogy, a computer chip provides a single instruction set at the machine language level--yet you can run a huge variety of computer languages on it: FORTRAN, LISP, Python, Prolog and so forth.
Religion shows we can create very detailed belief in ornate ideas that are scientifically nonsensical. It’s possible the concepts linguists seek to develop are similarly self reinforcing feedback loops that are meaningless to science.
There’s been an explosion in biological science since Chomsky became prominent. He even admits his work is abstract and to serve his ends. We may be putting more into his ideas due to his fame and infamy than we should.
Trial and error, social constraints on sounds and the mechanics of biology can explain it elegantly. What do the ornate theories and ephemeral organs provide except to satisfy “linguists” biological agency to create and imagine?
Linguistics came about in a much less scientifically aware era in human history. My money is on it going the way of religion; an abstraction that’s so
orthogonal to advancing science we leave it behind.
Perhaps thinking language is a key aspect of consciousness is wrong.
Chomsky has said human languages themselves are just random sounds we’ve been polishing the meaning of.
So yeah I have no doubt a machine can sort them correctly if we tell it to. They mean what we want and see in them.
That’s hardly proving anything about consciousness. Just that a computer can sort and count syntax, and guess at meaning by frequency of relative placement.
It’s acting on English data sets. Not human biology.