Is Chomsky's View on the Mind-Body Problem Redefining Materialism?

[bohm2]

You do know Peirce was the father of pragmatism?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatic_maxim

Here are some of the relevant quotes/interpretations:

It is somehow more than a mere figure of speech to say that nature fecundates the mind of man with ideas which, when those ideas grow up, will resemble their father, Nature...This is in line with Peirce’s synechism (which he developed especially after 1890s), according to which everything is continuous...Mind and matter are not entirely distinct elements but ‘all phenomena are of one character, though some are more mental and spontaneous, others more material and regular’... Similarly, it can be argued that there is no sharp line between instinct and inference; ‘instinct and reason shade into one another by imperceptible gradations’...The metaphysical ground is a rather vague argument for the idea that if the human mind is developed under those laws that govern the universe, it is reasonable to suppose that the mind has a tendency to find true hypotheses concerning this universe...In this way, general considerations concerning the universe, strictly philosophical considerations, all but demonstrate that if the universe conforms, with any approach to accuracy, to certain highly pervasive laws, and if man's mind has been developed under the influence of those laws, it is to be expected that he should have a natural light, or light of nature, or instinctive insight, or genius, tending to make him guess those laws aright, or nearly aright.

http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/papers/instinctorinference.pdf

For whatever reason, there are times when I want to be sympathetic to some of Peirce's ideas. I think there's a part of me that would like to think Peirce is right (at least in those views in quotes above). But my skeptical part blocks me. I still have a hard time understanding how we are able to arrive at some seemingly far-reaching results in disciplines like theoretical physics by using our ability to do abstract mathematics especially since that ability is unlikely to have been selected for. I'm not sure?

 

[apeiron]

For whatever reason, there are times when I want to be sympathetic to some of Peirce's ideas.

I'm not seeing evidence from your quoting that you understand those ideas.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/#psych

The most important extension Peirce made of his earliest views on what deduction, induction, and abduction involved was to integrate the three argument forms into his view of the systematic procedure for seeking truth that he called the “scientific method.” As so integrated, deduction, induction, and abduction are not simply argument forms any more: they are three phases of the methodology of science, as Peirce conceived this methodology. In fact, in Peirce's most mature philosophy he virtually (perhaps totally and literally) equates the trichotomy with the three phases he discerns in the scientific method. Scientific method begins with abduction or hypothesis: because of some perhaps surprising or puzzling phenomenon, a conjecture or hypothesis is made about what actually is going on. This hypothesis should be such as to explain the surprising phenomenon, such as to render the phenomenon more or less a matter of course if the hypothesis should be true. Scientific method then proceeds to the stage of deduction: by means of necessary inferences, conclusions are drawn from the provisionally-adopted hypothesis about the obtaining of phenomena other than the surprising one that originally gave rise to the hypothesis. Conclusions are reached, that is to say, about other phenomena that must obtain if the hypothesis should actually be true. These other phenomena must be such that experimental tests can be performed whose results tell us whether the further phenomena do obtain or do not obtain. Finally, scientific method proceeds to the stage of induction: experiments are actually carried out in order to test the provisionally-adopted hypothesis by ascertaining whether the deduced results do or do not obtain. At this point scientific method enters one or the other of two “feedback loops.” If the deduced consequences do obtain, then we loop back to the deduction stage, deducing still further consequences of our hypothesis and experimentally testing for them again. But, if the deduced consequences do not obtain, then we loop back to the abduction stage and come up with some new hypothesis that explains both our original surprising phenomenon and any new phenomena we have uncovered in the course of testing our first, and now failed, hypothesis. Then we pass on to the deduction stage, as before. The entire procedure of hypothesis-testing, and not merely that part of it that consists of arguing from sample to population, is called induction in Peirce's later philosophy.

...our ability to do abstract mathematics especially since that ability is unlikely to have been selected for.

Of course it is not a result of biological evolution. There is no abstract maths instinct. But it was quite clearly a result of cultural evolution. The human mind is the product of sociocultural development - remember Vygotsky? And maths was a valued cultural product because it underwrites technological control over the world. So there is no problem here.

 

[bohm2]

I'm not seeing evidence from your quoting that you understand those ideas. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/#psych

I disagree. I think there is some debate on Peirce's "abductive instinct" but it seems at least from his own writings that he did come to believe that because we are a product of nature/natural law, we have a natural instinct at somehow being able to arrive at the laws of nature. Some of those quotes are directly from Peirce's later writings: Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce. See p. 415 + 421-422 (604) that is available in link below:

In this way, general considerations concerning the universe, strictly philosophical considerations, all but demonstrate that if the universe conforms, with any approach to accuracy, to certain highly pervasive laws, and if man's mind has been developed under the influence of those laws, it is to be expected that he should have a natural light, or light of nature, or instinctive insight, or genius, tending to make him guess those laws aright, or nearly aright...This would be impossible unless the ideas that are naturally predominant in their minds was true...The history of science, especially the early history of modern science, on which I had the honor of giving some lectures in this hall some years ago, completes the proof of showing how few were the guesses that men surpassing genius had to make before they rightly guessed the laws of nature...

Chomsky basically agrees with Peirce's "abductive instinct" but not Peirce's others beliefs. For Chomsky, there is an innate capacity to do so but he doesn't believe that

"nature fecundates the mind of man with ideas which when those ideas grow up, will resemble their father, Nature"

as Peirce suggests because for reasons mentioned including "Poverty of stimulus" argument, etc. (see below). I think Chomsky makes (to me) a very convincing argument.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=G7I...trictly philosophical considerations,&f=false

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus

Also, I don't agree with Vygotsky that knowledge of abstract math is the result of cultural evolution, except to the extent that such environmental input may act as a trigger. I think mathematical knowledge like other aspects of our knowledge is innate, although I find Platonism kind of interesting but I have trouble understanding it but I'm trying to. A paper that takes a different perspective that innateness for mathematics/science ability may not be enough are these papers:

Mathematical symbols as epistemic actions – an extended mind perspective

http://kuleuven.academia.edu/HelenDeCruz/Papers/317927/Mathematical_symbols_as_epistemic_actions

Evolved cognitive biases and the epistemic status of scientific beliefs

http://kuleuven.academia.edu/HelenD...nd_the_epistemic_status_of_scientific_beliefs

I haven't read them but I'm looking forward to it. Maybe, that's what you guys are talking about?

 

[apeiron]

I think mathematical knowledge like other aspects of our knowledge is innate.

And how, neuroscientifically speaking, is this feat achieved? Where is the evidence that makes this a credible view in this day and age?

 

[bohm2]

And how, neuroscientifically speaking, is this feat achieved? Where is the evidence that makes this a credible view in this day and age?

I don't think this author will go the full innatist distance though as Chomsky appears to:

The innateness Hypothesis and Mathematical concepts:

http://biblio.ugent.be/input/download?func=downloadFile&fileOId=911487


The cognitive basis of arithmetic:

http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~dirk/PhiMSAMP-bk_DeCruzNethSchlimm.pdf

 

[apeiron]

I don't think this author will go the full innatist distance though as Chomsky appears to:

The innateness Hypothesis and Mathematical concepts:

http://biblio.ugent.be/input/download?func=downloadFile&fileOId=911487


The cognitive basis of arithmetic:

http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~dirk/PhiMSAMP-bk_DeCruzNethSchlimm.pdf

Both authors in fact are evidence against innatism.

Correctly, they emphasise the vast chasm between animal capacity for mental grouping (one, two, err, many) and actual formal mathematical reasoning (which piggybacks on language ability and so Vygotskean socioculturally evolved habits of thought).

 

[bohm2]

Both authors in fact are evidence against innatism.

Correctly, they emphasise the vast chasm between animal capacity for mental grouping (one, two, err, many) and actual formal mathematical reasoning (which piggybacks on language ability and so Vygotskean socioculturally evolved habits of thought).

I didn't interpret the papers in that way. Here's the conclusion of the paper:

Our examination of possible relationships between intuitive and formal arithmetic indicates that there are good reasons to think that innate numerical abilities play a significant role in the development of arithmetic competence, even though intuitive number concepts do not correspond to any established set in number theory, and even though children’s learning of number does not clearly follow axiomatizations of number.

 

[apeiron]

I didn't interpret the papers in that way. Here's the conclusion of the paper:

Yes, here is the conclusion.

Our examination of possible relationships between intuitive and formal arithmetic indicates that there are good reasons to think that innate numerical abilities play a significant role in the development of arithmetic competence, even though intuitive number concepts do not correspond to any established set in number theory, and even though children’s learning of number does not clearly follow axiomatizations of number.

The point is you made a claim about strong innatism. So where is the evidence?

No one here is defending its opposite either - naive constructivism. Quite clearly, maths ability, like any ability is a mix of nature and nurture, evolution and development, etc. And the only matter of interest is how to capture that interaction of complementary causes in our scientific modelling.

When it comes to the constraints that shape human learning and thinking, clearly genes capture historical information at one level. And then words, cultural evolution, captures information of a different order.

 

[Pythagorean]

bohm2:

much work in the cognitive neurosciences indicates are large role for spatial metaphor in our abstract thinking (such as mathematics). This comes largely from our somatic system (integrating not only visual and audio cues for spatial organization, but also your skin's topographical map and your muscle feedback-control system (that tells you how much you're stretching your body and allowing you to imagine where it's stretching to in your surroundings).

This is largely handled by your parietal lobes, which has a very important junction with the temporal lobes (where semantic memory is thought to be organized). Semantic memory is where we define objects; and we do this largely through the way we can interpret and predict our environment. Even abstract "objects" like numbers can be thought of spatially.

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/13/2/185.short
The roles of body and mind in abstract thought

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027799000736
Metaphoric structuring: understanding time through spatial metaphors

For instant, it's been shown that playing with blocks can increase a toddler's vocabulary:
http://www.redorbit.com/news/education/1112414483/playing-with-blocks-facilitates-development-of-spatial-vocabulary/index.html

And of course, it's well known that instructional DVD's (like "baby einstein") have little to no effect on Toddlers:
http://www.hanen.org/Helpful-Info/Articles/Educational-DVDs--What-Helps-Babies-Learn.aspx

This is why Children's Museums are now springing up everywhere... because Vygotsky had a point. Things that seem trivial to you and me are being deeply processed by our children during play time; the more interactive that play time is, the more spurious is development.

Did you know that just thehttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15766532" ? Compared to sitting at the TV, just the intensity of interaction with our environment from jogging (impact, jerk, center of gravity, navigation, etc.) significantly trumps the effect of a single source of stimulus and processing (a linear TV stream with no choices or feedback required).

Furthermore, it's well known by all neuroscience undergraduates about the experiment performed on baby kittens, where they covered their eyes at birth. These kittens never developed eye sight later (whereas if you do this with an adult cat, the cat will be fine). The idea, in general, is called http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Critical_period" .

So not only is environment influential on neural development, neural development depends on it.

 

[apeiron]

I disagree. I think there is some debate on Peirce's "abductive instinct" but it seems at least from his own writings that he did come to believe that because we are a product of nature/natural law, we have a natural instinct at somehow being able to arrive at the laws of nature. Some of those quotes are directly from Peirce's later writings: Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce. See p. 415 + 421-422 (604) that is available in link below:

You have to read this in the historical context of Peirce's reaction to Kant.

The interesting idea at the heart of what he says is that the workings of the mind parallel those of reality simply because that is "the way things must work". This is what makes semiosis a general logic or general model of causality. You could call it a principle of self-organisation. The way we make our ideas clear (the triadic process of synechism) is the same way - in a formal sense - as a universe would self-create itself into concrete existence.

And rather than this being instinctual, it is about the development of habits.

In psychology, habits are different from instincts, even if genetics biases development to make some habits far more likely to be acquired than others.

Again, you have to read Peirce in context. Darwin was still a big new idea. Just biologising the capacities of the human mind (as "instincts") was controversial. Psychologising them as "habits" was a step more sophisticated.

So the big idea was that reality develops via semiosis from vague potential to crisply structured worlds. Peirce used psychological terminology for things like the global realm of constraints - calling it "habits of interpretance" - to stress the way even the universe would "self-organise through its experiences". But he also used formal terminology like firstness, secondness and thirdness.

So there is no evidence that Peirce's metaphysics is based on a notion of instinct or innateness, either genetic or Platonic. His primary psychological analogy is the aquisition of habits through experience. And he generalises that to a model of hierarchical self-organisation called semiosis.

Yes, there has to be a reason why humans are already halfway there to making good guesses about the nature of reality - the capacity for abduction. And yes, this does seem biological and evolved.

Rationalism said we could know the truth of things through some kind of inner direct access. Empiricism said the opposite - we blindly grope our way to generalities via some random Darwinian contest of hypothesis and measurement.

But Peirce was acknowledging that our path to truth is both far less certain than rationalism and yet far more efficient than random empiricism. So there has to be some constraint, some prior bias, on our reasoning so that we quite quickly lift ourselves out of the swamp of vagueness and into the sharp interplay of induction and deduction.

Peirce wasn't a Vgotskian. But then he was pre-genetics as well. So he can't be blamed too much for getting only as far as instincts and habits in his discussions.

With the advantage of hindsight, we can say the human brain develops freely via experience under the global constraints offered by 1) historical information captured by genes, and 2) the information present as the actual constraints of an environment "out there".

That accounts for an animal level of abduction, induction and deduction. And so the "maths ability" of chimps, ravens, and humans without a cultural history of maths.

Then the kind of formalised maths ability we are talking about here develops 3) under the constraints of a formal education - enculturation to a history of ideas captured in the symbols of text and diagrams.

 

[Maui]

It's also not the same as saying that we aren't easily misled by our brain's clunky, and sometimes primal, way of processing.

Reminds me of a quote i read the other day that goes like this... "the mental reality is the brain's best guess about what happens outside of it" implying that it is often wrong.

 

[bohm2]

much work in the cognitive neurosciences indicates are large role for spatial metaphor in our abstract thinking (such as mathematics). This comes largely from our somatic system (integrating not only visual and audio cues for spatial organization, but also your skin's topographical map and your muscle feedback-control system (that tells you how much you're stretching your body and allowing you to imagine where it's stretching to in your surroundings).

I wasn't sure what you meant here so and I deleted my previous response because I may have misinterpreted you. So, with respect to our mathematical and linguistic abilities/knowledge are you saying that without proper sensory-motor functioning we are not capable of forming mathematical and linguistic constructs/knowledge?

 

[bohm2]

Reminds me of a quote i read the other day that goes like this... "the mental reality is the brain's best guess about what happens outside of it" implying that it is often wrong.

Sounds quite a bit like this quote:

Based on minimal sensory information, the perceptual system generates knowledge-based 'guesses' (hypotheses) about possible targets and internally synthesizes these targets. Matching procedures between the synthesized candidate targets and the input signal ultimately select the best match; in other words, the analysis is guided by internally synthesized candidate representations

Speech perception at the interface of neurobiology and linguistics

http://www.biolinguistics.uqam.ca/Poeppel_Idsardi_vanWassenhove_2008.pdf

 

[Pythagorean]

I wasn't sure what you meant here so and I deleted my previous response because I may have misinterpreted you. So, with respect to our mathematical and linguistic abilities/knowledge are you saying that without proper sensory-motor functioning we are not capable of forming mathematical and linguistic constructs?

No. For one, because you can always knit-pick about what "proper sensory-motor functioning" is; some "defect" in sensory processing may be beneficial to long-term memory and learning (for example, synesthesia). But also because the concept of space can be learned through visual and audio cues too (in fact, we have a particular set of neurons that correlate audio signals for location detection called the medial superior olive). All one can claim is that the evidence supports spatial experience contributing positively to abstract knowledge. I do not know for certain if it is a necessary condition, but even if it is, it's probably not sufficient. Stable emotional development is probably the most important condition:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sce.20010/pdf

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/amp/53/2/205/

Emotional development and emotional intelligence: educational implications By Peter Salovey

Obviously, it's hard to digest and compute new and complicated information if you have constant stressors in your environment; this is the same for any organism. Not having somebody to cuddle with and depend on is generally a giant source of stress for baby mammals, especially humans, who are born very early in their gestational period, because of their big heads. If they are being deprived of basic needs, they will spend time and energy trying to get those needs met (crying for help is about all they can do). However, if their survival needs are being met, they feel more safe and secure and are more willing to experiment with their thoughts and perceptions (which may seem trivial to an adult, but for a baby this is an extremely intense and fascinating experience perceive things). If you encourage them by always interacting with them, they will develop linguistic skills much faster (they actually love facial expressions, and are hardwired to learn from them. I successfully did the Meltzoff experiment with both of my daughters when they were about ten minutes old).

 

[bohm2]

No. For one, because you can always knit-pick about what "proper sensory-motor functioning" is; some "defect" in sensory processing may be beneficial to long-term memory and learning (for example, synesthesia). But also because the concept of space can be learned through visual and audio cues too (in fact, we have a particular set of neurons that correlate audio signals for location detection called the medial superior olive).

I was thinking about how our ability for abstract thought, language, mathematics would be affected if we were say blind or were inflicted with major sensory-motor pathology. I think this is one argument that Fodor/Chomsky used to criticize the importance of Piaget's sensory-motor scheme for language learning. Major sensory-motor pathology doesn't have a major impact on linguistic ability, so Piaget's scheme was questioned.

 

[apeiron]

Major sensory-motor pathology doesn't have a major impact on linguistic ability, so Piaget's scheme was questioned.

What do you think "major sensory-motor pathology" looks like if brain function has a distributed architecture rather than the modular one being supposed by Fodor and Chomsky?

More like Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, Parkinson's, etc.

 

[bohm2]

What do you think "major sensory-motor pathology" looks like if brain function has a distributed architecture rather than the modular one being supposed by Fodor and Chomsky?

How do you explain specific language impairment or you don't find the evidence convincing?

 

[apeiron]

How do you explain specific language impairment or you don't find the evidence convincing?

How does that relate to your claims of modularity? Indeed the great variety of developmental problems that get tagged SLI is evidence for the distributed complexity of neurological function.

 

[bohm2]

How does that relate to your claims of modularity? Indeed the great variety of developmental problems that get tagged SLI is evidence for the distributed complexity of neurological function.

Well, if there's a dissociation between where language is disrupted and yet other mental abilities are fine, it would suggest language modularity. Some reviews suggest this but it's not universally accepted even though I know it's true. And I also know you will disagree

Empirical data from numerous SLI (Specific Langauge Impairment) investigations, and particularly from G-SLI, suggest that developmental deficits in grammar are best accounted for by the hypothesis that the brain contains domain-specific systems. I have argued that deficits in each of three components of grammar (syntax, morphology, phonology) can co-exist, and might all dissociate.

http://www.dldcn.org/vdl2005Trends.pdf

 

[apeiron]

Well, if there's a dissociation between where language is disrupted and yet other mental abilities are fine, it would suggest language modularity. Some reviews suggest this but it's not universally accepted even though I know it's true. And I also know you will disagree

No, what I will inevitably say is that it is never a case of either/or but instead always both.

So brain architecture is two complementary tendencies - lumping and splitting, integration and differentiation, modularity and distributed - in interaction. A good model of this situation is scalefree networks.

This is a view that makes Chomskian-like debates (its innate! no its learnt!) very dated.

You now say here that SLI affects only language skills. Yet it is standard that motor skills are poor also in kids diagnosed under this label. It is also the case that attempts to find locatable brain differences have drawn a blank (ie: the differences are too fine-grain and diffuse to show up as something particular).

Not to mention of course that language is simply "impaired". Not absent.

 

[bohm2]

I find this stuff interesting because it kind of has some major overlap with the mind-body problem and perhaps other related areas. So, what do you guys think of the arguments put forth by some of these authors who are sympathetic to Chomsky’s position . They basically argue that this uniquely human part of our language faculty (FLN-see links for details) having the properties of recursion (also found in our mathematical abilities) emerged in human brains for “physical” reasons yet to be fully comprehended; but unlike most innatists/ nativists (e.g. Pinker/Jackendoff) the reasons suggested are not due to “natural selection” but instead are guided by principles of elegance and compactness (not “tinkering” in Pinker’s sense, I guess). So to give one example, “why did Helium evolve after Hydrogen in the evolution our universe”, etc. It wasn’t for reasons of “natural selection” in any sense of the term. There were physical laws dictating it that it occur. Same with this uniquely human abstract abilities in language and mathematics (or so, it is argued by this position).

I’m not sure if I fully understand his argument or to what extent Chomsky endorses this position but here’s an interesting quote from Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini:

Still a bridge too far? Biolinguistic questions for grounding language on brains

Early linguistic investigations led to an elegant and compact formulation of the problem of what may be seen as ‘natural knowledge’. Many so-called mental modules thus described already resist any simple-minded emergence in classical adaptationist terms. But the challenge became all the more extreme with the advent of the Minimalist Program, with its suggestion that linguistic structuring obeys some kind of optimum (at any rate, an optimal compromise) at the interface between the interpretation and the externalization of language. Interestingly, optima turn out to be quite important when considering growth patterns in general. We find it natural to conceive that program in terms of broadly construed physics, a dimension that is alien to standard accounts in terms of natural selection. The present paper argues for this approach, illustrating it with the presence of Fibonacci growth patterns in language, which we take to be a signal case. (Space limitations prevent us from going into several other optimal solutions in this realm.) What could it mean to ground such properties on a human brain? We wager that they are the result of the brain’s very physical conditions, in some sense to be fully investigated and understood. Structural properties of linguistic behaviors should then, more generally, follow as a deductive consequence of quite abstract and all-important brain micro-properties.

http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~massimo/publications/PDF/MPP&JU_Bridge_too_farPUBL.pdf

Assuming this position is accurate, what I’m having trouble understanding is this:

1. Does this make it any easier to understand why our ability to do higher mathematics is so useful in studying physical phenomena even though it did not evolve for reasons of “natural selection” (or so, they argue); that is, does evolution of abstract mental structures (from more primitive language and mathematical cognitive structures) that is guided by physical law versus natural selection make it more plausible why mathematics is so useful for doing physics, etc?

2. What would be the implications (if any) on the mind-body problem, if this view is accurate?

3. If accurate would this strengthen, weaken or have no effect on Peirce's notion that "nature fecundates the mind of man with ideas which when those ideas grow up, will resemble their father, Nature". I'm hoping 'strengthen', since Chomsky's more skeptical position with respect to knowledge (ie. match between our mental constructs and "true" laws) is something I would like to avoid, even though I find it pretty convincing.

Links about FLN and debates between Chomsky’s group and Pinker’s group:

Chomsky’s group:
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20021122.pdf
http://www.punksinscience.org/klean...inker/3a_Fitch-Hauser-Chomsky_Evol Lg Fac.pdf

Pinker’s group:
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/2005_03_Pinker_Jackendoff.pdf
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/2005_09_Jackendoff_Pinker.pdf

 

[Pythagorean]

“why did Helium evolve after Hydrogen in the evolution our universe”, etc. It wasn’t for reasons of “natural selection” in any sense of the term.

you go too far with "any sense of the term" Helium and hydrogen share a very special relationship! It would have been very unlikely for helium to come before hydrogen! Can you guess why?

Does this make it any easier to understand why our ability to do abstract mathematics is so useful in studying physical phenomena even though (at least they argue) it did not evolve for reasons of “natural selection”; that is, does evolution of abstract mental structures (from more primitive language and mathematical cognitive structures) that is guided by physical law versus natural selection make it more plausible why mathematics is so useful for doing physics, etc?

I don't hold the position that mathematics arose through natural selection. I'd guide to to a presentation by Gary Marcus about his book Kluge. The human "mind" is still very young in terms of evolution; it hasn't stood the test of time; it could, for all we know, be a flaw that slowly leads to our extinction. Or it could be a spandrel (like your chin!). Obviously, our minds have helped us to expand our territory and population, so it's been beneficial for the most part, but we do note serious flaws (minds bent on destruction or greed) that could potentially lead to a world-wide extinction (i.e. we've built ourselves all kinds of mass-killing devices all around the world). It's still very much in a state of flux.

 

[bohm2]

you go too far with "any sense of the term" Helium and hydrogen share a very special relationship! It would have been very unlikely for helium to come before hydrogen! Can you guess why?

That's the whole point. It was not driven by "survival of the fittest" (biological adaptive value) as in natural selection. It was bound to happen as dictated by physical laws. As the author writes:

So just as the justified contextual optimality of a given structure may argue for its adaptive value, to the extent that we find structures that can be characterized as optimal irrespective of any functional correlate, the opposite conclusion should be driven: their optimality must obey a different cause, not bio-genetic interactions winnowed by natural selection. In our view, the more that optimality in any biological network can be separated from its putative function, the more we should suspect that the process behind the abstract form follow from physicochemical invariants...The patterns we are after present a characteristic optimality to them, which might suggest that it is, after all, a result of natural selection. However, the sort of optimality that natural selection could yield is tied-up to contextual specifications of a functional sort. A structure, in these terms, is optimal for a function, and therefore it wins the evolutionary race simply because alternative structures are less fit for that function in its context. This is quite different, in principle, from the optimality we seek to understand.

 

[Pythagorean]

I don't understand, are you switching now to a determinism argument?

The point, I thought, was whether the "environment" influenced the evolution of the "particle"; and even in the case of hydrogen fusing into helium, it was only under the conditions produced by the stars that the hydrogen atoms overcame their electroweak interactions and found the more favorable strong interaction. It was a synthesis of both external and internal forces.

 

[apeiron]

They basically argue that this uniquely human part of our language faculty (FLN-see links for details) having the properties of recursion (also found in our mathematical abilities) emerged in human brains for “physical” reasons yet to be fully comprehended;

OK, bear in mind that I consistently explained systems in terms of three principles.

1) They self-organise hierarchically in that you have local constructive degrees of freedom finding some mutual equilibrium balance with downwards acting global constraints.

2) This is thus a dynamical or process view where things develop, starting out as the vaguely potential and becoming crisply realized (as a hierarchical situation of local degrees of freedom~global constraints).

3) Complexity of a higher order (like life and mind) can arise if a system discovers the trick of constructing its own constraints. This requires semiotic mechanism, the epistemic cut, memory structures, etc. A system is no longer helplessly self-organising, it can harness dynamics for a purpose.

This is a view of nature now standard in theoretical biology. It shows through in "new models" of evolutionary theory like evo-devo - the realisation that natural selection can only harness self-organisational potentials, growth gradients. Or what Pattee called rate dependent dynamics.

The shift in biological thought is of course based on the deeper breakthroughs in physics and maths when it comes to modelling dynamics and self-organisation. All the work on criticality, dissipative structure, condensed matter physics, fractal geometry, chaos theory, etc.

So nature does have its fundamental patterns. There is a mathematics of development and self-organisation that we have only quite recently been discovering. And it is anti-reductionist or holistic in spirit because it highlights the causality of downwards-acting constraints.

Reductionist thought views causality only in terms of upward acts of material construction. Complicated things do not develop, they get built. Which then usually leads to the problem of who did the building? It is clear that too much information has gone into the construction of any natural system for something like Darwinian selection to be the designer, for genes to be a simple blueprint.

But the systems view, the evo-devo view, the epistemic cut/semiotic view, says what actually happens is that only a little bit of rate independent information (constraints that a system can construct) is needed to harness or control a whole lot of "order for free" in the shape of naturally-occuring developmental forms. The genes, the hand of natural selection, etc, only have to do a bit of judicious tweaking at the right moments to channel the kind of growth that will happen anyway of its own accord.

You could call this an organic logic, as opposed to the mechanical logic beloved of those whose main interest in life is building machines (systems which actually are over-determined, constrained to the point where they have no free dynamics, and so operate purely from local effective cause). A gardener will understand though the difference between judiciously nudging nature and deterministically trying to control nature. Likewise a parent with a child.

Anyway, to address your point, you can see that the Piattelli-Palmarini/Uriagereka paper is reinventing this particular wheel. Surprise, surprise, nature is mathematical in that developmental processes show general (ie: universal) patterns like log/log growth. When you get hierarchical expansion - with both the local and the global growing at equal rate - the inevitable outcome is powerlaw, scalefree, fractal, etc.

So naked self-organisation is constrained to fall into certain self-consistent (ie: self-constraining!) patterns. Then these natural patterns are what epistemic/semiotic mechanism can harness, so as to channel growth towards goals. And surprise, surprise, even this controlling machinery has certain inevitable characteristics. It looks to be ruled by certain universal mathematical principles (as only certain forms can achieve the resulting effects).

Recursion in grammar is this kind of story.

Nested hierarchical form is a natural outcome of self-organising development. Fractal or Fibonacci patterns are the "order for free" that result from free (ie: "random") local constructive actions within a stable set of global constraints. The animal brain is functionally structured as a nested hierarchy. Take the macaque visual hierarchy as the standard example. (http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~billk/billkPres1b.html)

It is all about differentiation~integration - two mutual processes, one localising, one globalising, going on with equal energy. The result is a tremendously dynamic hierarchical organisation. Whether you are talking about sensory input or motor output, there is a hierarchical process of composition and decomposition going on. Which can look "modular" once you frame it as higher cortical areas doing the broad planning and oversight (setting the general constraints) and the lower cortical areas doing the detailed grunt work (constructing the particular actions to fit within these constraints).

So the animal brain is good at "recursion" in this sense. To move a paw requires the hierarchical composition of the intent coupled to the hierarchical decomposition of its execution.

But there is something still limited about the animal mind. It's thinking is holistic, entirely patterned according to the demands and possibilities of the moment, not able to step back and think self-consciously, reflectively, objectively, about the moment. The animal cannot construct a recursive structure of such moments where this moment is seen within a dynamically/deliberately selected context of such moments. There is no secondary life story concerning a "me" who is having "this experience".

The reason is the animal mind/brain has the semiotic machinery (genes, synapses, other dynamic-tweaking memory devices) to develop hierarchical states of experience. But it is missing the mechanism for constructing the constraints necessary to go up that further level of recursion.

This is what language brings. And again, in terms of systems causality, it is only in fact a small difference that can produce a very big effect.

The key to language evolution (in my view, after Leiberman, etc) is the development of serial utterance - a palate and throat which broke vocalisation into a syntactic stream. As Piattelli-Palmarini/Uriagereka point out, Fibonacci type recursive growth needs the emergence of digital codes - the 0/1 of onset and coda in their "F-game". The human vocal tract does that, breaking the flow of sound into vowels and cosonants. Once that simple trick emerges, then unlimited recursion - an endlessly growing nested hierarchy - can be constructed.

So the animal brain was naturally a hierarchy, able to compose~decompose. But only in response to the very immediate world. There was no way to construct a back-story of thought and meaning. The recursive capacities of their brains could not be exploited to do this higher level recursion because there was not the further machinery to harness it.

Humans stumbled into such a machinery with simple changes to the vocal tract. Yes, undoubtedly all this was connected to changes also going on in the brain - selective pressure for machavellian sociality, theory of mind, tool-use - which were making Homo capable of more elaborate recursion anyway. So it is a complex paleoanthropological tale.

But essentially the problem was finding a tool to unlock the potential. The animal brain was very good at self-organising mental states of anticipation, intent, etc. But only as a response to constraints largely given by the world around them. Langauge was a way to code for constraints - to construct them "at will" (or rather, by social learning and habit) - and so harness the moment-to-moment personal development of states of mind. I speak therefore I can control what I think. (and having found I spoke too hastily, I can then correct that)

So there is recursion here on the grand scale. Development has a systems logic. It is the natural and inevitable patterns that result from dynamical self-organisation. It is both physical (what happens in reality) and mathematical (how we model what happens in terms of formal causality). And it looks to have the form of a nested hierarchy when it is optimal or otherwise extremal - the max ent principle, the reason powerlaws are ubiquitous in natural structures.

But evo can harness devo. Syntax can harness semantics. Give a system a memory, some kind of epistemic mechanism to construct its own constraints, and freely-occuring dynamics can be chanelled to achieve localised purpose. You get life and mind. Genes were the first level great breakthrough, words the second.

The complex structure of a sentence was inevitable just as soon as some mechanism arose to break a flow of sound into discrete chunks. Syntax is the construction of constraints on semantics. A cat is a general idea. Which can be made hierarchically more constrained by adding qualifiers such as [cat [sat [mat]]]. Or [cat [kitten [cute]]]. Or [cat [cartoon [Krazy Kat]]].

What matters in the mind is that an idea, an anticipatory image, forms. This is going to happen every moment anyway because that is how brains are structured. But states of mind can be constructed via acts of verbally-base, recursively nested, constraint.

Sure, you can get obsessed about the hunt for a brain module which does "syntactic constraint". Stick a person's head in a scanner, ask them to generate regular and irregular verbs, and you will find different parts of the brain working hard. Perhaps the left dorsolateral prefrontal for regular verbs, and the left superior frontal gyrus for the irregular (until the next study using german rather than english speakers contradicts you).

But this is missing the point. Brains are already hierarchically organised. And the cause that is making such a "neuroscientific" difference in humans is not the addition of some novel brain module/genetic modification but another level of the epistemic cut. That is what needs to be the focus of attention.

 

[bohm2]

Complexity of a higher order (like life and mind) can arise if a system discovers the trick of constructing its own constraints.What matters in the mind is that an idea, an anticipatory image, forms. This is going to happen every moment anyway because that is how brains are structured. But states of mind can be constructed via acts of verbally-base, recursively nested, constraint.

Isn't "constructing it's own constraints" just the nativist position?

Sure, you can get obsessed about the hunt for a brain module which does "syntactic constraint". Stick a person's head in a scanner, ask them to generate regular and irregular verbs, and you will find different parts of the brain working hard. Perhaps the left dorsolateral prefrontal for regular verbs, and the left superior frontal gyrus for the irregular (until the next study using german rather than english speakers contradicts you).

But this is missing the point. Brains are already hierarchically organised. And the cause that is making such a "neuroscientific" difference in humans is not the addition of some novel brain module/genetic modification but another level of the epistemic cut. That is what needs to be the focus of attention.

Maybe I'm mistaken but I don't think they are suggesting a "brain module". I think the argument is for "mental" module. It's not clear if such modules can be accommodated within neural mechanisms as presently understood. I think that's why Chomsky writes:

The familiar slogan about the mental and the neurophysiological has the matter backwards: it should not be taken as a characterization of the mental, but rather as a hypothesis about neurophysiology: perhaps the neurophysiological is the mental at a “lower” level, perhaps not. As of now, we have more reason to feel secure about the mental than about the neurophysiological.

The point, I thought, was whether the "environment" influenced the evolution of the "particle"; and even in the case of hydrogen fusing into helium, it was only under the conditions produced by the stars that the hydrogen atoms overcame their electroweak interactions and found the more favorable strong interaction. It was a synthesis of both external and internal forces.

Nobody is claimimg that the environment plays no role just a secondary, minor role. With respect to language, the environment just can't deliver the goods or so goes the argument for reasons as the following:

An important argument in favor of the generative approach is the Poverty of the stimulus argument. The child's input (a finite number of sentences encountered by the child, together with information about the context in which they were uttered) is in principle compatible with an infinite number of conceivable grammars. Moreover, few if any children can rely on corrective feedback from adults when they make a grammatical error. Yet, barring situations of medical abnormality or extreme privation, all the children in a given speech-community converge on very much the same grammar by the age of about five years. An especially dramatic example is provided by children who for medical reasons are unable to produce speech, and therefore can literally never be corrected for a grammatical error, yet nonetheless converge on the same grammar as their typically developing peers, according to comprehension-based tests of grammar. Considerations such as these have led Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Eric Lenneberg and others to argue that the types of grammar that the child needs to consider must be narrowly constrained by human biology (the nativist position).These innate constraints are sometimes referred to as universal grammar, the human "language faculty," or the "language instinct"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition

 

[apeiron]

Maybe I'm mistaken but I don't think they are suggesting a "brain module". I think the argument is for "mental" module. It's not clear if such modules can be accommodated within neural mechanisms as presently understood. I think that's why Chomsky writes:

Chomsky has always been wedded to the notion of organs of the mind, suggesting the brain would be organised in a functionally compartmented way like the body's organ system.

So yes, it may have only been a hypothesis - a move from the supposed evidence for mental modularity to the expectation of actual neurophysiological modularity. But it was the hypothesis.

And it was a hypothesis broadly shared by many cogsci folk in the early days of brain scanning. Despite the jokes about cognitive phrenology.

The hypothesis of course collapsed pretty quickly - about 1988 to be precise, when the Washington PET group reported the cerebellum (along with many other areas) lighting up during word processing tasks.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3277066

 

[Pythagorean]

Nobody is claimimg that the environment plays no role just a secondary, minor role. With respect to language, the environment just can't deliver the goods or so goes the argument for reasons as the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition

I so no good reasons for you to quantify who plays the bigger role and I really don't understand how you're quantifying it. If we take the environment away, there can be little to no development. How do you tally up contributions, how do you weigh contributions? Do you really think that paragraph did a sufficient job of making any quantifiable argument? It was a bunch of hand-waving. All it does it outline (and quite qualitatively, I may add) the fact that environment is not sufficient which we all agree on already.

 

[bohm2]

I so no good reasons for you to quantify who plays the bigger role and I really don't understand how you're quantifying it. If we take the environment away, there can be little to no development. How do you tally up contributions, how do you weigh contributions? Do you really think that paragraph did a sufficient job of making any quantifiable argument? It was a bunch of hand-waving. All it does it outline (and quite qualitatively, I may add) the fact that environment is not sufficient which we all agree on already.

This is his argument. Take a simple example. A human embryo. It grows to develop hands and not wings in comparison to a bird embryo. One assumes that's due to heredity (nativist position). Environmental factors are considered to play a minor role. Do you agree with that?

 

[Pythagorean]

This is his argument. Take a simple example. A human embryo. It grows to develop hands and not wings in comparison to a bird embryo. One assumes that's due to heredity (nativist position). Environmental factors are considered to play a minor role. Do you agree with that?

In the very specific case of morphology of wing vs. bird, yes, it's obviously based on internal genetic programming, but I don't see how this is relevant to the discussion at large.

 

[bohm2]

In the very specific case of morphology of wing vs. bird, yes, it's obviously based on internal genetic programming, but I don't see how this is relevant to the discussion at large.

Okay, given that you agree with this and we don't know the details how that occurs, why do you believe that such an internal genetic programming does apply with respect to the bird embryo example and not the human language case? That's his basic argument:

In fact, if someone came along and said that a bird embryo is somehow "trained" to grow wings, people would just laugh, even though embryologists lack anything like a detailed understanding of how genes regulate embryological development...The gene-control problem is conceptually similar to the problem of accounting for language growth. In fact, language development really ought to be called language growth because the language organ grows like any other body organ.

 

[Pythagorean]

Okay, given that you agree with this and we don't know the details how that occurs, why do you believe that such an internal genetic programming does apply with respect to the bird embryo example and not the human language case? That's his basic argument:

I didn't say the internal genetic programming isn't there, I said environment plays a significant role. I'd appreciate if you stopped trying to paint my arguments black or white, because you're mischaracterizing my position.

On example: the language you speak depends on the region you live in. Another example, bilingual have an intellectual edge on unilinguals, which supports the weak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity" .

Diane Poulin-Dubois, Agnes Blaye, Julie Coutya, Ellen Bialystok. The effects of bilingualism on toddlers’ executive functioning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2010; DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2010.10.009

 

[bohm2]

I didn't say the internal genetic programming isn't there, I said environment plays a significant role. I'd appreciate if you stopped trying to paint my arguments black or white, because you're mischaracterizing my position.

My mistake. I didn't mean to imply that you don't think genetics isn't important. I lost track of the argument. It happens a lot to me when I'm doing multiple tasks. I apologize.

 

[Pythagorean]

Wow, don't see that much in philosophy forums; apology accepted.

 

[bohm2]

even in the case of hydrogen fusing into helium, it was only under the conditions produced by the stars that the hydrogen atoms overcame their electroweak interactions and found the more favorable strong interaction. It was a synthesis of both external and internal forces.

I'm not very well read on cosmology and this is a total aside, but isn't it believed that most of Helium existed before star formation or am I mistaken?