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

[Pythagorean]

I think you're right; I think on the way down from very very hot, there was some fusion going on.

 

[bohm2]

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 thought this recent analysis seems to offer some support by the scheme outlined by Gould/Chomsky/Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, I think?

Due to such constraints, selection for localized shape change in a single part of a structure can produce widespread morphological changes because relative constraints deflect the evolutionary response in a direction of morphological space that differs from the direction of selection...Because relative constraints can produce substantial deflections of the evolutionary response from the direction of selection, inferring the selective pressures from observed changes in the fossil record is fraught with difficulty. It is conceivable that the derived characters of modern humans may not have arisen independently by adaptive evolution in response to separate selection pressures, but that the origin of one trait may have facilitated the evolution of the entire suite of characters.

"As much as possible, we simulated each of these changes as a localised shape change limited to a small region of the skull. For each of the simulations, we obtained a predicted response that included not only the change we selected for, but also all the others. All those features of the skull tended to change as a whole package. This means that, in evolutionary history, any of the changes may have facilitated the evolution of the others."

Human Skull Is Highly Integrated: Study Sheds New Light On Evolutionary Changes
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111220102248.htm

Pervasive Genetic Integration directs the evolution of human skull shape
http://www.flywings.org.uk/PDF%20files/Evol2012.pdf

 

[apeiron]

I thought this recent analysis seems to offer some support by the scheme outlined by Gould/Chomsky/Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, I think?

Given that fossil endocasts suggest very little evidence of significant brain reorganisation - local or global - it seems more likely that the telling change was a redesign of the vocal tract for articulate vocalisation.

Studies of Neanderthals, for instance, argue for only slight differences. Of these, the ones like the shortening of frontal and temporal areas in humans look due to changes in jaw-line - so an imposed change in the shape of the brain case that is unlikely to have changed the brain functionally. While others, such as a possible expansion of cerebellum and parietal lobes, would be in the "wrong" place so far as grammar ability goes.

http://www.paleoanthro.org/journal/content/PA20080093.pdf

So - as I've already argued in post #270 - the brain looks to have kept doing what it was doing, and a new constraint was put upon its output in the form of serial articulation. Which in turn created the possibility of the elaborate recursion that underpins grammatical structure.

It has been pointed out that the radical modification of the hominid vocal tract involves a whole hierarchy of dichotomies in itself. So just to control the equipment demands a recursive motor capacity.

http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~chrisg/index_files/EvolHierar.pdf

Brown and Golston note how there is a first divide between the larynx and the supralaryngeal filter (or voice box and basically the rest), then the filter divides in turn into its oral vs nasal paths, the oral into its lips vs tongue, the tongue into its front vs back, the front of the tongue into its pointy tip vs broad blade configuration. There is a whole tree of sub-divisions.

To get an idea of how much happens in articulation, compare saying bat and mat. Pinch your nose shut to really see how one is oral, the other nasal. So once the machinery existed - probably evolved just to make complicated expressive social noises (the old "singing ape" hypothesis) then you have all the exaptation for recursive grammar you really need. The cultural habit of associating semantics to this syntactical capacity could then eventually develop.

This is a simpler story. Any major reorganisation of the brain itself is a problem for evolutionary theory. But a change to some other bit of the body which had a major rebound effect on the brain, that is more parsimonious.

 

[Albuquerque]

From where I stand Holism and its emergence or irreducible complexity, as an anti mechanical approach to reality is unacceptable...the best I can make for a case, is to say that any valid conception of Holism must be symmetrically proportional to Reductionism or in turn be abandoned...on that regard one might just as well give up any hope of rational thought, Philosophy, Mathematics, or Science altogether, if we are to indulge ourselves in such appetites, as from this point on concepts become a word salad, and of course, through it, any thing can be made up to fit our observational needs...

...precisely in this sense I am lead to not believe in "minds" as agents of causal constrains upon a body of parts any more than I believe in parts as the causal justification of a mind...in fact if applying the principles of a non linear relativistic time to it, the all idea of agency falls down as meaningless...to me Holism or Reductionism are then constrained to perspective place holders from where we can build a symmetrically proportional understanding of reality but nothing else...the cause of much confusion is the permanent lack of "resolution" or "detail" in detecting what can be described as parasite hidden variables in the correct framing of the problems at hand...

A correct Reductionist approach must account for the dynamic unfolding of functions when making the bottom up stack of parts onto a system as means of explaining it...in turn the Holistic approach cannot give up a mechanical exact account on the phenomena it tries to describe. Same is to say the last must be undressed from its magical pretensions while the first must re-equate its notion of parts without contextual dynamics...that is, "things" must do/perform, in order to be things, just as systems must be functionally accountable to parts in order for "systems" make any sense at all !

 

[bohm2]

Given that fossil endocasts suggest very little evidence of significant brain reorganisation - local or global - it seems more likely that the telling change was a redesign of the vocal tract for articulate vocalisation.

I'm not very knowledgeable about evolutionary theory but I think that these authors don't believe that language has much to do with vocal tract redesign. Here's an interesting assessment of Chomsky's position from one blog:

Chomsky thinks language should be seen as a “spandrel” of some other structural change. The

“answers may well lie not so much in the theory of natural selection as in molecular biology, in the study of what kinds of physical systems can develop under the conditions of life on Earth and why, ultimately because of physical principles” .

Though he does not deny that evolution played a role in the development of language, he stresses that it possibly emerged only via a small mutation and that ultimately only unknown operations of “physical laws applying to a brain of a certain degree of complexity” could explain the origin of the language faculty and its properties...The only speculation he expressed before his Science paper with Fitch and Hauser was that

"It may be that at some remote period a mutation took place that gave rise to the property of discrete infinity, perhaps for reasons that have to do with the biology of cells, to be explained in terms of properties of physical mechanisms, now unknown...At that point evolutionary pressures might have shaped the further development of the capacity, at least in part. Quite possibly other aspects of its evolutionary development again reflect the operation of physical laws applying to a brain of a certain degree of complexity. We simply do not know. (Chomsky 1988: 170)...

With the rise of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program this view became more concrete: if only few principles ultimately comprise Universal Grammar (Pinker/Jackendoff 2005: 219),

“one does not need to advance incremental, adaptationist arguments with intermediate steps to explain much of natural language's specific syntactic design”.

http://sharedsymbolicstorage.blogspot.com/2008/02/language-evolution-i-noam-chomskys.html

But he doesn't think it has much to do with the vocal tract for some reasons that can be found in these passages:

Langauge can of course be used for communication, as can any aspect of what we do: style of dress, gesture, and so on. And it can be and commonly is used for much else. Statistically speaking, for whatever that is worth, the overwhelming use of language is internal – for thought. It takes an enormous act of will to keep from talking to oneself in every waking moment – and asleep as well, often a considerable annoyance. The distinguished neurologist Harry Jerison (1977:55) among others expressed a stronger view, holding that “language did not evolve as a communication system…. the initial evolution of language is more likely to have been…for the construction of a real world,” as a “tool for thought.” Not only in the functional dimension, but also in all other respects – semantic, syntactic, morphological and phonological – the core properties of human language appear to differ sharply from animal communication systems, and to be largely unique in the organic world.

Anatomically modern humans are found in the fossil record several hundred thousand years ago, but evidence of the human capacity is much more recent, not long before the trek from Africa. Paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall reports that “a vocal tract capable of producing the sounds of articulate speech” existed over half a million years before there is any evidence that our ancestors were using language. “We have to conclude,” he writes, “that the appearance of language and its anatomical correlates was not driven by natural selection, however beneficial these innovations may appear in hindsight” – a conclusion which raises no problems for standard evolutionary biology, contrary to illusions in popular literature (Tattersall, 1998). It appears that human brain size reached its current level recently, perhaps about 100,000 years ago, which suggests to some specialists that “human language probably evolved, at least in part, as an automatic but adaptive consequence of increased absolute brain size” (neuroscientist Georg Striedter, 2004).

http://www.punksinscience.org/klean...L/material/Berwick-Chomsky_Biolinguistics.pdf

 

[apeiron]

A correct Reductionist approach must account for the dynamic unfolding of functions when making the bottom up stack of parts onto a system as means of explaining it...in turn the Holistic approach cannot give up a mechanical exact account on the phenomena it tries to describe.

I agree and have always argued that reductionism and holism are complementary views of reality. Both are "right". Although it is also clear which is the simpler model, which the larger model.

 

[apeiron]

But he doesn't think it has much to do with the vocal tract for some reasons that can be found in these passages:

Again, to be frank, Chomsky's views cut little ice in paleolinguistic circles. Why do you treat him as such an authority here?

Gould, likewise, is not exactly state of the art in evo-devo theory.

Both these guys seem to have reputations for challenging the uber-reductionist approaches of their days - Chomsky vs behaviourism, Gould vs Darwinism. So they were good critics - putting things in blunt and simple-minded fashion - but then poor at creating the alternative theories because of the same rhetorical qualities.

Yes, a broadly human brain organisation judging by endocasts has been around 1.8 million years, an articulate vocal tract for perhaps 400,000 years, Homo sapiens has been around about 120,000years, the symbolic explosion in human culture happened about 40,000 years ago. So theories about the rise of the human mind are constrained by a basic timeline.

In broad terms, this can be explained by, first the rise of tool-use and brain lateralisation in H.erectus (so the reorganisation seen in endocasts), then the rise of expressive vocalisation/emotional calls in the highly social late erectus period (a smart chimp who now made fire, used spears to hunt, chipped hand axes, but had no symbolic culture and so no evidence of actual language), then at some point there was the invention of actual language and the sudden explosion of symbolic culture because of the feedback advantages of speech-scaffolded thought.

You could say that for a long time there was the hardware (a capable brain and articulate vocal tract). But the software of an actual language had to be invented socially (it could not evolve biologically). And you can then speculate about why it took a while, or why it happened when it eventually did.

But you can see why people can't take Chomsky seriously on the subject. He is focused on the abruptness of the emergence of symbolic culture circa 40kya. And seeks some strange "spontaneous genetic reorganisation due to Platonic principles" explanation - a view which is utterly handwavy and lacking in biological specifics. Where is the evidence for this kind of thing to happen? Well, how can we even attack this as a theory when it is just handwaving without the detail to contradict?

Chomsky seems to be ignoring the evidence of actual steady biological change - the early reorganisation of the brain and greater laterality for tool-use, the medium term reorganisation of the vocal tract, probably for expressive communication.

And then he discounts the cultural evolution of the software to make use of the gradually exapted hardware. He believes human-level thought to be "innate" rather than socioculturally evolved and language scaffolded. So the very rapid pace of cultural evolution cannot be used to explain the sudden appearance of symbolic culture. Chomsky has to appeal to some genetic "hopeful monster".

OK, the later Chomsky has tried to trim down universal grammar to a minimal core that biological evolution could implement rapidly. But the leaner the mechanism, the more definite should be its imprint. The genetics, the brain architecture, should be damn obvious. And yet the Chomskian approach can't even explain the differences in the way the brain handles regular and irregular verbs.

Can you state what you actually think Chomsky's theory is here? Summarise its essentials? To be honest, I felt I was always chasing shadows when trying to deal with what Chomsky believes. He had a description of the structure of grammar. Fine. He had a critique of Behaviourism and associative learning. Again fine. But has he ever had a sensible theory of the evolution of human language and thought? I have always felt most definitely not. I can't even see an actual theory there, just some hand-waving coupled to a grumpy refusal to engage with the actual science that has been going on.

 

[Albuquerque]

I agree and have always argued that reductionism and holism are complementary views of reality. Both are "right". Although it is also clear which is the simpler model, which the larger model.

...well, agreed but then I would argue that a sub-set will never compute a "master-set"...
...a master-set if everything, is not computable or "repeatable", at least while unfolding as an ensemble within itself, if repeatable, it will be cyclic repeatable, one after the other and obviously without memory of the other...a sub-set as an epistemic description will therefore always lack "resolution" in relation to its master domain (reality) once the demonstration is the domain itself...what I informally in my own vague language am clumsily trying to convey is that epistemologically Holism serves as analogy from our perspective limited frame of reference downwards and not upwards...Reality is upwards ! Hence sub-set minds do not exist and an ultimate reality/system taken for a mind does not need to think/search...its done, and its not an agent !

...note that my conceptual frame of reference permanently will avoid terms like "nothingness" or any degrees of "freedom" whatever they are...there is no "creative somethingness" to be added to the power set which is everything that can truly be mechanically and "causally" separated and then randomly emerge in this wholeness...if anything "my" wholeness, which include from our point of view, conception of potential states, does not grow nor does it shrink...as time is relative, whatever is the case is NOW the case...

(...I apologise for the messy amateurish "free form thinking" presentation of would be ideas, as for my unforgivable bad English, hope nevertheless there is some content to explore around...)

 

[Albuquerque]

(above edited)
...in sum, in neither case, human like or god like, regarding minds, one can account for valid full agency..."agency" here, is seen as more of an illusory effect and not so much as a thing in its own right...as I put it and timely speaking, all there is is process, and curiously the process is done !

 

[apeiron]

(...I apologise for the messy amateurish "free form thinking" presentation of would be ideas, as for my unforgivable bad English, hope nevertheless there is some content to explore around...)

It would indeed help if you could supply a reference that explains your epistemological position here. If your ideas are based on anything, it won't be to hard to cite the relevant source.

But as far as I can make out what you are saying, you seem to be muddling the map and the territory.

Both reductionism and holism are formal styles of map-making. Reality is always going to be something else, complete and entire, and not actually divided in any of the ways we may talk about.

Reductionism is indeed a subset of the master set of holism, I would argue. But both then stand apart from reality as our models.

 

[apeiron]

(above edited)
...in sum, in neither case, human like or god like, regarding minds, one can account for valid full agency..."agency" here, is seen as more of an illusory effect and not so much as a thing in its own right...as I put it and timely speaking, all there is is process, and curiously the process is done !

Again, reality is certainly "done!". But our models of reality are another matter.

This goes to the OP in that our minds are models of reality. And that modelling keeps progressing. The shift from the informal modelling of speechless animals to the formal modelling of symbol-handling humans is a significant step in the history of reality modelling.

The mind-body "problem" as traditionally posed focuses on the fact that there is "something it is like to be" to be modelling reality. Well, surely it had to be like something . The real question is how has that process of modelling evolved? And once the basics of modelling are understood, the apparent distance between mind and world is no longer a problem but a necessary quality.

If reality is "holistic", then the only way to be an observer of reality is to (pretend) to stand outside it. A separation - an epistemic cut - must be manufactured.

 

[Albuquerque]

It would indeed help if you could supply a reference that explains your epistemological position here. If your ideas are based on anything, it won't be to hard to cite the relevant source.

But as far as I can make out what you are saying, you seem to be muddling the map and the territory.

Both reductionism and holism are formal styles of map-making. Reality is always going to be something else, complete and entire, and not actually divided in any of the ways we may talk about.

Reductionism is indeed a subset of the master set of holism, I would argue. But both then stand apart from reality as our models.

...well it seams fair to reckon there is this idea going around on reality being an open ended ongoing process in permanent construction...how many current contemporary philosophers or scientists in mainstream oppose this conception in your view ?

...and of course holism and reductionism regard map making, I just accessed the real constrains each approach presents as its implications regarding my own perspective upon minds, there are no citations to be made here...

 

[bohm2]

Can you state what you actually think Chomsky's theory is here? Summarise its essentials? To be honest, I felt I was always chasing shadows when trying to deal with what Chomsky believes. He had a description of the structure of grammar. Fine. He had a critique of Behaviourism and associative learning. Again fine. But has he ever had a sensible theory of the evolution of human language and thought? I have always felt most definitely not. I can't even see an actual theory there, just some hand-waving coupled to a grumpy refusal to engage with the actual science that has been going on.

What science? I thought there is very little science in this area. If his papers and that of people like Ian Tattersall, Hauser, etc. aren't convincing then it's unlikely that a non-expert like myself can do justice to their arguments but two very good papers giving these arguments are the following:

An Evolutionary Framework for the Acquisition of Symbolic Cognition by Homo sapiens
http://psyc.queensu.ca/ccbr/Vol3/Tattersall.pdf

Three Factors in Langauge Design
http://www.biolinguistics.uqam.ca/Chomsky_05.pdf

 

[Albuquerque]

Again, reality is certainly "done!". But our models of reality are another matter.

This goes to the OP in that our minds are models of reality. And that modelling keeps progressing. The shift from the informal modelling of speechless animals to the formal modelling of symbol-handling humans is a significant step in the history of reality modelling.

The mind-body "problem" as traditionally posed focuses on the fact that there is "something it is like to be" to be modelling reality. Well, surely it had to be like something . The real question is how has that process of modelling evolved? And once the basics of modelling are understood, the apparent distance between mind and world is no longer a problem but a necessary quality.

If reality is "holistic", then the only way to be an observer of reality is to (pretend) to stand outside it. A separation - an epistemic cut - must be manufactured.

I am trying to make a point that ultimately goes against agency evolution and causality as things in their own right as I don´t see nor primal nor last agents no start nor end...I am absolutely sure you understand what I mean as lack of intelligence does not seam to be one of your attributes...I guess I am trying to reduce minds to compelled systems without agency, to question open randomness in evolution whatever randomness intends to mean, and ultimately to regard causality as a correlation on non free events in which the LAW of what is to be the case at all times is the very source of Logic and reason from where causality is later wrongly inferred...necessarily my position goes against the status quo as it presents a very undigested raw approach to such problems...

 

[Albuquerque]

...even squids and octopus are capable of symbolic representation through mental mapping of their surroundings, I would say our uniqueness is more related with complexity then with any emergent extra feature...oral language was useful for conveying complex systems of relations in the world to our weak infants in which our increasingly developed brain require a great deal of time to fully grow to adulthood...

...now my question is would you consider Earth an Intelligent being on its own ? You see taken huge lengths of time Earth adapts as any other system in this universe adapts in their own way...at this light "awareness" seams more the product of progressive complexity where increasingly degrees of awareness arise then it looks like an all or nothing situation...still I don´t see "agency" in none of cases...

 

[bohm2]

...even squids and octopus are capable of symbolic representation through mental mapping of their surroundings, I would say our uniqueness is more related with complexity then with any emergent extra feature...

The argument is that there is a qualitative difference between the symbolic systems of man vs other animals:

In symbolic systems of other animals, symbols appear to be linked directly to mind-independent events. The symbols of human language are sharply different. Even in the simplest cases, there is no word-object relation, where objects are mind-independent entities. There is no reference relation, in the technical sense familiar from Frege and Peirce to contemporary externalists. Rather, it appears that we should adopt something like the approach of the seventeenth and eighteenth century cognitive revolution, and the conclusions of Shaftesbury and Hume that the “peculiar nature belonging to” the linguistic elements used to refer is not something external and mind-independent. Rather, their peculiar nature is a complex of perspectives involving Gestalt properties, cause-and-effect, “sympathy of parts” directed to a “common end,” psychic continuity, and other such mental properties. In Hume’s phrase, the “identity, which we ascribe” to vegetables, animal bodies, artifacts, or “the mind of man”—the array of individuating properties— is only a “fictitious one,” established by our “cognoscitive powers,” as they were termed by his seventeenth century predecessors. That is no impediment to interaction, including the special case of communication, given largely shared cognoscitive powers. Rather, the semantic properties of words seem similar in this regard to their phonetic properties. No one is so deluded as to believe that there is a mind-independent object corresponding to the internal syllable [ba], some construction from motion of molecules perhaps, which is selected when I say [ba] and when you hear it. But interaction proceeds nevertheless, always a more-or-less rather than a yes-or-no affair.”

N. Chomsky in THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE: HOW DEEPLY HIDDEN? p. 199-200.

And I'm probably being a big-time hypocrite here because in some of my other misanthropic posts I often refer to man as nothing more than a socially-obsessed linguistic ground chimp. But I guess perspective is important.

 

[Albuquerque]

Have you seen latest TED video from Antonio Damasio on mind ? its worth take a look although not directly linked to the issue here...any way our symbolic representations in language are abstract, if that was what you meant...their are systematizations of functions in themselves, and they can represent multiple tasks in one simple concept...as I see it, the complexity of such representations justified by the very integrated working of the neo-cortex with other systems in the brain does not have any emergent special feature but rather a complex inter-relational increment on multiple cognitive tasks seen more loosely in other animals in nature...even the all mighty Culture, paradigm of the 70´s mentality can be tracked today to killer wales and other species...I don´t think a strong case can be made regarding the human special case for minds and language not even regarding Civilization emerging in the past 20.000 years, although I can see Anthropologists Sociologists and the likes embarking all the way in such sunken ship...

 

[apeiron]

...and of course holism and reductionism regard map making, I just accessed the real constrains each approach presents as its implications regarding my own perspective upon minds, there are no citations to be made here...

Unfortunately, this forum does expect you to be able to provide references to back up opinions, to stay on topic, and to write in understandable fashion to boot.

Your choice if you want to play by these minimal standards.

 

[Albuquerque]

I commonly use to say that there is no bigger hypocrisy then pointing out an hypocrite...so no worries there, I sympathise with playing devils advocate if we are to seriously question anything...my problem here goes far beyond humans versus animal, aiming high I want a fundamental analogy between organic and inorganic systems, go figure...that´s why agency must go out of the window specially when one starts to associate this problem with other fundamental problems like compatiblist free will (foxy approach) and abstruse concepts like randomness and the like...it is my feeling there is allot that must be purged from our conceptual frames if we are to develop anything new from the Greeks on...

 

[Albuquerque]

Unfortunately, this forum does expect you to be able to provide references to back up opinions, to stay on topic, and to write in understandable fashion to boot.

Your choice if you want to play by these minimal standards.

...my opinions, if new or even partially new, can be backed up through an increment in internal consistency and a progressive clarification on the terms and concepts I provide if intending a useful fruitful communication with you guys which I honestly do, although the appeal of shortcuting extensive arguments with analogies and metaphors hoping for an intuitive reading may be tempting given my poor control of the language or the extenuating collection of evidence that such complex issues require when bringing out of the box thinking up to the table...nevertheless extraordinary claims require extraordinary profs and I fully appreciate the constructive intention of your remarks.

 

[apeiron]

What science? I thought there is very little science in this area.

Why do you think that? There are journals, conferences, turf battles over whether you belong to paleolinguistics, biolinguistics or historical linguistics. Every semblance of an active academic domain

If his papers and that of people like Ian Tattersall, Hauser, etc. aren't convincing then it's unlikely that a non-expert like myself can do justice to their arguments but two very good papers giving these arguments are the following:

OK, what is it that Tattersall is claiming here in your view? I'm not sure where the significant dispute might be?

Apparently the major biological reorganization at the origin of Homo sapiens involved some neural innovation that “exapted” the already highly evolved human brain for symbolic thought. This potential then had to be “discovered” culturally, plausibly through the invention of language. Emergence rather than natural selection is thus implicated in the origin of human symbolic consciousness, a chance coincidence of acquisitions having given rise to an entirely new and unanticipated level of complexity. This observation may undermine claims for “adaptedness” in modern human behaviors.

So as I argue, the brain is exapted for grammar/syntax. And then this possibility had to be "discovered" culturally.

Tattersall's gloss is in error I would say for not treating cultural evolution as an actual form of evolutionary change (he calls this second stage emergence rather than evolution).

But really, he is not addressing the points that I was raising. He does not deal with the vocal tract (though elsewhere he has said he is more swayed by the evidence that an articulate tract arose only in sapiens - something that is quite possibly true, indeed what I would prefer to believe, and doesn't change anything here except the timings).

And so far as "major brain reorganisation" goes, Tattersall is not presenting any evidence of such.

He says...

What exactly this change was, is beyond my expertise to speculate, although numerous suggestions have been made: one intriguing suggestion is that a neural system linking the basal ganglia and other subcortical structures with the cortex, and initially adapted for motor control,
was coopted to cognitive functions (Lieberman, 2006, 2007); another possibility is of a mutation affecting working memory or phonological storage capacity in the prefrontal cortex (Coolidge and Wynn, 2005).

He then goes on to say that this change was like the keystone of an arch - a small but significant change. So not in fact anything major in morphology, just retrospectively major in consequence.

At this point, it would be worth turning to a better authority like Lieberman - the original vocal tract theorist! Whose "intriguing suggestion" is precisely that the critical shift was from a low-level autonomic control over the vocal tract to a high-level one, setting up the ability to actually plan complex and novel vocalisations.

Vocalisation became more complex because of considerable change to the vocal tract. And because of the fine-tuning of top-down neural connectivity that created more "oversight" of the motor control of that tract.

It does pay to understand brain evolution in some detail here. The top-down connections already existed. So you could say the brain was exapted - but then it has connections in every direction so it is exapted to do just about anything on this score. All that had to actually happen was an adjustment of ratios. More widespread top-downness, more plasticity of motor control.

That is not to say a whole lot of other fine-grain twiddling of neurodevelopmental settings were not going on. Rather than a single hopeful monster genetic change, you would expect many millenia of fine-tuning that continued even for the next 40k years after symbolic speech definitely existed.

So did you see something critical in the Tattersall paper that I've missed? It's certainly not an argument against the possible importance of the vocal tract as a new constraint on expressive communication, or the likely fine-grain and cumulative nature of any related "brain reorganisation", or the need for the later cultural evolution of language itself, as far as I can see.

 

[Albuquerque]

...the advantage in the evolution of vocal communication in relation to say gestural communication is probably related with the constant use of hands either to gather to hunt or to work...curiously face mimics can be considered the only exception to this situation...no wonder our complex array of facial expressions is so important in communication specially considering that baby´s could not resort to complex vocalizations while very young...for that very same reasons it is currently believed women are far better prepared to interpret facial signs regarding states of mind then man...

 

[bohm2]

So did you see something critical in the Tattersall paper that I've missed? It's certainly not an argument against the possible importance of the vocal tract as a new constraint on expressive communication, or the likely fine-grain and cumulative nature of any related "brain reorganisation", or the need for the later cultural evolution of language itself, as far as I can see.

I think the key difference can be framed around a modern version of the Darwin-Wallace debate. Maybe you can expand on it because your background is far more extensive than mine in this area. Consider these points by Chomsky but also repeated by Tattershall and the others:

The language faculty is one component of what the cofounder of modern evolutionary theory, Alfred Russel Wallace, called ‘‘man’s intellectual and moral nature’’: the human capacities for creative imagination, language and symbolism generally, mathematics, interpretation and recording of natural phenomena, intricate social practices, and the like, a complex of capacities that seem to have crystallized fairly recently, perhaps a little over 50,000 years ago, among a small breeding group of which we are all descendants—a complex that sets humans apart rather sharply from other animals, including other hominids, judging by traces they have left in the archaeological record. The nature of the ‘‘human capacity,’’ as some researchers now call it, remains a considerable mystery. It was one element of a famous disagreement between the two founders of the theory of evolution, with Wallace holding, contrary to Darwin, that evolution of these faculties cannot be accounted for in terms of variation and natural selection alone, but requires ‘‘some other influence, law, or agency,’’ some principle of nature alongside gravitation, cohesion, and other forces without which the material universe could not exist. Although the issues are framed differently today within the core biological sciences, they have not disappeared (see Wallace 1889: chap. 15, Marshack 1985).

Same with our mathematical abilities:

Restriction to this case yields the successor function, from which the rest of the theory of natural numbers can be developed in familiar ways. That suggests a possible answer to a problem that troubled Wallace over a century ago: in his words, that the ‘‘gigantic development of the mathematical capacity is wholly unexplained by the theory of natural selection, and must be due to some altogether distinct cause’’ (1889:467), if only because it remained unused.

Consider also Tattersall's point here:

Still, it is far more likely that the neurological underpinnings of the human symbolic capacity were born in the major genetic/developmental reorganization that resulted in the physical entity Homo sapiens as we know it today – but that the expression of this underlying capacity had to await release by some cultural (White, 1982) rather than biological acquisition (Tattersall, 2004). This, of course, begs the question of what this cultural acquisition might have been; and it is hardly original to suggest that the prime candidate for the cultural releasing agent of the human symbolic capacity is the invention of language, facilitated by an already existing neural substrate.

I think the difference is that Chomsky/Tattersall/Hauser see culture as an effect of our innate symbolic ability and not the other way around. I'm not sure if I'm making sense but the difference is important and is what separates these two contrasting positions, I think. What confuses me (and maybe I'm mistaken), is if evolution of these abstract faculties was not guided by natural selection but due to natural law, might this explain why we seem to have a much deeper understanding of mind-independent reality than other animals? This is more in line with Peirce's argument and not Chomsky's (e.g. "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..."). But maybe I'm way off the mark and direct access to some aspect of mind-independent reality is not possible (as Chomsky argues), even if evolution is guided directly by such laws.

Why do you think that? There are journals, conferences, turf battles over whether you belong to paleolinguistics, biolinguistics or historical linguistics. Every semblance of an active academic domain

I meant this:

The most direct potential approaches to such investigation lie in the examination of the fossil and archaeological archives of the human past. Sadly, though, cognition in itself leaves no imprint in the tangible record. As a result, in trying to understand the evolution of our unusual cognitive mode we have to seek proxy systems.

 

[Albuquerque]

...it is my impression that the gravitational information coming out from the Moon, not being the Moon it is a natural model of the Moon or what the system Moon is, functionally speaking, say, in relation to Earth...sets of gravitons may be said to constitute the "linguistic" medium by which packets of information can be conveyed regarding variations in distance and its respective influence say in tides and so on...additionally we could consider rotation magnetic fields heat and such like but for simplification sake gravity suffices for analogy...now it seams fair to assert that the fundamental distinction we usually do regarding the encoding of information from living beings at large and humans in particular in opposition to inorganic systems is deeply rooted to the innate persuasive and persistent sense of agency provided by the highly complex so called "self effect" common to the particular development of our own system/species which to some extent has recently progressively been called into question by neuroscientists...if such is proven the case the all endless debate on language miraculous specificity will look very funny on history books...

 

[apeiron]

What confuses me (and maybe I'm mistaken), is if evolution of these abstract faculties was not guided by natural selection but due to natural law, might this explain why we seem to have a much deeper understanding of mind-independent reality than other animals? This is more in line with Peirce's argument and not Chomsky's (e.g. "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..."). But maybe I'm way off the mark and direct access to some aspect of mind-independent reality is not possible (as Chomsky argues), even if evolution is guided directly by such laws.

I don't think you give near enough weight to the impact of cultural evolution. Langauge opened up an entirely new realm of world-modelling for the human mind. And if you don't find a way to factor this in as part of your view of epistemology, then indeed you may jump to more fantastical reasons why humans are so good at world-modelling.

 

[Albuquerque]

...complex algorithms in computer programs can be very good in prediction and control and the tendency is to improve in the long run but it is not the case that they are conscious or aware on anything per se...it seams to me that we must separate "awareness" a problem of its own from complex forms of convergent data analysis...other then that I am personally not denying the importance of culture in general or even Ethics and Moral as methods to improve social efficiency in producing work, which is what they do, as they are none less then organizing "operative systems" where obviously a precise and yet subjective multi modal language is instrumental to the diversified adapting progress of a large group as a whole...nevertheless communication as means of achieving efficiency between a constellation or a cloud of integrated systems hardly can be seen as a specific human invention if not through a very narrow conception of what "language" and "communication" actually mean...we are indeed to obsessed with our sense of self importance to look at such matters in a frivolous cold and sufficiently distant manner...I for one indulge myself in imagining such scenarios for the sole and modest purpose of entertainment..

 

[bohm2]

I don't think you give near enough weight to the impact of cultural evolution. Langauge opened up an entirely new realm of world-modelling for the human mind. And if you don't find a way to factor this in as part of your view of epistemology, then indeed you may jump to more fantastical reasons why humans are so good at world-modelling.

You're probably right. Do you think that as a species we've evolved at all in the past ~50,000 years despite major changes in culture (and I'm not talking about things that are environmental like increase in height/weight, etc.)? I mean if I was to take a human infant from ~50,000 years ago and bring him/her up in today's society would he/she be pretty well like any other human being? Take a Neandethal or a pre-human ancestor and do the same.

 

[Evo]

You're probably right. Do you think that as species we've evolved at all in the past 50,000 years despite major changes in culture (and I'm not talking about things that are environmental like increase in height/weight, etc.)? I mean if I was to take a human infant from ~50,000 years ago and bring him/her up in today's society would he/she be pretty well like any other human being? Take a Neandethal or a pre-human ancestor and do the same.

Humans from ~50k years ago, yes.

 

[bohm2]

Humans from ~50k years ago, yes.

Do you think that an infant from that era that is brought up in modern society would not have the same language/math/science/music abilities/potential, etc as a modern human infant?

 

[Evo]

Do you think that an infant from that era that is brought up in modern society would not have the same language/math/science/music abilities/potential, etc as a modern human infant?

They'd have the same abilities, the modern human brain has been around ~50,000 years.

 

[Pythagorean]

What about transgenerational epigenetic effects? They've begun to manifest changes in the body at least (grandmothers of the depression have granddaughters more susceptible to diabetes and obesity).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics#Transgenerational_epigenetic_observations

Won't it be a while (and a lot of experiments and studies) before we can say what such effects have played a role in brain function in 50k years? (given that the textbook example of famine and diabetes was a two-generation development).

 

[apeiron]

Do you think that as a species we've evolved at all in the past ~50,000 years despite major changes in culture (and I'm not talking about things that are environmental like increase in height/weight, etc.)?

Yes, some researchers argue there has actually been faster genetic change during the past 10k than during any earlier period!

Gould was one of those who pushed the view that H.sapiens would have been genetically frozen since the cultural revolution 50kya. But the evidence is not supporting him.

See http://www.pnas.org/content/104/52/20753.full.pdf+html

To the extent that new adaptive alleles continued to reflect demographic growth, the Neolithic and later periods would have experienced a rate of adaptive evolution 100 times higher than characterized most of human evolution. Cultural changes have reduced mortality rates, but variance in reproduction has continued to fuel genetic change (51). In our view, the rapid cultural
evolution during the Late Pleistocene created vastly more opportunities for further genetic change, not fewer, as new avenues emerged for communication, social interactions, and creativity.

So it is entirely probable that the human brain has continued to evolve. There are all the highly controversial ethnic morphometric studies (Australian aborigines having larger primary visual cortex, for instance) but now we are moving into the neurogenetics era and can expect to have some much clearer answers.

This is another celebrated recent result...http://psych.colorado.edu/~carey/pdfFiles/ASPMMicrocephalin_Lahn.pdf

It could be something about an adaptation to tonal language, but what it is about is still speculative. The fact of continued genetic change, less so.

Could you adopt an archaic H.sapiens and rear it so it wouldn't stand out in high school? You would still want to say yes, but no longer with such certainty.

 

[apeiron]

What science? I thought there is very little science in this area.

This is a nice example of the kind of thing Chomsky has never done.

Restrictions on Biological Adaptation in Langauge Evolution
http://else.econ.ucl.ac.uk/papers/uploaded/329.pdf

Christiansen computer models the rate of cultural change against genetic change and argues that the co-evolution of language and genetic hard-wiring just can't happen as cultural evolution always runs ahead too fast - even if you invoke a Baldwin effect.

For example, the entire Indo-European language group, including Breton, Danish, Faroese, Gujarati, Hittite, Tadzik, and Waziri which exhibit huge variations in case systems, word order, and phonology, have diverged in just 10,000 years (33). Thus, the “environment” of linguistic conventions changes far more rapidly, and yields far greater diversity (34), than the typical properties of physical and biological environments to which organisms must adapt...

...Thus, a highly intricate and abstract language “module” (5), “instinct” (6) or “organ” (7) postulated to explain language acquisition (7, 39), language universals (7) and the species-specificity of human language (8) could not have arisen through biological adaptation.

Indeed, this conclusion is reinforced by the observation that, had such adaptation occurred in the human lineage, these processes would have operated independently on modern human populations as they spread throughout Africa and the rest of the world during the last 100 kyr. If so, genetic populations should have coevolved to their own language groups, leading to divergent and mutually incompatible language modules (40).

Linguists have found no evidence for this (6). For example, native Australasian populations have been largely isolated for 50 kyr (31), but learn European languages readily.

This is not such a problem for vocal tract evolution however...

Although we have shown that arbitrary linguistic properties cannot be genetically encoded through adaptation, this does not preclude genetic adaptation to aspects of language held stable by functional pressures. For example, changes in the vocal apparatus may have arisen from functional pressures to produce more intelligible vocalization, although this point is controversial (48-50).

Then on the question that seems central to your concerns - is human grammatical language merely contingent or does it have deep Platonic structure? - Christiansen comes down on the side of "just contingent".

Although our simulations indicate that some biological adaptations for functional aspects of language could have taken place, we suggest that the close fit between the structure of language and the mechanisms employed to acquire and use it primarily arose because language has been shaped by the brain through cultural evolution. Indeed, the astonishing subtlety and diversity of patterns in human language (34) may for the most part result from the complex interaction of multiple constraints on cultural evolution, deriving from the nature of thought, the perceptuo-motor system, cognitive limitations on learning and processing, and pragmatic/communicative factors (40). Thus, as suggested by Darwin (64), the evolution of human language may be best understood in terms of cultural evolution, not biological adaptation.

However, I don't completely agree. I think that both the mammalian brain and language as the code of thought are subject to some severe optimality constraints. The evolution of both is guided by some deep structure. Which of course is why I think semiotics, hierarchy theory, dichotomies, dimensional constraint, etc, are crucial to explaining why brains and minds are the way they are. The evolution of reality-modelling is subject to stern efficiency constraints.

So Chomsky was never completely wrong. But he never properly engaged with the complexity of human evolution - the mix of the biological and cultural.

His response to the growing weight of evidence for the importance of the cutural bit seems to be to have stripped back his generative grammar to something more minimal - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalist_program - that could still conceivably be the bare bones of a genetic language organ.

However it still seems to miss what I think is essential - the serial/computational constraint imposed on a hierarchical/dynamic structure. Or the impact a vocal tract had on a brain. This is a crucial part of the "deep structure" story - as can be seen from Pattee's epistemic cut and his take on the genetic code/cellular metabolism.

So yes, there is something true about the structuralist/Platonic point of view - something regular reductionist science does not much consider. But Chomsky seems always too distanced from the real world evidence to get it.

 

[bohm2]

Yes, some researchers argue there has actually been faster genetic change during the past 10k than during any earlier period!Gould was one of those who pushed the view that H.sapiens would have been genetically frozen since the cultural revolution 50kya. But the evidence is not supporting him.

I'm pretty sure there is no evidence against Gould's major hypothesis, which is in agreement with Evo. Take any human infant from any part of the globe whether Africa, Asia, Europe, the Arctic or a human infant from ~50,000 yrs ago. If brought up in today's society they would be able to surf the net and do pretty much everything we can do. Do you disagree with this?

This is a nice example of the kind of thing Chomsky has never done.

From his most recent talk this is his argument (see video starting at ~27:00 minutes):

There is a field called Evolution of language, which has a burgeoning literature, most of which in my view is total nonsense. But anyway, its growing. In fact, it isn't even about evolution of language, its almost entirely speculations about evolution of communication which is a different topic. And its kind of natural topic to look at if your caught up in another myth, a misinterpretation of evolutionary theory, which holds that changes take place only incrementally. Small change, then another small change, and finally you get complex organisms. That was believed at one time, and you can find sentences in darwin... you can quote, that's the bible. But for a long time evolutionary biologists have understood it doesn't work like that. You can have quite sudden changes that, small changes, that lead to huge phenomenal difference. In the area of communication you can mislead yourself into believing that since every organism you can think of, from bacteria to humans, has some kind of communication system, so maybe our communication system us just a slight modification of primates' or whatever you like. But its undoubtedly not true, but at least you can delude yourself into believing it. On the other hand language seems totally separate. These nothing even remotely analogous or nothing at all homologous as far as anyone knows. Theres a few things that look similar, like say songbirds are at such a distance from an evolutionary point of view that its just got to be convergent evolution to the extent that there is a similarity. And there is interesting questions you can study, but only if you take biology in the last 50 years seriously. If you are back to the pop darwinism that you learned in 8th grade that's no good. Anyhow, the fact that there's been no evolution in 50000 years is interesting if anyone really wants to study evolution of language. It raises a lot of questions, but I don't want to get to far from the Poverty of the Stimulus...

On the Poverty of the Stimulus
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/psychlangsci/research/linguistics/news-events/latest-news/n_chomsky

 

[apeiron]

If brought up in today's society they would be able to surf the net and do pretty much everything we can do. Do you disagree with this?

No, I think the odds are still that the genetic diversity within the modern population would swamp the genetic difference that would exist between us and H.sapiens circa 50kya. But this claim is now much more open to question.

For instance, a significant seeming observation about the famous cave paintings is they look like eidetic imagery. Which in the modern era would be seen as a primitive or even pathological trait.

The art of modern children and modern tribal art is about what the painter is thinking, rather than seeing.

So right there is evidence for a mental difference. Could it be simply a sociocultural difference? Probably. Or could it be a genetic one? Not so likely, but still possible.

Broadly, of course, I have been arguing all along for the fundamental importance of a sociocultural explanation of the human difference. Whereas I thought you were championing the genetic.

But on the question of whether the brain is unchanged for the past 50ky, the honest answer is no. And that is something a sociocultural approach has to take into account.