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Reading has the same "instinct smell" as speech and music, but there's no reading instinct. Perhaps the story of the origins of writing is also the story of the origins of speech and music. Read More
Two quotes from your blog
Two quotes from your blog entry:
That kind of power doesn't happen unless our brains have been "designed" to do that, Pinker argues. [end]
The designer is not natural selection, but cultural selection. [end]
Design is a bad metaphor for natural selection. It slants the discussion towards teleology. It gives the picture that natural selection is a stand-in for God. This is FUNDAMENTALLY wrong. Natural selection is a process which "selects" random events non-randomly. The selection process is itself not much above "noise level" in most (not all) cases. Hardly a kind of "design".
But your fundamental point here is well taken. As you have argued that the "meaning" of writing comes from the a priori "nature" of the human brain. It will also turn out that the "meaning" of language comes from the pre-existing funtionality of the brain. Language simply structures things which champanzees [better: hominids], by and large, can already "potentially" do. The only novelty of language processing in the brain is converting sound streams to words, [shallowly] recursively parsing groups of these [phrases] to connect them with [pre-existing--compared to the age of language] thoughts. Then acting on these thoughts follows the pre-existing capabilities of hominids. Humans have put ourselves under immense pressure to perform our language functionality correctly or perish (from war, say, to name one possibility).
Several comments on this analysis.
1.) It is behavioristic, but it is also what you might call strongly nativist, so it is certainly not "classical behaviorism" we are talking about here.
2.) The subtext here is that culture pre-exists language. Music is an excellent candidate for such a capability. (There are many others.) By conjecture it would be "proto-structure" of behavior compared to language being structure of behavior.
3.) The ultimate generalization of the theory I sketch here is that all of evolution [of animalia, at least] goes into the thoughts which underlie language. Let me choose one (unusual?) example of this. Lions are top predators in their natural habitat. These animals make an impression on humans because our environment (and hence our selective situation) is the same as theirs (or can be). So (?) we domesticate them and end up with cats as pets. This, essentially, has nothing to do with a hypothetical "language instinct", but our environmental situation.
4.) We are left with the question: What is thought? [end] Interesting question. Ask the epistemologists, and earlier the Buddhists.
Loads...
Indeed, I think language harnesses loads of our ancient non-linguistic brain capabilities. My own work happens to flesh out the natural solid-object-event-mimicking sounds of speech. ...on phonology and how they combine into spoken words.
[On design, design is the perfect metaphor. One has lost sight of what biology is if one is incapable of looking at an eyeball and saying that it is clearly designed for seeing. The question is, What is the mechanism underlying the design? Intelligent design is, ahem, one "theory", and natural selection is another. The fact that each little step of the "algorithm" of natural selection has no "design" in it doesn't mean that the overall result doesn't end up with design, just as each little transistor activation of a computer may not possess "sorting" despite the algorithm being run implementing sorting.]
Thanks, Mark
Thank you for your kind reply.
Seriously, no sarcasm intended. It is good to know that we are apparently (more or less) in agreement on the fundamental point here.
But, without being too argumentative, I wish to demur on the comment in square brackets. You are talking, implicitly, about the limits of human understanding. We understand that the eye of (any!?) animal is "made for seeing" because we have eyes and we see. This is anthropomorphism cloaked as epistemology.
But this is NOT the goal of biology, it is merely a reflection of the method by which that discipline has been developed in the past. More and more biology is destined to become "mathematized" in the future. This inevitably will take us farther away from the fossil record to some kind of theory of possibilities.
In my opinion it is an example of THE fundamental error in this kind of reasoning to conflate the design of computers with the evolution of humans. As it says on the Heinz ketchup bottle I have in my kitchen: Grown Not Made. One completely misunderstands the intellectual underpinnings of the field to think of it as it has historically developed. The future (if we're lucky) will consist of many millenia and this kind of reasoning will inexorably give way to more "general" concepts.
A hint: Chess programs today play games which no human can play and which humans have great difficulty understanding. And one does not yet see the solution of the game itself in these programs.
Not intending to rant, I think you underestimate just how much anthropomorphism dominates the dogma of biology today, and how far we will get away from this in the future.
(What does it mean to imagine "seeing like a cat or a cow or a mouse or a bird or a fly or a mosquito or any kind of fish ... etc?" This question today has little meaning in biology, but I'll bet that within half a century from now such questions will have deep logically justified meaning.)
The only reason any natural
The only reason any natural phenomenon appears to have the "hallmarks of design" is that all designed phenomena imitate something found in nature. We design a camera to imitate an eye; an airplane to imitate a bird; a submarine to imitate a fish. So of course, natural phenomena have the hallmarks of "design": because we have designed artificial objects to have precisely the "hallmarks" that we found in nature!
And how about writing, which
And how about writing, which doesn't occur in nature? Or speech, or music? (Or also computers, or cars, etc.) -Mark
Changizi seems to be saying
Changizi seems to be saying that the ability to read and the structure of writing developed in accordance with pre-existing brain and perception potentials.
Yes, if there was a system of reading and writing that was incompatible with the brain's capacity, we wouldn't be reading about it, would we?
Doing something, versus hitting-it-out-of-the-park
Writing designed "in accordance with pre-existing brain and perception potentials" is quite different than being merely "compatible with the brain's capacity." (...where I'm assuming the former quote is alluding to designing to match the brain's functional competencies.)
The former, which is what I am talking about, concerns designing writing so that it has the shape our visual system is exquisitely geared to process. The latter is a much weaker notion, requiring only that the neural mechanisms be able to stumble haltingly through it.
For example, the sounds found in human speech are (I argue in my research) "designed" to fit the "sweet-spot-competencies" of our auditory system. Morse code, on the other hand, although not incompatible with the brain's capacity (because the brain *can* do it), is not a good fit for our auditory system, and even the world's best Morse-code reader was more than ten times slower at it than a typical speech comprehender.
re: morse code that is
re: morse code
that is because morse code had only two symbols, a dot and a dash. Up to four dots or dashes were required for each letter. Therefore a morse code reader would have to listen to possibly 30 symbols just for one word (with spaces between each symbol).
The length of time was not due to the brain's capacity but rather the required bandwidth (time of transmission) for the message. I can bark a word in a fraction of a second.
But jumping to speech from writing is a bit disingenuous anyhow, isn't it? Once again you seem to be saying merely that writing works because it is compatible with my brain. Well, gas works because it is compatible with my engine, but that doesn't really tell me anything about how the engine works, does it? I could just as well develop a water-based engine (as soon as I work out that fusion thing) and that wouldn't mean that I needed to use gas, only that it worked for that particular application.
central point
The following quote seems to encompass your central point: "you seem to be saying merely that writing works because it is compatible with my brain."
If by "compatible" you mean "designed to be a highly good fit," then yes, that is part of my point: that writing has gotten shaped (via cultural selection over time) to be a good fit for the brain. And, furthermore, I have a hypothesis and evidence for what that shape in fact is.
But if by "compatible" you mean "can, however inefficiently, be achieved," then no, that is not my point.
The game here is to notice that we are, in fact, not merely able to read, but are brilliant at it, brilliant in the way we are brilliant at things we evolved to do. (Unlike, for example, abstract logic, where we tend to be terrible.) But we know we didn't evolve to read. How, then, is it that we're so good at it? That's the question.
[On Morse code (and concerning the comprehension side only), there is always a trade-off. Codes with fewer fundamental "atom" types (like Morse) are easier by virtue of the fewer types, but more difficult by virtue of the longer words (i.e., more atoms per word). And codes with many atom types are more difficult by virtue of having to deal with so many types, but easier in that words are shorter (in terms of the number of atoms per word). One cannot a priori say that Morse code is more difficult than human speech sounds for human ears. It depends on the auditory mechanisms we possess, and, a priori, it could have been the case that our auditory system worked most efficiently for two-symbol codes like Morse, and Morse code flowed in more quickly than human speech with its 20 to 30 or so atom types (i.e., phonemes).
As for "disingenuous," my intent was to give an example of the conceptual difference between mere compatibility with a mechanism versus being a highly good fit with a mechanism.]
Thank you very much for your comments.
-Mark
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