Our Work as a Theory For Chomskys Language Inquiry - jalToorey/IdealMoney GitHub Wiki

An Introduction to Chomsky’s Paradox

The quotes below are from a youtube video transcript of Noam Chomsky.

From Chomsky's framing their is an uncontestable paradoxical observation that regardless evolutionary complexity of our cultural based expressions and languages we are for all intents and purposes nearly identical:

...each of us has a highly intricate computational system in the brain...but that then poses a paradox because...

If you take a child from say a hunter gather tribe in the Amazon and the child is raised in Cambridge Mass it'll become a graduate student studying quantum physics at MIT with no difference from anyone else, and conversely.

So we all have the same capacity. And its more or less understood why.

The capacity developed a very recently in evolutionary time. Probably in some window between 100 and 50 thousand years ago something like that and that's just a flick of an eye.

So whatever happened never changed except extremely marginally.

So we're all fundamentally identical for all practical purposes

On Higher Order Perspectives

From an external higher order view our otherwise complexly fragmented language systems seem nearly identical:

A foreign and outside extraterrestrial observer looking at us the way we look at frogs which is only one human and one language with minor variations on the one hand it's gotta be uniform the other hand the it seemed to be the case that each particular language had a highly intricate and complex system of rules and they're very different from one another and that is a paradox.

This lays the ground to ask what are the principles versus what are the parameters. That we all have the same principles (ie genetic) that interact with our parameters (ie environment or stimuli):

The principles and parameters view, there are fixed principles, which are already there no one has to acquire them. They are part of universal grammar, and then there are a number of options that can be taken, called parameters, that the child has to pick up from experience. And they have to be pretty simple; you have to be able to pick them up with limited evidence because that's all there is.

On the Asymmetry/Symmetry of English/Japanese

Chomsky explains English and Japanese, as complexly different as they appear, are actually symmetrical on a principal level:

...for example in some languages like English, it's called a head first language. The verb precedes the object, then the preposition precedes the object to preposition and so on other languages like say Japanese is almost a mirror image the verb follows the object being post positions not prepositions and so on.

The ordering is part of the training set in the environment:

...the languages are virtually mirror images of each other. And you have to set the parameters-the child has to set the parameters to say am I talking English or Am I talking Japanese.

This reversibility maps well with our nashLinterSyntax

Parameters Versus Principles

This gives us a distinction of a parameters versus a principle:

And that can be determined with very simple data. So that's reasonable to assume as a parameter.

This lays the grounds for understanding the evolution of language as a relationship between the underlying principles and parameters:

And the hope was you could find some finite set of parameters, like a finite switch box where the child has to set the switches one way or another and can do it on the basis of fairly simple data and then once it's entered into the predetermined system of principles you get things that SUPERFICIALLY look very different but are actually almost identical. Just differing on superficial choices.

However the complexity of the problem is perhaps unapproachable:

Well if you would have worked that out you would have solved the paradox. But it's a LONG WAY to work that out.

On the Origins of The Distinction of Parameters Versus Principles

This leads us to traversing our evolution in search for clues to distinction between principles and parameters via our origins:

What about the principles, where do they come from? And the choice of parameters?

However, these principles themselves, can't really be older than language (can they?) and language hasn't been around enough to be a long term 'genetic' phenomenon:

…if they're in universal grammar, if they’re part of the genetic endowment then had to evolved somehow but not a lot could have evolved because it's too recent.

Language is only a comparative recent technology:

Go back a hundred thousand years, there's far as we know nothing, humans had the same anatomy. Anything that's preserved in the fossil records is about the same you know hundreds of thousand years back so some small change must have taken place in the in the brain which somehow allowed all of this to suddenly blossom and pretty soon after that, again in evolutionary time like maybe couple of tens of thousand of years, which is no time at all, humans started leaving East Africa where we all come from as far as anyone knows, so some small group developed this system and then spread all over the world and now they are all essentially the same. But what evolved in that short period of time can not have been very complex.

You wouldn’t expect a series of extensive stages like the development of limbs over millions of years.

Chomsky's Prediction Of a Recursively Enumerative Technological Order

Chomsky therefore predicts there is a missing component to our evolution of language that explains the paradox of highly evolved principles in a seemingly otherwise paradoxically short period of time:

Therefore what you would predict is some other principle external to language, maybe some principle of nature, principle of computational efficiency or something like that, which is not specific to language, interacting with a small mutation, which just gave rise to the universal grammar.

This leads him to suggest there must be a natural cause to the origination of recursive enumeration that predated a more modern form of language:

Well that sets forth a new goal of research to ask to see if you can determine if the principles themselves do not have the intricacies that they appear to have that are actually the result of application of NON-linguistic in fact maybe NON-human principles, like general principles of computational efficiency, Through whatever small change took place. And the small change was probably the capacity to carry out recursive enumeration basically the capacity it gives you the number system for example.

On the Re-versibility of Language and Proto-Language Technology

We will return to this in our work. Here we note the re-versibility requirements of Chomsky's hidden recursive enumeration variable in the inquiry into the origin of language:

To take two things, two objects already constructed in the mind, and make up a new object out of them and then keep that process indefinitely so you get an infinite array of possible expressions each with some semantic interpretation and some motive of externalization. Speech sign whatever it may be.

The Goal of Re-solving Chomsky's Paradox

Our work (here we can specifically mention our termination of Mises Regression although we will later return to the point made here but with regard Nash's Agencies Method etc.) provides a theory to re-solving Chomsky's language origin paradox.

Recursion with order, our work show's and suggests, is a nature order of cooperation:

And the goal would be to try to show that that was essentially instantaneous once the small mutation took place given this operation recursive enumeration operation which allows you to create discrete infinity of expressions.

Our work does indeed suggest that such recursion is natural, and should be expect throughout all evolutionary processes with sufficient complexity:

Well that’s at least a feasible picture. The trick is to show that it's true or how come it is to true. Can we cut away at the apparent complexity, the principles, and show that they can actually be accounted for in terms of general principles that hold for organisms general perhaps and maybe even also in the physical world. And that are instantly or almost instantly applied on the original move is made to whatever small move it was to produce the capacity for recursive enumeration.

A possible consequences application particularly principles of computational efficiency to a system which had only ability to construct an infinite hierarchy of expressions…it could have been a very small mutation.

Homo sapiens very recent times without much opportunity for selection to have had any effect, maybe a small effect but not much.

Chomsky's Corollary

There is an interesting corollary here. By Chomsky's formulation and admission recursive enumeration is the only necessary precursor to an evolutionarily based discretely infinite language.