December 14, 2023 • 70 mins
Today it’s great to have the legendary Noam Chomsky on the podcast. Noam is a public intellectual, linguist, and political activist. He’s the author of many influential books, including Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, and his latest book with Robert Pollin called Climate Crisis and The Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving The Planet. Chomsky is also known for helping to initiate and sustain the cognitive revolution. He’s the Laureate Professor of Linguistics at The University of Arizona and Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT. Topics [02:06] The cognitive revolution of the ‘50s and ‘60s [03:49] Noam’s first encounter with behaviorism [12:41] What it was like to be part of the cognitive revolution [17:49] Implicit learning and artificial grammar [26:30] Noam’s view on modern-day behavioral genetics [28:05] Noam's thoughts on intelligence [32:02] Noam’s take on creativity [38:41] Chomsky's view vs. Foucault's view [42:49] Noam’s thoughts on modern-day social justice movements [45:50] Is there such a thing as human nature? [49:06] Identity vs. human nature [54:54] Noam’s views on race consciousness in America [59:16] Why Noam thinks Trump is the worst criminal in human history [1:00:34] How can democrats appeal to Trump supporters? [1:03:47] Cancel culture [1:05:10] The complexities of the slogan "defund the police" [1:08:36] Noam reflects on his life regrets [1:10:17] Chomsky's life advice
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today's episode is
part of the best of series, where we highlight some
of the most exciting and enthralling and enlightening episodes from
the archives of the Psychology Podcast. Enjoy Welcome to the
Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights into the mind, brain, behavior,
(00:25):
and creativity. I'm doctor Scott Barry Kaufman, and in each
episode I have a conversation with a guest who will
stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
The world to live in.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility. Thanks
for listening and enjoy the podcast today. It's great to
have Noam Chomsky on the podcast. Gnome is a public intellectual, linguist,
and political activist. He's the author of many influential books,
including Manufacturing Consent, The Political Economy of the Mass Media,
(00:58):
and his latest with Robert Polm on Climate Crisis and
the Green New Deal, The Political Economy of Saving the Planet.
Chomsky is also known for helping initiate and sustain the
cognitive revolution. He's Laureate Professor of Linguistics the University of Arizona,
and Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT. Thanks so much for
meking time to chat with me today.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Now, plead to be with you. Just had to take
care of a dog.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Is the dog okay?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah, just trying to horn in. I'm trying to shut
him up. Down down, It's okay.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
If if he or she wants to participate in the podcast,
that's fine with me.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Usually she usually calms down and gets under the desk.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Excellent. Well, so I'm a cognitive scientist by training, so
i'm and I'm one of the things I'm really fascinated
with is the history of the field that I work in.
And I had the great pleasure of working with and
being mentored by the Herb Simon, for instance, who was
one of the ones who helped form this cognitive revolution
as well. And I was wondering if you could we
(02:03):
could trace a little bit, you know, in the sixties fifties,
how did your work, you know, when linguistics intersect with
the other work going on during that cognitive revolution at
the time, the work on decision making and Marvin Minsky's work,
How did all this stuff call ask that that epic?
Can you take me back to the fifties sixties right now.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Well, I knew Herb Simon and Marv Minsky Marv most
of my life. We were colleagues. So the it was
one of the strange that one of the core elements
of the what's called the cognitive revolution, I don't like
the term particularly, but one of the core elements, of course,
(02:45):
was language. The other core element was visioned a couple
of other things, and so we all knew each other.
Of my own work was trying to construct theoretical accounts
that would account for the capacity of humans to do
(03:07):
what we're now doing. This core problem of the cognitive sciences.
What's the nature of the capacity, how can an individual
acquire it during their lifetimes, in fact, during their early childhood,
and ultimately how could such a system evolve? Those are
(03:28):
the core problems of the study of linguistics beginning around
nineteen fifty. It's a pretty sharp break from structural linguistics,
which had quite different goals and aspirations. I've actually written
some about these years. If you want me to send
(03:50):
you something, that'd be great, Yeah, just I have your email,
so to do that'd.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Be really great.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
So when did you first make contact with behaviorism and
what was your immediate gut reaction when you first encountered
that body of work and the notions of sort of
the stimulus response way of thinking about behavior.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Knew about it from childhood. But the real encounter was
when I moved to Cambridge. I came to Harvard as
a grad student in nineteen fifty one that I was
basically studying philosophy. So I was a student of Fan
Coins mainly, and he was one of the chief exponents
(04:38):
of Skinner and Hawker and conditioning partent rigid form of behaviors,
and Skinner's William James Lectures had just appeared a couple
of years ago. Later became his book on language, and
(05:01):
the drafts were very widely read, and it was influential,
in part because of Coin's advocacy, and part it just
did fit the tenor of the times very well. So
it was kind of a bible when I got there.
You look at say, George Miller's first early books. Out
(05:21):
of the later ones, they're pretty strict behaviors. It was
even you know, some of his early experiments were considered
rather shocking and sounds kind of obvious, showing that you
could understand a word better if it was in a sentence,
then if it was in isolation, which shouldn't happen on
(05:47):
what should happen on rigid behavior, as Browns is that
you're the first word of a sentence, then there's a
certain probability for the next one, and kind of like
what's done with deep learning today. And by the time
you got to the end of the sentence, you can
barely guess what the word is because the probably is
go down. But of course the results are exactly the opposite.
(06:08):
As you hear the sentence, you can just the last work.
None of this works, But that was some of his
early work and it was considered quite surprising. By the
mid fifties, George had significantly changed and became one of
the founders of cognitive science. But when I got there
in fifty one, this was orthodox with a couple other
(06:32):
things that happened. Claude Shannon had come along with information theory.
The Shannon and Weaver book, with Weaver's kind of popularization
and extension of the technical ideas, was another bible. Cybernetics
was another. Signal detection radio engineering was another, and they
(06:56):
all kind of converged into a four area of which
Scinierian behaviorism was a central part a sense that we're
cracking the last frontiers. When Krick and Watson came along
fifty three, that enhanced the idea that we're now moving
to a new era. It was called unified science, and
(07:19):
which we'd be able to we had the tools to
deal with the problems that were called problems of mind
and psychology. There were a couple of us who thought
this was all nonsense. Three in fact, to three grad students,
(07:40):
my friend Mars Halle, who I worked with till the
end of his life, and Eric Lenneberg, who also a
grad student. He went on in later years to found
modern biology of language. But the three of us just
didn't believe any of it. We thought it made no sense.
(08:03):
We began reading European comparative pathology, Tinberg and Lawrence others
looked at comparative psychology work, and I was introduced by
a friend, Mar Shapiro, and art historian suggests that I
(08:26):
should read Carl A. Ashley's Serial Order and Behavior, which
was a very important article back in around nineteen fifty,
which just knocked the props out of the whole behavior system.
Nobody knew it. I mean, neurologists knew it. It was
(08:47):
in the neuroscience literature, but psychologists and I think and
others were totally unaware of it when I wrote about
it for the first time in a review of Skinner's
or Behavior the Press nineteen fifty seven, But that, I
think was the first mention of it in the general
(09:09):
psychology cognitive science literature, so that these were things that
we were Eric went on to start writing articles on
He was doing a good deal of work at the
time on various a variant forms of linguistic behavior, studying pathologies,
(09:36):
early studies on use of SNIGN, cognitive deficiencies in language,
and neural deficiencies, and this went on to become his
Biology of Language book, very very important book, Biological Foundations
of Language. But at first it was essentially the three
(09:57):
of us. Then George Miller interested link, linked up with
Jerry Brunner, who was injured, formed the Cognitive Science Group
at Harvard, spent a year there. I was working quite
a lot with George Miller in the mid fifties, books,
a couple of articles together, taught together, and so on,
(10:19):
and then it just kind of expanded, linked up to
some extent with the early work and artificial intelligence Simon
Simon and Newell, har Minsky and McCarthy, and by the
early sixties it become kind of a fairly i can't
(10:41):
say integrated because there are a lot of internal disputes,
but interlinked approach to many questions the euphoria, but then
had pretty much anticipated you get it. You can get
a good sense of it by reading theoshu of Barhelil's
(11:03):
essays around nineteen sixty five. He's an Israeli, a logician
who was a regular visitor to Pralely Research Level Electronics MIT,
which was kind of the center of most of it.
And at first he was very much a partisan of
the euphoric hopes, but by the mid sixties he was
(11:27):
a close personal friend also back from about nineteen fifty,
but he had pretty much come around to agree with
the skeptical approach and wrote some retrospectives about it which
are quite interesting and knowledgeable around the mid sixties. You
(11:48):
can get a sense from his work that's kind of
what it was like in the early days in Cambridge.
There was no linguistics. Practically the only linguist, the romaniocopsin
was there. But from the European tradition, but there were
no American linguists, so I was, in fact about the
(12:11):
only person there was an American linguistics tradition factor consensus,
but it was quite different in character. It was it
was described its proponents described as a taxonomic science set
(12:31):
of procedures, but you could apply to any purpose of data.
It would identify the elements and their distributional arrangement. That
was linguistics. That's basically my own background. This was quite different.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
So what was it like? You know, was there a
great excitement in the air. Did you feel like you
were you were leading a revolution at the time or
was it only in retrospect that you realized it was
a revolution?
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Well, myself, I thought it was just a personal hobby.
I took for granted that the consensus of American linguists
had to be on the right track, and this was
a totally different approach. But it was my own. A
couple of others got interested in it. By by the
(13:24):
mid fifties, we felt that we were pursuing something that
should displace the I think it was the consensus, and
as I say, none of us agreed with the None
of us means three or three of us with the
behaviors dogmas that were rampant at the time, but never
(13:51):
the question wasn't is it a revolution? But is this
the right way to pursue things. Gradually I learned that
there were ant of students, I say, we were reading
European ethology, which had some similarities, and I began looking
into the history a little further. Learned that there were
(14:13):
much earlier tradition that had been totally forgotten some of that.
So my own view in retrospect that you might call
this the second cognitive revolution. Turns out, in the seventeenth century,
the time of the origin of modern science, a lot
(14:34):
of things of this kind were happening. They didn't have
what they lacked, and what we had was the poria
of computation didn't come along till mid twentieth century, so
there were no tools for trying to explore the kinds
of questions that they were raising. But I look back
(14:57):
to Galileo as contemporary as they recognized something very significant
wasn't discovered later until I wrote about it in the
mid sixties, and almost nobody knows it now. In fact,
if you look back, the early founders of modern science
(15:20):
like Galileo, were just amazed by what they regarded was
the most astonishing, remarkable fact in the world, that with
a few dozen symbols we could construct in our minds
infinitely many thoughts and even convey to others who have
(15:42):
no access to our minds the innermost workings of our minds.
The Galileo, for example, alphabet was the most stupendous of
human inventions because it enabled this miracle to take place.
Of course, it was understood that the alphabet was just
(16:03):
representing some system in the mind which does the same thing,
and that didn't develop. The tradition of what was called
general and rational grammar through the eighteenth seventeenth eighteenth centuries,
which tried to develop these ideas, but lacking the theory
(16:24):
of computation, there was no way to formulate it. How
do you formulate a computational process that captures these capacities.
By the mid twentieth century, when I was a student,
I was studying logic and recursive function theory, and you
(16:45):
could see that that offered that modern recursive function theory
and theory of computation provided the tools in which you
could proceed to develop computational systems which a recursive enumeration
of the expressions of the language basically expressions of thought,
(17:08):
and you could find also provided means by which this
could be translated into the map into sensor remote motor
outputs and inputs, so you could link it to perception production, learnability,
How can it be acquired? All these questions on the
(17:29):
agenda as soon as this fell together.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Yeah, I'd love to double click there for a second
on this idea of a neatness and this idea of learnability.
What was unique about what you did was it was
certainly not saying that learning doesn't matter at all in
the process, but the learning of the language seemed to
operate in a way that almost the language of the
word learning doesn't seem to really conform to what psychologists
(17:53):
tend to think of as learning. During that time, it
didn't seem to operate by those same sort of principles.
I was wondering how your thoughts on this have evolved
over the years, especially in light of Arthur Reeber's work,
for instance, on implicit learning, showing that artificial grammars can
be learned that we are not sort of hardwired. I'm
(18:15):
not a big fan of that phrase. But you know
what I mean, hardwired to have that specific rule structure.
But we perhaps maybe like through to statistical learning, we
can learn languages, and so there's a lot less built
in than maybe we once thought. And I'm wondering how
you're current thinking of that is.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
All of these results are negative. They show you can't
do anything you can do. I mean, if you have
a bunch of supercomputers running and huge amounts of data
and do a lot of statistical analysis, you can come
(18:55):
close to approximating a set of phenomena, like you can
come pretty close to approximating the sentences in the Wall
Street Journal that's of zero scientific interest. If you did
a ton of statistical analysis of chemical experiments that say,
(19:16):
you know, people mixing things in the laboratory and so on,
you could get a fair approximation to what they're actually doing.
Would I tell you anything about chemistry. Nothing. It's a game.
It's a way of selling a propaganda for IBM, you know,
(19:37):
or for Google these days. But it tells you absolutely
nothing about the nature of the system and the way
it's acquired and learned that human beings don't. A two
or three year old child has mastered the basis of
the language. We now know from statistical analysis the data
(19:58):
available to each child that it's extremely empoverished. I mean,
sounds like the child is hearing millions of sentences. But
when you take into account such elementary facts as Zip's law,
you know this the rank frequency distribution, and it turns
(20:21):
out that almost everything you barely in hearing bigrams, let
alone trigrams. So from the what's back in this is
what's there is a problem that was understood in the
early fifties called poverty of stimulus. How do you go
from the impoverished stimuli available to the rich knowledge attained?
(20:45):
It was obvious in the early fifties is a major problem.
By now we know it's a much worse problem, far
worse than was assumed, because because by now we have
extensive studies, first of all of the data available, we
don't have to guess anymore, and extensive studies of acquisition
(21:06):
of language. None of that existed at a time. And
it turns out that at about the earliest age you
can start testing that kids already have very rich knowledge,
which goes way beyond what they produce. This is work
that's going on for fifteen sixty years. So the problem
(21:28):
of poverty stimulus is overwhelming. Now the deep learning approaches
have no problem. That they have basically as much data
as you want, vast amounts of data, huge amounts of
computing capacity, and with that what they get is kind
(21:50):
of what you get if you did what I just suggested, looked,
looked at or takes an example closer to the language.
Suppose that you did deep learning studies of the communication
system of bees. Okay, you could get a fair prediction,
(22:12):
probably pretty good predictions of what bees do. You know,
bees start going out of the hive, they wander around,
they find a flower, they right, they have the capacity
of dead reckonings, or they go straight back to the hive.
They waggle their wings and the other bees start fluttering
(22:36):
around when they go to the flower. But they'll tell
you anything about bee communication. Nothing. You know, it's not
what when Frish was doing. It's not what other bee
scientists do. They want to find that it works. The
fact that you can kind of approximate to phenomena just
(22:57):
tells you another thing. You can look at the phenomena
without a activating.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Well, you know, I'm thinking of these implicit learning paradigms
that I administered in my dissertation, like serial reaction time
learning or artificial grammar learning. This formed a core basis
of my dissertation. I was really interested to the extent
to which there's individual differences where people can soak up
the probabilistic rule structure of something unconsciously, you know, without
(23:24):
their conscious awareness. And I found that people are some
people are better at it than others, but overall, you know,
most people. I debriefed them afterwards, I said, did he
notice that fifteen percent of the time this sequence it
followed this sequence, eighty five percent of the time it
followed that sequence, and that you got faster at the
reaction time for the eighty five percent. And they had
no idea, you know, consciously that they learned these things.
(23:46):
And these were artificial you know, languages, These are not,
you know, something that we evolved. And so do you
think that's telling us anything about how much is build
in versus how much is not building? Because I think
it might. I think it does tell us something tells.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
You something about human cognition. But I think it's a
mistake to use the word artificial languages. Nothing to do
with languages I mean, these are data sets that have
may are constructed to share some of the superficial properties
of languages, but it tells you absolutely nothing about how
(24:23):
language is acquired, certainly not acquired this way. I mean,
as I say, if you take a look at the
actual data available to children, you don't even get a
lot of biagrams, let alone trigrams. And this is not
there because what the kid is hearing mostly is the
(24:47):
function words, the end of and so on. And then
you look at the rank frequency distribution, it goes very
sharply down and tails often to a long tail. So
I mean there's some statistical learning, but very much at
the margins. So there's nothing wrong with the experiments they're studying.
(25:14):
They're interesting things to study of cognition, and of course
everything goes on unconsciously, like you and I have absolutely
no awareness of the rules that we're following in this conversation,
way beyond the levels of consciousness. I mean, people are
deluded to think that what we call inner speech is
(25:37):
somehow our thinking processes. Absolutely not. What we call inner
speech is a pale reflection of the externalized form of
what's going on in our minds. And if you actually
think about it, it's just bits and pieces of fragments.
(25:57):
Our construction of sentences in our minds is vastly more
equipped than what we call in our speech, and you
can see it very simply by just doing things like
reading out loud, which is much slower than reading. You
can read a page in a fraction at the time
and understand it of reading it all because the externalization
(26:23):
is just very much slowing everything down. There's all kind
of stuff going on in our minds. We can study
it the way we study becommunication from the outside that
can't introspect into it totally beyond the level of consciousness.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
How do you link some of this to modern day
behavioral genetics? What do you think of the field of
modern day behavior genetics? And you know, obviously those tools
weren't available to you when you first when you first
started in the field, and I was worrying sort of
what your own sort of thinking about about that is
in terms of what tells us about a neatness.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Well, now it tells us. It's an important field. It's
an important field for biology, but it's very far from
accounting for even much simpler traits than language. There was
a lot of enthusiasm when the genome project came along
(27:21):
about all the things that were going to follow from it.
But what we've mainly learned is do you haven't a
clue how instructions in the DNA turn into an organism?
I mean, even just figuring out how you get protein
folding you can barely do by Now that's an area
(27:44):
where AI has made some contributions, but that's remember this
the bare beginning of what makes an organism. It's good
to study these things, but you should study simple traits,
not a very complex trade life language which is going
(28:05):
to be way out of sight for any such investigations.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Or intelligence, whatever intelligence is. What do you think intelligence is?
Speaker 2 (28:18):
Well, all I can tell you is that I, for
about sixty years was on admissions committees for graduate courses
at MIT, which has pretty high standards. You can pick
maybe five percent of the applicants and they're all very
highly qualified. I can't remember once when anybody ever suggested
(28:42):
looking at IQ. Nobody cares. It's totally irrelevant. That's not
the kind of thing you look. I'm sure you find
the same thing. I mean, you've been on commission on
admissions commissions. Yeah, Ever look at IQ.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Well, you know, sat is is correlated with IQ, very
very highly. Right, So it's subconsciously if we look at
SAT or indirectly, or are we selecting for IQ.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
I don't know about you, but we looked at SAT
as a kind of a marginal phenomenon enough some interest.
For example, if some kid an applicant is just all
as you know, top flight in every area and the
SAT we recorded that as kind of negative, probably means
(29:32):
he has no special interests and no ingenuity and creativity.
If you get somebody who does very well in some
areas and very poorly in others, you want to take
a second look. Maybe there's some maybe there's some sparks
here that makes him do creative work and put aside
things he's not interested in. So it's something, but I
(29:57):
don't think it's much of a criterion. Of course, if
somebody scores very low in everything, you think, well, probably
not qualified.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Yeah, so it sounds like you're challenging this idea of
general intelligence as being the most important or even important
at all for college admissions and what about life more broadly?
Speaker 2 (30:23):
You know you can find something. Okay, I don't think
it's a very interesting characteristic. Well, what's interesting or for
you think, take a look at I mean, I've had
many years to look back. I'm sure you have to,
not as many as you, Yeah, not as many. But
when you look back and you ask, all of these
(30:44):
kids who came in MI t were very highly qualified.
Some of them had very distinguished careers, did a lot
of exciting work. Others just did routine technical work, you know,
perfectly competent, but like it adds a brick here and
(31:07):
there to which you know, if you look back, it's
pretty hard to find the distinguishing characteristics. I was in
the Society of Fellows at Harvard, which is a very
highly selective of three or four year research graduate fellowship,
no duties or responsibilities, and that they tried to have
(31:33):
very high standards for selection and occasionally look back and
try to do the same judgments and the same story.
You can't tell. These are really matters of character in
many ways, more than technical more than mental ability. I mean,
they're going to have somebody who's a you know, a
(31:55):
math genius, but will never discover anything. This just doesn't
have the right right characteristics.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah, I really I really appreciate that, or you know,
even creativity. We you know, we find a distinction oury
research between creativity and intelligence. You know, I'd like to
talk about creativity a little bit because this is a
topic that you've talked about in in other you know,
sort of even a political sort of way, in terms
of what societies can help us thrive and are most
(32:27):
likely in conducive to autonomy and human freedom and and creativity.
How do you define creativity? Like, how do you even
conceptualize that such a word?
Speaker 2 (32:37):
I wouldn't try to define it. The only terms you
can really define are within well grounded explanatory theories. So
if you're working in physics, you can give a technical
definition of energy within the framework. But if you were
to ask me how I define energy ordinary life, and
(33:02):
can give you some descriptive description, but no definition. There
aren't definitions outside of very narrow sectors of carefully constructed
theoretical systems. But creativity, we is the ability to First
(33:23):
of all, it's the ability to be puzzled by things.
You have to start with that. There are infants have
that capacity. They're puzzled by everything. They're constantly asking questions
that can't stop. Is annoying, you know how what's this?
How does that work? You know, if you're a parent,
(33:45):
drive you bananas. They want to the world's very puzzling, strange.
They want to understand it. That's driven out of people's
heads in many ways worked by the educational system, part
of another way. But there are some people who retain it.
And in fact, if you look at the great moments
(34:06):
of history of science, that's pretty much what they were.
So take say, the scientific Revolution seventeenth century, the great
science that really changed science practically, it basically was based
on being puzzled. Galileo's contemporaries were just dissatisfied with the
(34:30):
what we're called explanations of things. So why do alls
fall to the ground, Well, it was an explanation, that's
their natural place. They're attracted to the earth. They didn't
regard that as an explanation. As soon as they began
looking at it, they found that we don't really understand
(34:54):
and in fact, all that was believed turns out to
be wrong. Like it was versely taken for granted that
a heavy lid ball full faster than a small lid
ball until they showed by thought experiments incidentally, never carried
any experiment by thought experiments, ingenious thought experiments. Should this
(35:17):
can't be the case. And that's what happens when you're puzzled.
Appillion people are willing to question orthodoxy, not as to
accept it because that's what everybody says, but to be
to want an argument for it, to challenge it. Sometimes
(35:37):
it's right, you get convinced. Sometimes you see, it's just dogma.
Behaviorism was like that, it was just dogma. It's soon
as it began to look at it carefully, totally fell apart.
But it's hard to do that. There were people who
did like lastly, for example, and who were ignored. But
(35:58):
if enough people do it begin to interact. Uh, they
start to try to work out real answers. They keep
finding flaws in their own answers, address those. Then you
get creative work. But how to pick it out among people?
Speaker 1 (36:18):
I can't say or pick it up? But the other
interesting question is how can we bring it out of
people in a society? I really, you know, do you
remember that that conversation you have with Fuco? Does that?
Does that ring a bell? That that legendary conversation you know?
Speaker 2 (36:35):
I remember it? Of course? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Yeah, I mean I'm obviously you do I'm joking, but
it's a it's a very well watched video and and debate.
But I'm just very interested in the discussion you had
with them about about creativity. You too seem to have
very differing views of what the essential question there is
for for how society should be organized and uh and
(36:59):
and issues of the role of justice for creativity. I
was worrying a few thoughts about that have changed over
the years.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
I mean, as I understand Fucau's position, at least from
what I got out of the discussion and reading his work,
he doesn't seem to think seems to think that everything
just as a matter of who has more power than others.
So it's a matter of distribution of power. And if
(37:29):
you want to take a political position, say, at that
time he was pretty committed sort of French style Marxist Maoist.
So we're on the side of the proletariat and we
want them to win. And if you ask, as I did, ask,
(37:52):
if you look back at the they suppose it turns
out that what the proletariat will institute is inhuman, destructive,
cruel and so on, does that mean we oppose it?
He said, no, it's just a matter of which side
you're on, there's no right or wrong. There's no questions
(38:13):
of justice, there's no basic human nature, just which power
system it takes control. That may be a caricature, I'm
not sure, but that's what I understood, is position to be.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
That's what I understood it as well.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
I totally reject it. I think there's a fundamental human nature.
We don't understand much about it, but we can try
to discover. My guess, partly from experience, partly from study,
partly from wish fulfillment, is that the goal of human
(38:51):
beings is to be free and independent, the creative, not
controlled by others, under pursuing their own free and independent interests.
This is the basic Enlightenment position which you find we're
so humble other great figures of the Enlightenment, and it's
(39:15):
the origins of classical liberalism just won't been forgotten. It's
the reason, for example, why working people in the nineteenth
century early Industrial Revolution were bitterly opposed to the wage
labor regarded as a fundamental assault on human dignity and
(39:39):
human rights. In fact, that was a very standard position
at the time because, in fact, the slogan of the
Republican Party that wage slavery, wage labor, what they called
wage slavery, is no different from slavery, except that it's
temporary on the program Lincoln. And in fact, that's the
whole classical liberal tradition. There's way back to the Greeks
(40:03):
and the Romans. That's a modern idea that having a
job is a good thing. I think that the tradition
is probably right that people don't want to be subject
to masters. And I don't care whether the masters are
the Central Committee or the the corporate sector about the
(40:32):
same thing. But that's a guess about human nature. I
can't demonstrate it today.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
Yeah, it's a really good point. I'm trying to think
a lot about the modern day. You know, these social
justice movements we're seeing today with Black Lives Matter and theirs.
I don't know if you're familiar with the term woke
or wokeness, and there are some people criticize wokeness, and
then I'm trying to think, you know, do you ever
hear anything from some of the arguments coming from what
(41:06):
some would call woke sort of denying a human nature,
And and you know, because a lot of them really
are big fans of foco. You know, do you ever,
do you have any criticize, criticisms of maybe some of
the methods used in modern day social justice movements that
have moved us away from the classical liberal sort of ideal.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Well, I think they don't understand the classical liberal ideal.
They regard the classical liberal ideal as modern capitalism, very
far from that they.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
Do and even sometimes maybe viewed as modern day conservatism.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
You know what modern day conservatism, in my view is
extreme authoritarianism. Well, libertarian in the United States is almost fascism.
It's the most extreme form of sport to power. It's
just subordination to private power, and that's even worse than
(42:07):
subordination to the state. I mean, if you're like, if
you have a job in a factory, say let alone
an Amazon warehouse, you're under for most of your waking life.
You're under the kind of control that Stalin couldn't have
dreamt of. Like Stalin couldn't tell you that at three
(42:31):
o'clock in the afternoon, you have five minutes to go
to the bathroom, and you got to wear these clothes
and on some other clothes, and this is the past
you have to take when you're moving from here to there.
I mean people that lit alone on an assembly line,
which is kind of control that no dictator could even
(42:51):
dream of. Or a person working at a cash register
just totally turned totally into an automaton under total control of
an authority. I mean, that's an extreme form of authoritarian control.
We know. One of those dogmas question kind of like
(43:15):
behaviorism in nineteen fifty, is that this is a good thing.
As I say, in the early Industrial Revolution, this was
regarded as totally intolerable, built on basic human rights. Now
it's considered the highest thing in life. I can get
a job flipping Hamburg. That's it. I think that's so
(43:43):
what you're saying about. No, there are a lot of
people like Fucoh and many others who say there's no
human nature. That's first of all, it's insanity. It's like
saying we're no different from cats. I mean, it's insane.
You know, of course, the human nature. What they mean
is something different. They mean. What they probably mean, which
(44:06):
makes sense, is that the particular social forms and arrangements
in which we are integrated are subject to change. That's correct,
that seems reasonable, But it's not going to turn us
into insects. It's not going to give us an insect
(44:26):
visual system. It's not going to turn us into creatures
that are incapable of language. I mean, we have a nature,
and in fact it's very rigid and strict. Within it
are variations and social and cultural and other arrangements that
lead to variations. I mean, take say the visual system.
(44:51):
Since we just think of the classical experimental work Hubil
and Weasel, for example on human on vision a male
en vision, I mean, what they show is that early,
very early modification of the visual system, story cortex can
(45:13):
lead to radical changes in the phenotype and the outcome
that appears. It doesn't happen with us because we all
have about the same visual experience. But if there was
a mangle around who could stick electrodes into our visual
cortex or control the stimuli that we see, we'd have
(45:36):
totally different visual systems that the as adults maybe no
visual system a cat. As they showed, if you deprive
a kitten of structured visual stimuli for the first couple
of weeks of life, it's essentially blind. The analytics systems
(46:00):
just degenerate. Okay, that means and it's kind of the
same as speaking different languages. But the point is you
can't change an a mammalian visual system into an insect
visual system with compound eyes. That's a mammalian nature. Within
mammalian nature, there's a lot of possible options. Within human nature,
(46:23):
there's a lot of possible options. And it's the options
that interest us as human beings. We take for granted
what's common to us, kind of like sports, Like when
you go to the Olympics, you don't see a competition
and walking across the room with anybody to do that.
(46:43):
You see competitions and things that humans are no good
at all, like pole holding. So if you go way
to the edges of human competence, you start to find
differences among people, but the overwhelming mass of competence is
just shared.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
Well, I agree. I mean, this idea of there being
a common human nature and a shared common humanity sometimes
I feel like gets at odds with the massive divisions
we see today through identity, you know, political identity is
being the first and foremost thing that is the most
important thing about a person these days, or or or
(47:25):
gender identity, you know, you know, the use of linguistics
right now is very interesting in how we see a
proliferation of gender pronouns, you know, far beyond the sex
biological sex binary you know, what do you?
Speaker 2 (47:39):
What do you?
Speaker 1 (47:41):
What are your thoughts on this and how we can
balance the need to want to appreciate someone's personal identity
and the things that divide us, but while at the
same time not forgetting that there is a common human
there is a common human nature that that you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
Well, first of all, let's let's try to take the
standpoint of an alien observer who looks at us the
way we look at frogs. Okay, that alien observer would
say they're all identical. There are minor variations between them
(48:19):
right around the extreme periphery, just as if we look
at frogs, we say frogs frog, But if you really
started looking closely at different frogs, you find slight differences
in the way they do things. Well, as a frog,
you're interested in the differences. They don't care about the
(48:39):
fact that we're all frogs that you just take for granted. Yeah,
interested in what's a little bit different between this frog
and that frog. But from the point of of us
looking at frogs, it's so minor you can't even see it.
It's the same with this what pronoun you use. From
the point of view, the nature of humans is so
(49:02):
marginally you need a microscope to detect it. But for
human life, that's what matters. We don't care. We don't
even pay attention to the fact that we're all fundamentally humans,
that we just take for granted. What's interesting to us
in our lives is these very slight differences around the edges.
(49:24):
Do you say everyone thought he was here, or do
you say everyone thought they were here or something? It's
worth thinking about for human life, and it's important. So
for example, I wouldn't like it if people called me
a kit. Let's say, I mean, I don't think there
(49:48):
should be a law against it, but I certainly wouldn't
like it.
Speaker 1 (49:51):
I wouldn't like it either. I wouldn't like it either.
Speaker 2 (49:55):
And it's the same. And if some woman feels slighted,
if you say when you mean anybody, okay, I can
understand that too, and you adjust to it. So you
don't expect people to walk around talking about kikes and
niggers and wops and so on. That's already internalized pretty recently. Incidentally,
(50:19):
you go back now very long it was normal speech,
even even writing one of my favorite articles from I
think it's Forbes magazine, the main business journal back in
around nineteen thirty was thirty two, early thirties. When I
(50:39):
was a kid that was a it was Fortune magazine
had a front page cover saying the wasps are unwhopping themselves,
meaning Mussolini's doing a good job. So the wops are
unwhopping themselves. I don't think I can say that now,
(51:03):
I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (51:04):
So there's a positive, you know, the use of linguistics
to help us with an appreciation of differences and respecting
the uniqueness of an identity, is it can be a
positive thing in changing, you know, inequality in a society.
(51:28):
Is that what you're.
Speaker 2 (51:28):
Saying, except that I would call it linguistics, just like
I wouldn't call it physics. If I adjust the books
on my desk so they don't fall, it's true it's physics,
but I don't have to go to a physicist to
find out about it. I mean, and it's the same
in this case. Linguistics isn't going to tell you anything
(51:52):
about whether you should say the walks are unwelthing themselves. Okay,
I can describe it, but give the rules for it.
It's not going to tell you whether to do it
or not. But just like a physicist isn't going to
tell me how to adjust the books. These are parts
of human life which are way beyond the sciences of
(52:12):
their comprehension. But yes, it's a it's a topic you
have to be concerned about. And I think you have
to have to ask yourself seriously, should we burn down
the city of Washington because George Washington was a slave owner? Okay,
(52:36):
I'm sure you can find some people to say we should.
I don't think so. These are the judgments you have
to make as a human being living in a complex society.
Speaker 1 (52:49):
So what do you think of the Black Lives Matter
movement right now? And and and uh and race being
the topic of consciousness because I saw an interviewed about
five years ago where you made a really good point
about how races and slavery it's a core part of
human of our history as a country Americans, but it's
(53:11):
not as big a part of our consciousness. And now
it's becoming, you know, and now it's really in our consciousness.
And I was wondering your some of your thoughts on
that now five years later.
Speaker 2 (53:21):
There's been a big change in the last few years
among certain parts of the society, not the society in general.
Society in general is very racist, shows up in all
kinds of ways. A large part of the Trump folks,
for example, is coming from deeply white supremacist circles, circles
(53:43):
that don't feel themselves as racist, like I have black friends,
you know, but just think the country is a white
Christian country and it has to stay that way. That
kind of white supremacy is very wide spread. But on
the other hand, there is a change in consciousness in
(54:05):
many circles. You can see it in the reaction to
the George Floyd murder. Blacks have been murdered for a
long time. This reaction was quite different, spontaneous, enormous in scale,
way beyond anything in American history, and have widely supported
(54:30):
at around sixty percent support, a lot of solidarity, sensible goals.
It was a very striking phenomenon, led by Black Lives
Matter organizers, but many others coming in. Well, that's one
(54:51):
sign of serious changes. I want to see another sign
take a look at this morning's New York Times as
a very good op ed by Eric Kohner. Fine historian
calling for abolition, and what he's calling for is abolition
(55:14):
of criminal labor, mostly black. He's a historian of abolitionism, reconstruction,
Civil War, and so he points out that the Thirteenth
Amendment banning slavery had a qualificatient it said forced labor
(55:36):
is legitimate as a punishment. That, as he discusses, was
the opening that the South used to say. And he says,
we still have it today in private prisons where convicts
are forced to work for ridiculously low wages of profit.
(56:01):
So we should really move on to abolition. You wouldn't
have had that up it a couple of years ago.
It's a sign of the increasing consciousness and awareness of
the really black history that is our actual dark, cruel history,
(56:21):
its history that's part of our legacy. Now we've never
grown out of it. Part of it the extermination of
the indigenous populations and other part of it. And these
are things that are gradually seeping into consciousness, not anywhere
near enough. So there are holocaust museums all over the country.
(56:45):
Try to find out how many museums there are for
slavery of nation of Indians.
Speaker 1 (56:52):
Yeah, I thought that was a good point. You made
that point in that interview five years ago there that
you don't see and I don't think there has been
many more slavery music in that five years. So that
thought that was a really good point. So in some sense,
we're making progress in social progress in lots of ways.
You're you're very pessimistic about the future. You've called Trump,
you know, our current president right now, the worst criminal
(57:14):
in human history. That's that's a pretty big that's a
pretty big deal. Why more so than like Hitler?
Speaker 2 (57:22):
Did Hitler devote his energies to trying to destroy the
possibility of human life on earth, to try to maximize
the use of fossil fuels and to eliminate the regulatory
system that provides some mitigation. Is condemning the human species
(57:43):
to extinction? Are we going to survive another couple of
if in the next few decades, if we don't deal
with the elimination of fossil fuels, it's we can be
very confident that will have passed irreversible tipping points. Practically
(58:07):
one hundred percent of climate scientists agree on this.
Speaker 1 (58:13):
I think it's a good point, but you know what,
I'm concerned about is you know, Trump did win. There
are a lot of people who did vote for him
their primary the people that vote for him their primary concern.
You know, a lot of them are poor. You know,
they were concerned about their own lives. They're concerned about
what they're going to do. And I think, you know,
i'd love to get your thoughts how we can get
the Democrats to actually focus on reducing economic inequality and
(58:35):
meaningful ways so they can bring on board and convince
the poor and uneducated people to stop voting for you know,
the next Trump, you know, or even Trump four years
from now. You know what, what can what can we
do as Democrats?
Speaker 2 (58:48):
Well, I think that's right, but we should separate it
from the former question. Is Trump the most dangerous criminal
in human history? I think that's worth considering, and I
think the evidence for it is overwhelming. Every time I
say it, I say, here's an outrageous statement, very outrageous statement.
(59:11):
Ask yourself if it's true. Okay, and nobody wants to
think about it, so we turn to something else. But
I think it's pretty important. Okay, but let's put it aside.
So what can the Democrats do? Well, that's a very
pertinent question. In fact, we've just seen what happens when
they don't do anything. So take the November election. There's
(59:36):
been a lot of There are areas of the country
that voted for Trump that haven't voted for a Republican
for one hundred years, and there's been a good deal
of discussion of it. Like South Texas, Mexican American area,
it's an oil economy, hadn't voted Republican since Harting. A
(59:58):
lot of them voted for trum even some counties went
for him. The reason what they heard from their sources,
Fox News, the White House, whatever they get their information from.
What they heard is Biden wants to take away your job,
(01:00:19):
destroy your community, destroy your businesses, devastate your families. Don't
vote for him. Vote for Trump, who says I'm going
to keep your jobs, keep your families, keep the oil
production working, and so on. That's what they heard. Now,
(01:00:42):
if the Democrats were a political party that had any
concern for the general population instead of being committed to
Wall Street and rich donors and the wealthy professional classes,
if that were the case, they'd have had down in
South Texas saying, look, it's a fact that we're going
(01:01:06):
to have to get off the oil based economy. There's
just no debating that. That's like debating the weather. It's
a fact. We have to face it. Now here's the
way we can face it. We can face it with feasible,
sustainable measures which will give you better jobs, better lives,
(01:01:27):
better communities, happier existence. Here's the way to do it.
But they didn't do that. No, okay, so there's the
answer your question. You don't you don't break through the propaganda. Yeah,
that's what's going to happen.
Speaker 1 (01:01:42):
That's definitely one answer. Do you see any potential backlash
from focusing too much, going too far left and that
kind of being the main democratic talking points, you know,
in terms of race and gender. Do you see any
any potential problems with making that too much the central
(01:02:03):
focus you can.
Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
I'm in the atmosphere and many universities is by now toxic.
Speaker 1 (01:02:10):
Cancel culture. Are you frying to cancel culture?
Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
It's called cancel culture. It goes way beyond that. It's
the disdain for people who use the wrong pronoun say
that's a lot of young people in the universities feel
they're working on takeshells. If I say the wrong thing,
or do something that's slightly the wrong way, then it's
(01:02:34):
the tragedy. Got'll be you know, I won't be killed,
but you have to be expelled from the society. And
if you go that far, you're doing completely the wrong thing. Totally.
So it's possible to take important issues and to destroy them, okay,
by just not handling them like what I said before,
(01:02:56):
somebody came along and said, let's burn down Washington. That's
you know, maybe you can make an argument for it.
That's not the way to deal with the world, not
a sensible way.
Speaker 1 (01:03:08):
What are your thoughts about defunding the police depends?
Speaker 2 (01:03:11):
Well, that's an interesting case. If you just used the
slogan defund the police, you're giving an enormous gift to
the far right and pick it up and run with it.
They love it. Say, these guys want to take the
police out of your community so that black criminals can
come in and rob your house. I want that. Now.
(01:03:34):
I suppose you did it sanely, the way many of
the organizers did, the way Bernie Sanders did, the way
Alexandria Kassie protest did. She was asked, what do you
mean by defund the police? And her answer was, just
go into any white suburb. That's what we mean by
(01:03:56):
defund the police. The kids using drugs, you know, pick
them up, beat them up, take them to jail, and
incarcerat them. You deal with it sensibly through community services.
You have the police when you need them, but they're
not supposed to be involved in community service operations of
(01:04:19):
family disputes, overdoses, mental health issues, because they're not these issues.
That's community service. I think the police are in favor
of that kind of defunded. Bernie Sanders did the same.
He said, yeah, that's what we want. We want police
(01:04:39):
freed from obligations that are none of their business and
are just a burden. And in fact, they're probably ninety
percent of what they do. And let's fund let's have
better pay for police, so it's more desirable, profession people,
better trained, and have them focused on police work. But
(01:05:00):
the things that should be done like they're done in
a white suburb, they should be done everywhere. I lived
in a suburb of Boston. Just give you an example.
We were away for the summer and some neighbors called
us up and said, somebody broke windows in your house.
(01:05:22):
So we came back to see what happened. It turned
out somebody had broken in, so we called the Lexington
police and they came over and the first thing they
said is look in your medicine cabinet. We looked in
our medicine cabinet and yeah, somebody had gone through it
and taken some stuff in. And they said, is this
(01:05:44):
kids in the neighborhood. We know who they are. We're
not going to send them to jail. It's up to
their parents and the community to discipline them and put
them on the right path. That's the way to deal
with it. I didn't want them to go to jail.
I suppose it was a black community. You know what happened.
(01:06:06):
So when Kassio Cortez says defund the police means make
it look like a white server, that's a message that makes.
Speaker 1 (01:06:15):
Sense, Okay, yeah, and that goes that transcends the slogan.
You know, this is just a superficial you know, just
to defund the police, you know, without any nuance or yeah, yeah,
I agree. Well, thank you for giving your point on that.
You know, I am wondering, what's the biggest thing you
were wrong about and change your mind over in your career.
Speaker 2 (01:06:38):
A lot of things. I mean, in academy and professional work,
scientific work all the time. Yeah, right now I'm writing
in the midst of an article which gets it just
works on problems that I didn't notice in earlier, things
(01:06:58):
which are totally wrong enough to be fait. That happens
every day. So in scientific work, it's just that's what
work is. Fine, mistakes, you direct them move on. In
social political domains, not very much. I still believe pretty
much when I believed as a young teenager. I mean,
(01:07:20):
there are individual there are individual things that are wrong,
like text day of the Vietnam War, which I devoted
a lot of my life to. I started in the
early sixties when it was very unpopular, but that was
much too late. It started ten years earlier, but nobody
even heard of it. By the early sixties. That already
(01:07:43):
getting out of control. There are things like that.
Speaker 1 (01:07:47):
Well, I have one final question. I want to be
very respectful of your time. You have grandchildren, right, great
grand great grandchildren.
Speaker 2 (01:07:57):
Okay, I can't see one of them's in Japan. I
can't travel.
Speaker 1 (01:08:04):
Can you see them on Skype or on the screening
like that?
Speaker 2 (01:08:08):
I don't know. It's me.
Speaker 1 (01:08:12):
I was just wondering if you could give advice to
your great grandchildren, you know, for the life that they're
going to grow up to live in fifty years from now,
you know when you probably won't be here. Who knows
you may be here, but you know what sort of
advice for them? And then you know that that can
just apply to any young person listening to you right
(01:08:32):
now who really values and treasures your thoughts.
Speaker 2 (01:08:36):
Well, I never really gave any advice to my children.
They didn't ask for it, then I didn't give it.
I do get a lot of letters from young people
these days asking for advice, and what I usually say
is the only advice I know is if anybody tries
(01:08:56):
to give you advice, put it aside. Figure it out
for yourself, what kind of life you want, how to
lead it. There's no general answers to you should live,
no rules. There's cliches. You can give the cliches, but
it's really up to you. You have to create your
own life.
Speaker 1 (01:09:18):
But if you're an activist, if you're aspiring academic, you
want to make the world a better place, you know
surely you have some bit of advice you could give
to people hanging on your every word.
Speaker 2 (01:09:29):
Here I can repeat the cliches, they can figure them
out for themselves.
Speaker 1 (01:09:36):
Okay, fair enough. I just want to thank you so
much for this chat, but also just inspiring me in
my own career and being such a legend.
Speaker 2 (01:09:46):
Good very Please talk to you bye, have a good one.
Speaker 1 (01:09:58):
Thanks for listening to this episode of this ecology podcast.
If you'd like to react in some way to something
you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion
at thusycology podcast dot com or on our YouTube page
thus Ecology Podcast. We also put up some videos of
some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll
want to check that out. Thanks for being such a
great supporter of the show, and tune in next time
(01:10:20):
for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.
Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today's episode is
part of the best of series, where we highlight some
of the most exciting and enthralling and enlightening episodes from
the archives of the Psychology Podcast. Enjoy Welcome to the
Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights into the mind, brain, behavior,
(00:25):
and creativity. I'm doctor Scott Barry Kaufman, and in each
episode I have a conversation with a guest who will
stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
The world to live in.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility. Thanks
for listening and enjoy the podcast today. It's great to
have Noam Chomsky on the podcast. Gnome is a public intellectual, linguist,
and political activist. He's the author of many influential books,
including Manufacturing Consent, The Political Economy of the Mass Media,
(00:58):
and his latest with Robert Polm on Climate Crisis and
the Green New Deal, The Political Economy of Saving the Planet.
Chomsky is also known for helping initiate and sustain the
cognitive revolution. He's Laureate Professor of Linguistics the University of Arizona,
and Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT. Thanks so much for
meking time to chat with me today.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Now, plead to be with you. Just had to take
care of a dog.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Is the dog okay?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah, just trying to horn in. I'm trying to shut
him up. Down down, It's okay.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
If if he or she wants to participate in the podcast,
that's fine with me.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Usually she usually calms down and gets under the desk.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Excellent. Well, so I'm a cognitive scientist by training, so
i'm and I'm one of the things I'm really fascinated
with is the history of the field that I work in.
And I had the great pleasure of working with and
being mentored by the Herb Simon, for instance, who was
one of the ones who helped form this cognitive revolution
as well. And I was wondering if you could we
(02:03):
could trace a little bit, you know, in the sixties fifties,
how did your work, you know, when linguistics intersect with
the other work going on during that cognitive revolution at
the time, the work on decision making and Marvin Minsky's work,
How did all this stuff call ask that that epic?
Can you take me back to the fifties sixties right now.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Well, I knew Herb Simon and Marv Minsky Marv most
of my life. We were colleagues. So the it was
one of the strange that one of the core elements
of the what's called the cognitive revolution, I don't like
the term particularly, but one of the core elements, of course,
(02:45):
was language. The other core element was visioned a couple
of other things, and so we all knew each other.
Of my own work was trying to construct theoretical accounts
that would account for the capacity of humans to do
(03:07):
what we're now doing. This core problem of the cognitive sciences.
What's the nature of the capacity, how can an individual
acquire it during their lifetimes, in fact, during their early childhood,
and ultimately how could such a system evolve? Those are
(03:28):
the core problems of the study of linguistics beginning around
nineteen fifty. It's a pretty sharp break from structural linguistics,
which had quite different goals and aspirations. I've actually written
some about these years. If you want me to send
(03:50):
you something, that'd be great, Yeah, just I have your email,
so to do that'd.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Be really great.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
So when did you first make contact with behaviorism and
what was your immediate gut reaction when you first encountered
that body of work and the notions of sort of
the stimulus response way of thinking about behavior.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Knew about it from childhood. But the real encounter was
when I moved to Cambridge. I came to Harvard as
a grad student in nineteen fifty one that I was
basically studying philosophy. So I was a student of Fan
Coins mainly, and he was one of the chief exponents
(04:38):
of Skinner and Hawker and conditioning partent rigid form of behaviors,
and Skinner's William James Lectures had just appeared a couple
of years ago. Later became his book on language, and
(05:01):
the drafts were very widely read, and it was influential,
in part because of Coin's advocacy, and part it just
did fit the tenor of the times very well. So
it was kind of a bible when I got there.
You look at say, George Miller's first early books. Out
(05:21):
of the later ones, they're pretty strict behaviors. It was
even you know, some of his early experiments were considered
rather shocking and sounds kind of obvious, showing that you
could understand a word better if it was in a sentence,
then if it was in isolation, which shouldn't happen on
(05:47):
what should happen on rigid behavior, as Browns is that
you're the first word of a sentence, then there's a
certain probability for the next one, and kind of like
what's done with deep learning today. And by the time
you got to the end of the sentence, you can
barely guess what the word is because the probably is
go down. But of course the results are exactly the opposite.
(06:08):
As you hear the sentence, you can just the last work.
None of this works, But that was some of his
early work and it was considered quite surprising. By the
mid fifties, George had significantly changed and became one of
the founders of cognitive science. But when I got there
in fifty one, this was orthodox with a couple other
(06:32):
things that happened. Claude Shannon had come along with information theory.
The Shannon and Weaver book, with Weaver's kind of popularization
and extension of the technical ideas, was another bible. Cybernetics
was another. Signal detection radio engineering was another, and they
(06:56):
all kind of converged into a four area of which
Scinierian behaviorism was a central part a sense that we're
cracking the last frontiers. When Krick and Watson came along
fifty three, that enhanced the idea that we're now moving
to a new era. It was called unified science, and
(07:19):
which we'd be able to we had the tools to
deal with the problems that were called problems of mind
and psychology. There were a couple of us who thought
this was all nonsense. Three in fact, to three grad students,
(07:40):
my friend Mars Halle, who I worked with till the
end of his life, and Eric Lenneberg, who also a
grad student. He went on in later years to found
modern biology of language. But the three of us just
didn't believe any of it. We thought it made no sense.
(08:03):
We began reading European comparative pathology, Tinberg and Lawrence others
looked at comparative psychology work, and I was introduced by
a friend, Mar Shapiro, and art historian suggests that I
(08:26):
should read Carl A. Ashley's Serial Order and Behavior, which
was a very important article back in around nineteen fifty,
which just knocked the props out of the whole behavior system.
Nobody knew it. I mean, neurologists knew it. It was
(08:47):
in the neuroscience literature, but psychologists and I think and
others were totally unaware of it when I wrote about
it for the first time in a review of Skinner's
or Behavior the Press nineteen fifty seven, But that, I
think was the first mention of it in the general
(09:09):
psychology cognitive science literature, so that these were things that
we were Eric went on to start writing articles on
He was doing a good deal of work at the
time on various a variant forms of linguistic behavior, studying pathologies,
(09:36):
early studies on use of SNIGN, cognitive deficiencies in language,
and neural deficiencies, and this went on to become his
Biology of Language book, very very important book, Biological Foundations
of Language. But at first it was essentially the three
(09:57):
of us. Then George Miller interested link, linked up with
Jerry Brunner, who was injured, formed the Cognitive Science Group
at Harvard, spent a year there. I was working quite
a lot with George Miller in the mid fifties, books,
a couple of articles together, taught together, and so on,
(10:19):
and then it just kind of expanded, linked up to
some extent with the early work and artificial intelligence Simon
Simon and Newell, har Minsky and McCarthy, and by the
early sixties it become kind of a fairly i can't
(10:41):
say integrated because there are a lot of internal disputes,
but interlinked approach to many questions the euphoria, but then
had pretty much anticipated you get it. You can get
a good sense of it by reading theoshu of Barhelil's
(11:03):
essays around nineteen sixty five. He's an Israeli, a logician
who was a regular visitor to Pralely Research Level Electronics MIT,
which was kind of the center of most of it.
And at first he was very much a partisan of
the euphoric hopes, but by the mid sixties he was
(11:27):
a close personal friend also back from about nineteen fifty,
but he had pretty much come around to agree with
the skeptical approach and wrote some retrospectives about it which
are quite interesting and knowledgeable around the mid sixties. You
(11:48):
can get a sense from his work that's kind of
what it was like in the early days in Cambridge.
There was no linguistics. Practically the only linguist, the romaniocopsin
was there. But from the European tradition, but there were
no American linguists, so I was, in fact about the
(12:11):
only person there was an American linguistics tradition factor consensus,
but it was quite different in character. It was it
was described its proponents described as a taxonomic science set
(12:31):
of procedures, but you could apply to any purpose of data.
It would identify the elements and their distributional arrangement. That
was linguistics. That's basically my own background. This was quite different.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
So what was it like? You know, was there a
great excitement in the air. Did you feel like you
were you were leading a revolution at the time or
was it only in retrospect that you realized it was
a revolution?
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Well, myself, I thought it was just a personal hobby.
I took for granted that the consensus of American linguists
had to be on the right track, and this was
a totally different approach. But it was my own. A
couple of others got interested in it. By by the
(13:24):
mid fifties, we felt that we were pursuing something that
should displace the I think it was the consensus, and
as I say, none of us agreed with the None
of us means three or three of us with the
behaviors dogmas that were rampant at the time, but never
(13:51):
the question wasn't is it a revolution? But is this
the right way to pursue things. Gradually I learned that
there were ant of students, I say, we were reading
European ethology, which had some similarities, and I began looking
into the history a little further. Learned that there were
(14:13):
much earlier tradition that had been totally forgotten some of that.
So my own view in retrospect that you might call
this the second cognitive revolution. Turns out, in the seventeenth century,
the time of the origin of modern science, a lot
(14:34):
of things of this kind were happening. They didn't have
what they lacked, and what we had was the poria
of computation didn't come along till mid twentieth century, so
there were no tools for trying to explore the kinds
of questions that they were raising. But I look back
(14:57):
to Galileo as contemporary as they recognized something very significant
wasn't discovered later until I wrote about it in the
mid sixties, and almost nobody knows it now. In fact,
if you look back, the early founders of modern science
(15:20):
like Galileo, were just amazed by what they regarded was
the most astonishing, remarkable fact in the world, that with
a few dozen symbols we could construct in our minds
infinitely many thoughts and even convey to others who have
(15:42):
no access to our minds the innermost workings of our minds.
The Galileo, for example, alphabet was the most stupendous of
human inventions because it enabled this miracle to take place.
Of course, it was understood that the alphabet was just
(16:03):
representing some system in the mind which does the same thing,
and that didn't develop. The tradition of what was called
general and rational grammar through the eighteenth seventeenth eighteenth centuries,
which tried to develop these ideas, but lacking the theory
(16:24):
of computation, there was no way to formulate it. How
do you formulate a computational process that captures these capacities.
By the mid twentieth century, when I was a student,
I was studying logic and recursive function theory, and you
(16:45):
could see that that offered that modern recursive function theory
and theory of computation provided the tools in which you
could proceed to develop computational systems which a recursive enumeration
of the expressions of the language basically expressions of thought,
(17:08):
and you could find also provided means by which this
could be translated into the map into sensor remote motor
outputs and inputs, so you could link it to perception production, learnability,
How can it be acquired? All these questions on the
(17:29):
agenda as soon as this fell together.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Yeah, I'd love to double click there for a second
on this idea of a neatness and this idea of learnability.
What was unique about what you did was it was
certainly not saying that learning doesn't matter at all in
the process, but the learning of the language seemed to
operate in a way that almost the language of the
word learning doesn't seem to really conform to what psychologists
(17:53):
tend to think of as learning. During that time, it
didn't seem to operate by those same sort of principles.
I was wondering how your thoughts on this have evolved
over the years, especially in light of Arthur Reeber's work,
for instance, on implicit learning, showing that artificial grammars can
be learned that we are not sort of hardwired. I'm
(18:15):
not a big fan of that phrase. But you know
what I mean, hardwired to have that specific rule structure.
But we perhaps maybe like through to statistical learning, we
can learn languages, and so there's a lot less built
in than maybe we once thought. And I'm wondering how
you're current thinking of that is.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
All of these results are negative. They show you can't
do anything you can do. I mean, if you have
a bunch of supercomputers running and huge amounts of data
and do a lot of statistical analysis, you can come
(18:55):
close to approximating a set of phenomena, like you can
come pretty close to approximating the sentences in the Wall
Street Journal that's of zero scientific interest. If you did
a ton of statistical analysis of chemical experiments that say,
(19:16):
you know, people mixing things in the laboratory and so on,
you could get a fair approximation to what they're actually doing.
Would I tell you anything about chemistry. Nothing. It's a game.
It's a way of selling a propaganda for IBM, you know,
(19:37):
or for Google these days. But it tells you absolutely
nothing about the nature of the system and the way
it's acquired and learned that human beings don't. A two
or three year old child has mastered the basis of
the language. We now know from statistical analysis the data
(19:58):
available to each child that it's extremely empoverished. I mean,
sounds like the child is hearing millions of sentences. But
when you take into account such elementary facts as Zip's law,
you know this the rank frequency distribution, and it turns
(20:21):
out that almost everything you barely in hearing bigrams, let
alone trigrams. So from the what's back in this is
what's there is a problem that was understood in the
early fifties called poverty of stimulus. How do you go
from the impoverished stimuli available to the rich knowledge attained?
(20:45):
It was obvious in the early fifties is a major problem.
By now we know it's a much worse problem, far
worse than was assumed, because because by now we have
extensive studies, first of all of the data available, we
don't have to guess anymore, and extensive studies of acquisition
(21:06):
of language. None of that existed at a time. And
it turns out that at about the earliest age you
can start testing that kids already have very rich knowledge,
which goes way beyond what they produce. This is work
that's going on for fifteen sixty years. So the problem
(21:28):
of poverty stimulus is overwhelming. Now the deep learning approaches
have no problem. That they have basically as much data
as you want, vast amounts of data, huge amounts of
computing capacity, and with that what they get is kind
(21:50):
of what you get if you did what I just suggested, looked,
looked at or takes an example closer to the language.
Suppose that you did deep learning studies of the communication
system of bees. Okay, you could get a fair prediction,
(22:12):
probably pretty good predictions of what bees do. You know,
bees start going out of the hive, they wander around,
they find a flower, they right, they have the capacity
of dead reckonings, or they go straight back to the hive.
They waggle their wings and the other bees start fluttering
(22:36):
around when they go to the flower. But they'll tell
you anything about bee communication. Nothing. You know, it's not
what when Frish was doing. It's not what other bee
scientists do. They want to find that it works. The
fact that you can kind of approximate to phenomena just
(22:57):
tells you another thing. You can look at the phenomena
without a activating.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Well, you know, I'm thinking of these implicit learning paradigms
that I administered in my dissertation, like serial reaction time
learning or artificial grammar learning. This formed a core basis
of my dissertation. I was really interested to the extent
to which there's individual differences where people can soak up
the probabilistic rule structure of something unconsciously, you know, without
(23:24):
their conscious awareness. And I found that people are some
people are better at it than others, but overall, you know,
most people. I debriefed them afterwards, I said, did he
notice that fifteen percent of the time this sequence it
followed this sequence, eighty five percent of the time it
followed that sequence, and that you got faster at the
reaction time for the eighty five percent. And they had
no idea, you know, consciously that they learned these things.
(23:46):
And these were artificial you know, languages, These are not,
you know, something that we evolved. And so do you
think that's telling us anything about how much is build
in versus how much is not building? Because I think
it might. I think it does tell us something tells.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
You something about human cognition. But I think it's a
mistake to use the word artificial languages. Nothing to do
with languages I mean, these are data sets that have
may are constructed to share some of the superficial properties
of languages, but it tells you absolutely nothing about how
(24:23):
language is acquired, certainly not acquired this way. I mean,
as I say, if you take a look at the
actual data available to children, you don't even get a
lot of biagrams, let alone trigrams. And this is not
there because what the kid is hearing mostly is the
(24:47):
function words, the end of and so on. And then
you look at the rank frequency distribution, it goes very
sharply down and tails often to a long tail. So
I mean there's some statistical learning, but very much at
the margins. So there's nothing wrong with the experiments they're studying.
(25:14):
They're interesting things to study of cognition, and of course
everything goes on unconsciously, like you and I have absolutely
no awareness of the rules that we're following in this conversation,
way beyond the levels of consciousness. I mean, people are
deluded to think that what we call inner speech is
(25:37):
somehow our thinking processes. Absolutely not. What we call inner
speech is a pale reflection of the externalized form of
what's going on in our minds. And if you actually
think about it, it's just bits and pieces of fragments.
(25:57):
Our construction of sentences in our minds is vastly more
equipped than what we call in our speech, and you
can see it very simply by just doing things like
reading out loud, which is much slower than reading. You
can read a page in a fraction at the time
and understand it of reading it all because the externalization
(26:23):
is just very much slowing everything down. There's all kind
of stuff going on in our minds. We can study
it the way we study becommunication from the outside that
can't introspect into it totally beyond the level of consciousness.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
How do you link some of this to modern day
behavioral genetics? What do you think of the field of
modern day behavior genetics? And you know, obviously those tools
weren't available to you when you first when you first
started in the field, and I was worrying sort of
what your own sort of thinking about about that is
in terms of what tells us about a neatness.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Well, now it tells us. It's an important field. It's
an important field for biology, but it's very far from
accounting for even much simpler traits than language. There was
a lot of enthusiasm when the genome project came along
(27:21):
about all the things that were going to follow from it.
But what we've mainly learned is do you haven't a
clue how instructions in the DNA turn into an organism?
I mean, even just figuring out how you get protein
folding you can barely do by Now that's an area
(27:44):
where AI has made some contributions, but that's remember this
the bare beginning of what makes an organism. It's good
to study these things, but you should study simple traits,
not a very complex trade life language which is going
(28:05):
to be way out of sight for any such investigations.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Or intelligence, whatever intelligence is. What do you think intelligence is?
Speaker 2 (28:18):
Well, all I can tell you is that I, for
about sixty years was on admissions committees for graduate courses
at MIT, which has pretty high standards. You can pick
maybe five percent of the applicants and they're all very
highly qualified. I can't remember once when anybody ever suggested
(28:42):
looking at IQ. Nobody cares. It's totally irrelevant. That's not
the kind of thing you look. I'm sure you find
the same thing. I mean, you've been on commission on
admissions commissions. Yeah, Ever look at IQ.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Well, you know, sat is is correlated with IQ, very
very highly. Right, So it's subconsciously if we look at
SAT or indirectly, or are we selecting for IQ.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
I don't know about you, but we looked at SAT
as a kind of a marginal phenomenon enough some interest.
For example, if some kid an applicant is just all
as you know, top flight in every area and the
SAT we recorded that as kind of negative, probably means
(29:32):
he has no special interests and no ingenuity and creativity.
If you get somebody who does very well in some
areas and very poorly in others, you want to take
a second look. Maybe there's some maybe there's some sparks
here that makes him do creative work and put aside
things he's not interested in. So it's something, but I
(29:57):
don't think it's much of a criterion. Of course, if
somebody scores very low in everything, you think, well, probably
not qualified.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Yeah, so it sounds like you're challenging this idea of
general intelligence as being the most important or even important
at all for college admissions and what about life more broadly?
Speaker 2 (30:23):
You know you can find something. Okay, I don't think
it's a very interesting characteristic. Well, what's interesting or for
you think, take a look at I mean, I've had
many years to look back. I'm sure you have to,
not as many as you, Yeah, not as many. But
when you look back and you ask, all of these
(30:44):
kids who came in MI t were very highly qualified.
Some of them had very distinguished careers, did a lot
of exciting work. Others just did routine technical work, you know,
perfectly competent, but like it adds a brick here and
(31:07):
there to which you know, if you look back, it's
pretty hard to find the distinguishing characteristics. I was in
the Society of Fellows at Harvard, which is a very
highly selective of three or four year research graduate fellowship,
no duties or responsibilities, and that they tried to have
(31:33):
very high standards for selection and occasionally look back and
try to do the same judgments and the same story.
You can't tell. These are really matters of character in
many ways, more than technical more than mental ability. I mean,
they're going to have somebody who's a you know, a
(31:55):
math genius, but will never discover anything. This just doesn't
have the right right characteristics.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah, I really I really appreciate that, or you know,
even creativity. We you know, we find a distinction oury
research between creativity and intelligence. You know, I'd like to
talk about creativity a little bit because this is a
topic that you've talked about in in other you know,
sort of even a political sort of way, in terms
of what societies can help us thrive and are most
(32:27):
likely in conducive to autonomy and human freedom and and creativity.
How do you define creativity? Like, how do you even
conceptualize that such a word?
Speaker 2 (32:37):
I wouldn't try to define it. The only terms you
can really define are within well grounded explanatory theories. So
if you're working in physics, you can give a technical
definition of energy within the framework. But if you were
to ask me how I define energy ordinary life, and
(33:02):
can give you some descriptive description, but no definition. There
aren't definitions outside of very narrow sectors of carefully constructed
theoretical systems. But creativity, we is the ability to First
(33:23):
of all, it's the ability to be puzzled by things.
You have to start with that. There are infants have
that capacity. They're puzzled by everything. They're constantly asking questions
that can't stop. Is annoying, you know how what's this?
How does that work? You know, if you're a parent,
(33:45):
drive you bananas. They want to the world's very puzzling, strange.
They want to understand it. That's driven out of people's
heads in many ways worked by the educational system, part
of another way. But there are some people who retain it.
And in fact, if you look at the great moments
(34:06):
of history of science, that's pretty much what they were.
So take say, the scientific Revolution seventeenth century, the great
science that really changed science practically, it basically was based
on being puzzled. Galileo's contemporaries were just dissatisfied with the
(34:30):
what we're called explanations of things. So why do alls
fall to the ground, Well, it was an explanation, that's
their natural place. They're attracted to the earth. They didn't
regard that as an explanation. As soon as they began
looking at it, they found that we don't really understand
(34:54):
and in fact, all that was believed turns out to
be wrong. Like it was versely taken for granted that
a heavy lid ball full faster than a small lid
ball until they showed by thought experiments incidentally, never carried
any experiment by thought experiments, ingenious thought experiments. Should this
(35:17):
can't be the case. And that's what happens when you're puzzled.
Appillion people are willing to question orthodoxy, not as to
accept it because that's what everybody says, but to be
to want an argument for it, to challenge it. Sometimes
(35:37):
it's right, you get convinced. Sometimes you see, it's just dogma.
Behaviorism was like that, it was just dogma. It's soon
as it began to look at it carefully, totally fell apart.
But it's hard to do that. There were people who
did like lastly, for example, and who were ignored. But
(35:58):
if enough people do it begin to interact. Uh, they
start to try to work out real answers. They keep
finding flaws in their own answers, address those. Then you
get creative work. But how to pick it out among people?
Speaker 1 (36:18):
I can't say or pick it up? But the other
interesting question is how can we bring it out of
people in a society? I really, you know, do you
remember that that conversation you have with Fuco? Does that?
Does that ring a bell? That that legendary conversation you know?
Speaker 2 (36:35):
I remember it? Of course? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Yeah, I mean I'm obviously you do I'm joking, but
it's a it's a very well watched video and and debate.
But I'm just very interested in the discussion you had
with them about about creativity. You too seem to have
very differing views of what the essential question there is
for for how society should be organized and uh and
(36:59):
and issues of the role of justice for creativity. I
was worrying a few thoughts about that have changed over
the years.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
I mean, as I understand Fucau's position, at least from
what I got out of the discussion and reading his work,
he doesn't seem to think seems to think that everything
just as a matter of who has more power than others.
So it's a matter of distribution of power. And if
(37:29):
you want to take a political position, say, at that
time he was pretty committed sort of French style Marxist Maoist.
So we're on the side of the proletariat and we
want them to win. And if you ask, as I did, ask,
(37:52):
if you look back at the they suppose it turns
out that what the proletariat will institute is inhuman, destructive,
cruel and so on, does that mean we oppose it?
He said, no, it's just a matter of which side
you're on, there's no right or wrong. There's no questions
(38:13):
of justice, there's no basic human nature, just which power
system it takes control. That may be a caricature, I'm
not sure, but that's what I understood, is position to be.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
That's what I understood it as well.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
I totally reject it. I think there's a fundamental human nature.
We don't understand much about it, but we can try
to discover. My guess, partly from experience, partly from study,
partly from wish fulfillment, is that the goal of human
(38:51):
beings is to be free and independent, the creative, not
controlled by others, under pursuing their own free and independent interests.
This is the basic Enlightenment position which you find we're
so humble other great figures of the Enlightenment, and it's
(39:15):
the origins of classical liberalism just won't been forgotten. It's
the reason, for example, why working people in the nineteenth
century early Industrial Revolution were bitterly opposed to the wage
labor regarded as a fundamental assault on human dignity and
(39:39):
human rights. In fact, that was a very standard position
at the time because, in fact, the slogan of the
Republican Party that wage slavery, wage labor, what they called
wage slavery, is no different from slavery, except that it's
temporary on the program Lincoln. And in fact, that's the
whole classical liberal tradition. There's way back to the Greeks
(40:03):
and the Romans. That's a modern idea that having a
job is a good thing. I think that the tradition
is probably right that people don't want to be subject
to masters. And I don't care whether the masters are
the Central Committee or the the corporate sector about the
(40:32):
same thing. But that's a guess about human nature. I
can't demonstrate it today.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
Yeah, it's a really good point. I'm trying to think
a lot about the modern day. You know, these social
justice movements we're seeing today with Black Lives Matter and theirs.
I don't know if you're familiar with the term woke
or wokeness, and there are some people criticize wokeness, and
then I'm trying to think, you know, do you ever
hear anything from some of the arguments coming from what
(41:06):
some would call woke sort of denying a human nature,
And and you know, because a lot of them really
are big fans of foco. You know, do you ever,
do you have any criticize, criticisms of maybe some of
the methods used in modern day social justice movements that
have moved us away from the classical liberal sort of ideal.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Well, I think they don't understand the classical liberal ideal.
They regard the classical liberal ideal as modern capitalism, very
far from that they.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
Do and even sometimes maybe viewed as modern day conservatism.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
You know what modern day conservatism, in my view is
extreme authoritarianism. Well, libertarian in the United States is almost fascism.
It's the most extreme form of sport to power. It's
just subordination to private power, and that's even worse than
(42:07):
subordination to the state. I mean, if you're like, if
you have a job in a factory, say let alone
an Amazon warehouse, you're under for most of your waking life.
You're under the kind of control that Stalin couldn't have
dreamt of. Like Stalin couldn't tell you that at three
(42:31):
o'clock in the afternoon, you have five minutes to go
to the bathroom, and you got to wear these clothes
and on some other clothes, and this is the past
you have to take when you're moving from here to there.
I mean people that lit alone on an assembly line,
which is kind of control that no dictator could even
(42:51):
dream of. Or a person working at a cash register
just totally turned totally into an automaton under total control of
an authority. I mean, that's an extreme form of authoritarian control.
We know. One of those dogmas question kind of like
(43:15):
behaviorism in nineteen fifty, is that this is a good thing.
As I say, in the early Industrial Revolution, this was
regarded as totally intolerable, built on basic human rights. Now
it's considered the highest thing in life. I can get
a job flipping Hamburg. That's it. I think that's so
(43:43):
what you're saying about. No, there are a lot of
people like Fucoh and many others who say there's no
human nature. That's first of all, it's insanity. It's like
saying we're no different from cats. I mean, it's insane.
You know, of course, the human nature. What they mean
is something different. They mean. What they probably mean, which
(44:06):
makes sense, is that the particular social forms and arrangements
in which we are integrated are subject to change. That's correct,
that seems reasonable, But it's not going to turn us
into insects. It's not going to give us an insect
(44:26):
visual system. It's not going to turn us into creatures
that are incapable of language. I mean, we have a nature,
and in fact it's very rigid and strict. Within it
are variations and social and cultural and other arrangements that
lead to variations. I mean, take say the visual system.
(44:51):
Since we just think of the classical experimental work Hubil
and Weasel, for example on human on vision a male
en vision, I mean, what they show is that early,
very early modification of the visual system, story cortex can
(45:13):
lead to radical changes in the phenotype and the outcome
that appears. It doesn't happen with us because we all
have about the same visual experience. But if there was
a mangle around who could stick electrodes into our visual
cortex or control the stimuli that we see, we'd have
(45:36):
totally different visual systems that the as adults maybe no
visual system a cat. As they showed, if you deprive
a kitten of structured visual stimuli for the first couple
of weeks of life, it's essentially blind. The analytics systems
(46:00):
just degenerate. Okay, that means and it's kind of the
same as speaking different languages. But the point is you
can't change an a mammalian visual system into an insect
visual system with compound eyes. That's a mammalian nature. Within
mammalian nature, there's a lot of possible options. Within human nature,
(46:23):
there's a lot of possible options. And it's the options
that interest us as human beings. We take for granted
what's common to us, kind of like sports, Like when
you go to the Olympics, you don't see a competition
and walking across the room with anybody to do that.
(46:43):
You see competitions and things that humans are no good
at all, like pole holding. So if you go way
to the edges of human competence, you start to find
differences among people, but the overwhelming mass of competence is
just shared.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
Well, I agree. I mean, this idea of there being
a common human nature and a shared common humanity sometimes
I feel like gets at odds with the massive divisions
we see today through identity, you know, political identity is
being the first and foremost thing that is the most
important thing about a person these days, or or or
(47:25):
gender identity, you know, you know, the use of linguistics
right now is very interesting in how we see a
proliferation of gender pronouns, you know, far beyond the sex
biological sex binary you know, what do you?
Speaker 2 (47:39):
What do you?
Speaker 1 (47:41):
What are your thoughts on this and how we can
balance the need to want to appreciate someone's personal identity
and the things that divide us, but while at the
same time not forgetting that there is a common human
there is a common human nature that that you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
Well, first of all, let's let's try to take the
standpoint of an alien observer who looks at us the
way we look at frogs. Okay, that alien observer would
say they're all identical. There are minor variations between them
(48:19):
right around the extreme periphery, just as if we look
at frogs, we say frogs frog, But if you really
started looking closely at different frogs, you find slight differences
in the way they do things. Well, as a frog,
you're interested in the differences. They don't care about the
(48:39):
fact that we're all frogs that you just take for granted. Yeah,
interested in what's a little bit different between this frog
and that frog. But from the point of of us
looking at frogs, it's so minor you can't even see it.
It's the same with this what pronoun you use. From
the point of view, the nature of humans is so
(49:02):
marginally you need a microscope to detect it. But for
human life, that's what matters. We don't care. We don't
even pay attention to the fact that we're all fundamentally humans,
that we just take for granted. What's interesting to us
in our lives is these very slight differences around the edges.
(49:24):
Do you say everyone thought he was here, or do
you say everyone thought they were here or something? It's
worth thinking about for human life, and it's important. So
for example, I wouldn't like it if people called me
a kit. Let's say, I mean, I don't think there
(49:48):
should be a law against it, but I certainly wouldn't
like it.
Speaker 1 (49:51):
I wouldn't like it either. I wouldn't like it either.
Speaker 2 (49:55):
And it's the same. And if some woman feels slighted,
if you say when you mean anybody, okay, I can
understand that too, and you adjust to it. So you
don't expect people to walk around talking about kikes and
niggers and wops and so on. That's already internalized pretty recently. Incidentally,
(50:19):
you go back now very long it was normal speech,
even even writing one of my favorite articles from I
think it's Forbes magazine, the main business journal back in
around nineteen thirty was thirty two, early thirties. When I
(50:39):
was a kid that was a it was Fortune magazine
had a front page cover saying the wasps are unwhopping themselves,
meaning Mussolini's doing a good job. So the wops are
unwhopping themselves. I don't think I can say that now,
(51:03):
I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (51:04):
So there's a positive, you know, the use of linguistics
to help us with an appreciation of differences and respecting
the uniqueness of an identity, is it can be a
positive thing in changing, you know, inequality in a society.
(51:28):
Is that what you're.
Speaker 2 (51:28):
Saying, except that I would call it linguistics, just like
I wouldn't call it physics. If I adjust the books
on my desk so they don't fall, it's true it's physics,
but I don't have to go to a physicist to
find out about it. I mean, and it's the same
in this case. Linguistics isn't going to tell you anything
(51:52):
about whether you should say the walks are unwelthing themselves. Okay,
I can describe it, but give the rules for it.
It's not going to tell you whether to do it
or not. But just like a physicist isn't going to
tell me how to adjust the books. These are parts
of human life which are way beyond the sciences of
(52:12):
their comprehension. But yes, it's a it's a topic you
have to be concerned about. And I think you have
to have to ask yourself seriously, should we burn down
the city of Washington because George Washington was a slave owner? Okay,
(52:36):
I'm sure you can find some people to say we should.
I don't think so. These are the judgments you have
to make as a human being living in a complex society.
Speaker 1 (52:49):
So what do you think of the Black Lives Matter
movement right now? And and and uh and race being
the topic of consciousness because I saw an interviewed about
five years ago where you made a really good point
about how races and slavery it's a core part of
human of our history as a country Americans, but it's
(53:11):
not as big a part of our consciousness. And now
it's becoming, you know, and now it's really in our consciousness.
And I was wondering your some of your thoughts on
that now five years later.
Speaker 2 (53:21):
There's been a big change in the last few years
among certain parts of the society, not the society in general.
Society in general is very racist, shows up in all
kinds of ways. A large part of the Trump folks,
for example, is coming from deeply white supremacist circles, circles
(53:43):
that don't feel themselves as racist, like I have black friends,
you know, but just think the country is a white
Christian country and it has to stay that way. That
kind of white supremacy is very wide spread. But on
the other hand, there is a change in consciousness in
(54:05):
many circles. You can see it in the reaction to
the George Floyd murder. Blacks have been murdered for a
long time. This reaction was quite different, spontaneous, enormous in scale,
way beyond anything in American history, and have widely supported
(54:30):
at around sixty percent support, a lot of solidarity, sensible goals.
It was a very striking phenomenon, led by Black Lives
Matter organizers, but many others coming in. Well, that's one
(54:51):
sign of serious changes. I want to see another sign
take a look at this morning's New York Times as
a very good op ed by Eric Kohner. Fine historian
calling for abolition, and what he's calling for is abolition
(55:14):
of criminal labor, mostly black. He's a historian of abolitionism, reconstruction,
Civil War, and so he points out that the Thirteenth
Amendment banning slavery had a qualificatient it said forced labor
(55:36):
is legitimate as a punishment. That, as he discusses, was
the opening that the South used to say. And he says,
we still have it today in private prisons where convicts
are forced to work for ridiculously low wages of profit.
(56:01):
So we should really move on to abolition. You wouldn't
have had that up it a couple of years ago.
It's a sign of the increasing consciousness and awareness of
the really black history that is our actual dark, cruel history,
(56:21):
its history that's part of our legacy. Now we've never
grown out of it. Part of it the extermination of
the indigenous populations and other part of it. And these
are things that are gradually seeping into consciousness, not anywhere
near enough. So there are holocaust museums all over the country.
(56:45):
Try to find out how many museums there are for
slavery of nation of Indians.
Speaker 1 (56:52):
Yeah, I thought that was a good point. You made
that point in that interview five years ago there that
you don't see and I don't think there has been
many more slavery music in that five years. So that
thought that was a really good point. So in some sense,
we're making progress in social progress in lots of ways.
You're you're very pessimistic about the future. You've called Trump,
you know, our current president right now, the worst criminal
(57:14):
in human history. That's that's a pretty big that's a
pretty big deal. Why more so than like Hitler?
Speaker 2 (57:22):
Did Hitler devote his energies to trying to destroy the
possibility of human life on earth, to try to maximize
the use of fossil fuels and to eliminate the regulatory
system that provides some mitigation. Is condemning the human species
(57:43):
to extinction? Are we going to survive another couple of
if in the next few decades, if we don't deal
with the elimination of fossil fuels, it's we can be
very confident that will have passed irreversible tipping points. Practically
(58:07):
one hundred percent of climate scientists agree on this.
Speaker 1 (58:13):
I think it's a good point, but you know what,
I'm concerned about is you know, Trump did win. There
are a lot of people who did vote for him
their primary the people that vote for him their primary concern.
You know, a lot of them are poor. You know,
they were concerned about their own lives. They're concerned about
what they're going to do. And I think, you know,
i'd love to get your thoughts how we can get
the Democrats to actually focus on reducing economic inequality and
(58:35):
meaningful ways so they can bring on board and convince
the poor and uneducated people to stop voting for you know,
the next Trump, you know, or even Trump four years
from now. You know what, what can what can we
do as Democrats?
Speaker 2 (58:48):
Well, I think that's right, but we should separate it
from the former question. Is Trump the most dangerous criminal
in human history? I think that's worth considering, and I
think the evidence for it is overwhelming. Every time I
say it, I say, here's an outrageous statement, very outrageous statement.
(59:11):
Ask yourself if it's true. Okay, and nobody wants to
think about it, so we turn to something else. But
I think it's pretty important. Okay, but let's put it aside.
So what can the Democrats do? Well, that's a very
pertinent question. In fact, we've just seen what happens when
they don't do anything. So take the November election. There's
(59:36):
been a lot of There are areas of the country
that voted for Trump that haven't voted for a Republican
for one hundred years, and there's been a good deal
of discussion of it. Like South Texas, Mexican American area,
it's an oil economy, hadn't voted Republican since Harting. A
(59:58):
lot of them voted for trum even some counties went
for him. The reason what they heard from their sources,
Fox News, the White House, whatever they get their information from.
What they heard is Biden wants to take away your job,
(01:00:19):
destroy your community, destroy your businesses, devastate your families. Don't
vote for him. Vote for Trump, who says I'm going
to keep your jobs, keep your families, keep the oil
production working, and so on. That's what they heard. Now,
(01:00:42):
if the Democrats were a political party that had any
concern for the general population instead of being committed to
Wall Street and rich donors and the wealthy professional classes,
if that were the case, they'd have had down in
South Texas saying, look, it's a fact that we're going
(01:01:06):
to have to get off the oil based economy. There's
just no debating that. That's like debating the weather. It's
a fact. We have to face it. Now here's the
way we can face it. We can face it with feasible,
sustainable measures which will give you better jobs, better lives,
(01:01:27):
better communities, happier existence. Here's the way to do it.
But they didn't do that. No, okay, so there's the
answer your question. You don't you don't break through the propaganda. Yeah,
that's what's going to happen.
Speaker 1 (01:01:42):
That's definitely one answer. Do you see any potential backlash
from focusing too much, going too far left and that
kind of being the main democratic talking points, you know,
in terms of race and gender. Do you see any
any potential problems with making that too much the central
(01:02:03):
focus you can.
Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
I'm in the atmosphere and many universities is by now toxic.
Speaker 1 (01:02:10):
Cancel culture. Are you frying to cancel culture?
Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
It's called cancel culture. It goes way beyond that. It's
the disdain for people who use the wrong pronoun say
that's a lot of young people in the universities feel
they're working on takeshells. If I say the wrong thing,
or do something that's slightly the wrong way, then it's
(01:02:34):
the tragedy. Got'll be you know, I won't be killed,
but you have to be expelled from the society. And
if you go that far, you're doing completely the wrong thing. Totally.
So it's possible to take important issues and to destroy them, okay,
by just not handling them like what I said before,
(01:02:56):
somebody came along and said, let's burn down Washington. That's
you know, maybe you can make an argument for it.
That's not the way to deal with the world, not
a sensible way.
Speaker 1 (01:03:08):
What are your thoughts about defunding the police depends?
Speaker 2 (01:03:11):
Well, that's an interesting case. If you just used the
slogan defund the police, you're giving an enormous gift to
the far right and pick it up and run with it.
They love it. Say, these guys want to take the
police out of your community so that black criminals can
come in and rob your house. I want that. Now.
(01:03:34):
I suppose you did it sanely, the way many of
the organizers did, the way Bernie Sanders did, the way
Alexandria Kassie protest did. She was asked, what do you
mean by defund the police? And her answer was, just
go into any white suburb. That's what we mean by
(01:03:56):
defund the police. The kids using drugs, you know, pick
them up, beat them up, take them to jail, and
incarcerat them. You deal with it sensibly through community services.
You have the police when you need them, but they're
not supposed to be involved in community service operations of
(01:04:19):
family disputes, overdoses, mental health issues, because they're not these issues.
That's community service. I think the police are in favor
of that kind of defunded. Bernie Sanders did the same.
He said, yeah, that's what we want. We want police
(01:04:39):
freed from obligations that are none of their business and
are just a burden. And in fact, they're probably ninety
percent of what they do. And let's fund let's have
better pay for police, so it's more desirable, profession people,
better trained, and have them focused on police work. But
(01:05:00):
the things that should be done like they're done in
a white suburb, they should be done everywhere. I lived
in a suburb of Boston. Just give you an example.
We were away for the summer and some neighbors called
us up and said, somebody broke windows in your house.
(01:05:22):
So we came back to see what happened. It turned
out somebody had broken in, so we called the Lexington
police and they came over and the first thing they
said is look in your medicine cabinet. We looked in
our medicine cabinet and yeah, somebody had gone through it
and taken some stuff in. And they said, is this
(01:05:44):
kids in the neighborhood. We know who they are. We're
not going to send them to jail. It's up to
their parents and the community to discipline them and put
them on the right path. That's the way to deal
with it. I didn't want them to go to jail.
I suppose it was a black community. You know what happened.
(01:06:06):
So when Kassio Cortez says defund the police means make
it look like a white server, that's a message that makes.
Speaker 1 (01:06:15):
Sense, Okay, yeah, and that goes that transcends the slogan.
You know, this is just a superficial you know, just
to defund the police, you know, without any nuance or yeah, yeah,
I agree. Well, thank you for giving your point on that.
You know, I am wondering, what's the biggest thing you
were wrong about and change your mind over in your career.
Speaker 2 (01:06:38):
A lot of things. I mean, in academy and professional work,
scientific work all the time. Yeah, right now I'm writing
in the midst of an article which gets it just
works on problems that I didn't notice in earlier, things
(01:06:58):
which are totally wrong enough to be fait. That happens
every day. So in scientific work, it's just that's what
work is. Fine, mistakes, you direct them move on. In
social political domains, not very much. I still believe pretty
much when I believed as a young teenager. I mean,
(01:07:20):
there are individual there are individual things that are wrong,
like text day of the Vietnam War, which I devoted
a lot of my life to. I started in the
early sixties when it was very unpopular, but that was
much too late. It started ten years earlier, but nobody
even heard of it. By the early sixties. That already
(01:07:43):
getting out of control. There are things like that.
Speaker 1 (01:07:47):
Well, I have one final question. I want to be
very respectful of your time. You have grandchildren, right, great
grand great grandchildren.
Speaker 2 (01:07:57):
Okay, I can't see one of them's in Japan. I
can't travel.
Speaker 1 (01:08:04):
Can you see them on Skype or on the screening
like that?
Speaker 2 (01:08:08):
I don't know. It's me.
Speaker 1 (01:08:12):
I was just wondering if you could give advice to
your great grandchildren, you know, for the life that they're
going to grow up to live in fifty years from now,
you know when you probably won't be here. Who knows
you may be here, but you know what sort of
advice for them? And then you know that that can
just apply to any young person listening to you right
(01:08:32):
now who really values and treasures your thoughts.
Speaker 2 (01:08:36):
Well, I never really gave any advice to my children.
They didn't ask for it, then I didn't give it.
I do get a lot of letters from young people
these days asking for advice, and what I usually say
is the only advice I know is if anybody tries
(01:08:56):
to give you advice, put it aside. Figure it out
for yourself, what kind of life you want, how to
lead it. There's no general answers to you should live,
no rules. There's cliches. You can give the cliches, but
it's really up to you. You have to create your
own life.
Speaker 1 (01:09:18):
But if you're an activist, if you're aspiring academic, you
want to make the world a better place, you know
surely you have some bit of advice you could give
to people hanging on your every word.
Speaker 2 (01:09:29):
Here I can repeat the cliches, they can figure them
out for themselves.
Speaker 1 (01:09:36):
Okay, fair enough. I just want to thank you so
much for this chat, but also just inspiring me in
my own career and being such a legend.
Speaker 2 (01:09:46):
Good very Please talk to you bye, have a good one.
Speaker 1 (01:09:58):
Thanks for listening to this episode of this ecology podcast.
If you'd like to react in some way to something
you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion
at thusycology podcast dot com or on our YouTube page
thus Ecology Podcast. We also put up some videos of
some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll
want to check that out. Thanks for being such a
great supporter of the show, and tune in next time
(01:10:20):
for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.
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