The End of Science by John Horgan
But isn’t mathematics a kind of universal language? I asked. Not really, Kuhn replied, since it has no meaning; it consists of syntactical rules without any semantic content. (p. 44)
Mathematics definitely has meaning and semantic content. Think about entropy function as information.
When Chomsky was in graduate school in the 1950s, linguistics --- and all the social sciences --- was dominated by behaviorism, which hewed to John Locke’s notion that the mind begins as a tabula rasa, a blank slate that is inscribed upon by experience. Chomsky challenged this approach. He contended that children could not possibly learn language solely through induction, or trial and error, as behaviorists believed. Some fundamental principles of language --- a kind of universal grammar --- must be embedded in our brains. Chomsky’s theories, which he first set forth in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures, helped to rout behaviorism once and for all and paved the way for a more Kantian, genetically oriented view of human language and cognition. (p. 151)
From the entropy law, systems, including language systems, have to have fixed asset to gain positive returns. Therefore, Chomsky’s theory is a natural extension from the entropy law.
Edward Wilson and other scientists who attempt to explain human nature in genetic terms are all, in as sense, indebted to Chomsky. But Chomsky has never been comfortable with Darwinian accounts of human behavior. He accepts that natural selection may have played some role in the evolution of language and other human attributes. But given the enormous gap between human language and the relatively simple communication systems of other animals, and given our fragmentary knowledge of the past, science can only tell us little about how language evolved. Just because language is adaptive now, Chomsky elaborates, does not mean that it arose in response to selective pressures. (p. 151)
While not every function of an animal arose in response to selective pressures, nature is highly competitive and would not allow many frills. Unless proven otherwise, the default assumption should always be that any function, including the language function, arose because of selective advantage. As for the claim that “the enormous gap between human language and the relatively simple communication systems of other animals”, there are many other examples, such as elephant’s trunk. Any advantageous feature often experience positive feedback, at least at its early stage, that amplifies the initial difference. Bickerton’s Language & Species gives a very good account for the problem.
Chomsky divides scientific questions into problems, which
are at least potentially answerable, and mysteries, which are not. Before the
seventeenth century, Chomsky explained to me, when science did not exist in the
modern sense, almost all questions appeared to be mysteries. The
This is an exaggeration. Even according to Chomsky’s own theory, most of our understanding of nature must be innate.
The success of science, Chomsky proposed to me, stems from “a kind of chance convergence of the truth about the world and the structure of our cognitive space. And it is a chance convergence because evolution didn’t design us to do this; there’s no pressure on differential reproduction that led to the capacity to solve problems in quantum theory. We had it. It’s just there for the same reason that most other things are there: for some reason that nobody understands.” (p. 153)
There might be “no pressure on differential reproduction that led to the capacity to solve problems in quantum theory”. But this is definitely pressure on differential reproduction that led to the capacity to solve problems in detecting natural resources, as measured by the level of entropy, as I argued in my book. The development of scientific theory is not “a kind of chance convergence of the truth about the world and the structure of our cognitive space.” It is not a chance convergence because there is an evolutionary advantage to do this.
Modern science has stretched the cognitive capacity of humans to the breaking point, according to Chomsky. In the nineteenth century, any well educated person could grasp contemporary physics, but in the twentieth century “you’ve got to be some kind of freak.” That was my opening. Does the increasing difficulty of science, I asked, imply that science might be approaching its limits? Might science, defined as the search for comprehensive regularities or patterns in nature, be ending? Abruptly, Chomsky took back everything he had just said. “Science is hard, I would agree with that. But when you talk to young children, they want to understand nature. It’s driven out of them. It’s driven out of them by boring teaching and by an educational system that tells them they’re too stupid to do it.” Suddenly it was the establishment, not our innate limitations, that had brought science to its current impasse. (p. 153)
Actually, few well educated people in nineteenth century or today could grasp the most profound physics of nineteenth century physics, such as Maxwell’s or Boltzmann’s. But I agree with Chomsky that “But when you talk to young children, they want to understand nature. It’s driven out of them. It’s driven out of them by boring teaching and by an educational system that tells them they’re too stupid to do it.” Science is innate in our mind, although some most profound parts are very deep in our mind and can’t be detected easily by the conscious part of our mind.
I once asked Chomsky which work he found more satisfying, his political activism or his linguistic research. He seemed surprised that I need to ask. Obviously, he replied, he spoke out against injustice merely out of a sense of duty; he took no intellectual pleasure from it. If the world’s problems were suddenly to disappear, he would happily, joyfully, devote himself to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. ( p. 154)
Chomsky repeated the same point when he discussed Platonic and Orwellian problems in Knowledge of language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use. Deep down, it is really the problem of resource discovery and resource distribution. Resource discovery is always happy and joyful. Resource distribution, however, is always brutal. This is the ultimate source of injustice and why human sense systems are often blocked from learning the truth.
Scientists like him are, of course, chasing after facts, but they can only capture facts, if at all, retrospectively; by the time they reach some understanding of what has taken place, the world has moved on, inscrutable as ever. (p. 158)
This is because they do not found the fundamental patterns in life. Kepler’s laws are still valid today.
Mind, not space, is science’s final frontier. (p. 159)
Edelman noted. “You read that section of my book where Max Planck says we’ll never get this mystery of the universe because we are the mystery? … (p. 166)
Get Edelman’s book and find what
Max Planck says exactly.
Edelman, …, noted that most artificial-intelligence designers tried to program knowledge in from the top down with explicit instructions for every situation, instead of having knowledge arise naturally from values. (p. 170)
In our theory, this value is determined.
If AI had not lived to its early promise, Minsky said, that was because modern researchers had succumbed to “physics envy” --- the desire to reduce the intricacies of the brain to simple formulas. (p. 185)
It is exactly the thinking from physics that we obtained a simple understanding of mind from the concept of entropy.
Minsky had no patience for those who claim that the mind is too subtle to understand. “Look, before Pasteur people said, ‘Life is different. You can’t explain it mechanically.’ It’s just the same thing.” (p. 186)
Prigogine exclaimed. “We are not the father of time. We are the children of time. We come from evolution. What we have to do is to include evolutionary pattern in our descriptions. What we need is a Darwinian view of physics, an evolutionary view of physics, a biological view of physics.” … The new physics might also heal the natural rift between science, which always depicted nature as the outcome of deterministic laws, and the humanities, which emphasized human freedom and responsibility. … Of course he emphasized, this unification was metaphorical rather than literal; it would not be by any means help science to solve all its problems. “One should not exaggerate and dream about a unified theory which will include politics and economics and the immune system and physics and chemistry,” … “One should not think that progress in chemical nonequilibrium reactions will give you the key for human politics. Of course not! Of course not! But still, it brings in a unified element of bifurcation, it brings in the idea of historical dimension, it brings in the idea of evolutionary patterns, which indeed you find on all levels. And in this sense it is a unifying element of our view of the universe.” (p. 219)
The above paragraph can be used at the beginning of the Chapter 3 of my book (end of p. 33 to beginning of p. 34) to illustrate the difference between his theory and mine.