Interesting, because I was reading this paper yesterday, where they argue that recursivity is the key to generalization power.
"Making Neural Programming Architectures Generalize via Recursion" - https://openreview.net/forum?id=BkbY4psgg¬eId=BkbY4psgg
Humans can also make mistakes when processing language. We're still better than LSTM's, but I'm not sure we can claim a qualitative difference.
Furthermore, even though we can process sentences with very deep embedding like "The rat the cat the dog bit chased escaped", my intuition is that we are not using our normal language processing systems for that. When I read that sentence, I just fail to process it and then I invoke my logic systems to try to determine the structure and decode it, in a way that feels totally different from processing a normal sentence (I'm not understanding it in real time, in a natural way, but rather solving a small puzzle). So I personally don't find the Chomskyan arguments based on that kind of corner cases very convincing.
That is indeed a contrived example of recursion, but recursion (in the sense of embedding) can be much simpler and easier to parse. For example:
"John, my friend from high school, who married your cousin, Mary, is coming over for dinner".
This sort of embedding is what makes human language infinite in scope- you can keep embedding sub-sentences for ever, and so you can produce new utterances forever.
This ability to infinitely extend and recombine the meaning of utterances is what gives human language its expressive power, and what is absent from animal languages, so far as we know.
The middle part is basically equivalent to saying "Mary had an affair with the bartender, Jack. Jack hated his sister, Lisa. Lisa was a fan of Lady Gaga". My intuition is that it's parsed basically as separate sentences. Once you finish one of them you can just forget it, you only need to remember John (as there is more information about him in the end). Sentences where you need to remember more elements (i.e., you actually need unbounded recursion) become unparsable in real time as my previous example.
Of course, I don't have scientific evidence to back the things I'm saying, it's just intuition, but the same can be said of the Chomskyan theories.
> non-material souls
I think this notion of "materiality" is an ancient chain letter that we can discard, or at least leave aside as we consider alternatives that can still support the notional 'self' & individual 'soul' without requiring a dualistic reality.
What the ancients understood as "matter" we can consider as 'localized coherence' (membranes, knots, vortices, etc.), and the "spirit" as fields, in a non-dualistic universe.
So speaking of Western religions, reconsider the meaning of the thought that "the kingdom is in you", and in the spirit of a holistic human metaphysics, note that whether in the "East" or in the "West", the key to transcendence appears to be shedding the illusion of the centrality of the localized "body" as the totality of the self.
Furthermore, all known human languages allow you to attribute utterances to another, earlier speaker, what is known as reported speech (often, though not always as Pirahâ demonstrate, through an embedded clause "He said that X").
Human non-verbal communication (which is EMPHATICALLY NOT to be confused with sign languages), on the other hand, is typically not very expressive. Apart from the admittedly very important, but nevertheless quite specialized domain of human emotion (conveyed by facial expression for instance), it is more or less inadequate for much of what we want to communicate.
I really agree about the abstract possibilities of speech, but I a bit annoyed at the fact in one's existence, the non verbal cues are so important, yet so often boldly ignored, and almost never taught.
It makes me kind of sad when people assume that "Chomsky's work = the whole of linguistics".