Chomsky – The Machine, the Ghost and the Limits of Understanding (2012) [video]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

I've heard this about Chomsky before and I don't get it. It sounds like he's criticised for doing what any researcher would do- defend his work and criticise competing approaches. I know that's what I do and what everybody else I know does (and has done to me too). Of course any researcher worth her salt will defend her work and of course they will criticise competing approaches. Robustly so. That is how research works and that is how researchers work.

He "systematically worked to block any researchers in the U.S. working on ideas that ran counter to his own"? Yes, that's precisely what you do when you think the other approach is rubbish, you fight to put it out like a fire that threatens to burn down your beloved field. You only ever stop criticising others' work and promoting your own ideas when you are 100% convinced -no doubts at all- that it's your work that's flawed.

Otherwise, how does science advance? Nobody has the absolute truth in any scientific question. Our best chance to know the truth is to try to formulate an answer and then have everybody's answers duke it out, like pit fighters in Conan the Barbarian. The alternative is to let your ideas go without putting up a fight - but then you run the risk of letting ideas that are worse than yours prevail. And I'm probably getting all this from Schopenhauer on the art of dialectic, which I read a while ago, but this is how debates go. And science is a debate. And if you're having a debate, it means there is disagreement- that's the point of having a debate; and the point of having research: that we can't agree about what the truth is in the first place. Otherwise, we wouldn't need research.

So I think that those complaints are best explained as sour grapes by those who failed to convince of the merit of their ideas, and blame Chomsky for doing his job as a scientist better than them. Of course you're starting at a disadvantage if you're going up against an established authority in your field, no less one of the size of Chomsky, but that's exactly what everyone else spends all their time trying to become, an established authority in their field. And they want that so that they can defend their own ideas more easily. So that, too, is not such a great piece of criticism.

And yes, as you say, Chomsian followers are a highly guarded, closed camp. There is a strong tradition of giving maximal support to acolyte who wants to work in this area while casting out the "heretics".

I don’t agree with him on numerous topics, but that doesn’t mean that I have a credible critic of his work.

It's happened in health too, arguably it has in all subjects, whether due to regulatory capture of government policy and/or academic capture influencing what research gets done via funding - the system is broken, well - it works for industrial complexes who generally have ulterior motive than wanting the very best for society.

Edit to add: why the hell would anyone downvote this comment?

And model theory (or if you want, interpretation theory) is Mathematically well formalised and understood in so far as anyone can understand formal languages.

And formal language theory is precisely Chomsky's long-standing contribution.

Why would morality be predicated on the notion of free will? That sounds like nonsense. Bad things happening to people aren't going to be erased just because free will doesn't exist.

When thinking about it I determined that the question is premised on this idea that with any limitation whatsoever free will does not exist

Nobody had ever explained to me in any coherent form what free will is. We are always deterministic machines, making decisions according to the law of physics. It can't certainly be random, because it would just be random and we definitely observe people making non-random decisions.

Or in other words, free will is necessary for morality to exist. I beg to differ.

Morality can be evaluated at population level - do the actions of an agent hurt or help the others? Punishment can be seen as simply compensating for bad influences in society.

If you look at game theory you can see how behavior relates to cooperation or betrayal, how these are also related to the context, and how society needs to weed out those who betray it.

The book's called 'understanding power'. I got my copy from a used book store for a few bucks. Great stuff full of interesting historical bits I had no idea about. It also helped clarify his philosophical stance, which is simply that people need to organize in order to affect change. He's decided that his part is providing research and it is up to others to use it to do their part.

Chomsky to me, would've been a giant historical figure, if he had found a Steve Jobs to represent his work, the same way Steve Wozniak did. Instead, Chomsky went at it alone, making some of the most juicy and interesting material feel stale, simply because he has no ability to present it in a compelling manner.

I last saw him speak at an event in Cambridge back in 2009 when he was giving an interview on American foreign policy to a church of 500+ people. At one point he spoke a sentence to the effect of "...it was retarded by their efforts to disrupt..."

However, as a speaker, he doesn't fill his pauses with "ummm" or "uhhh". Rather, he stops cold in the middle of a sentence until he has the right word and then proceeds again.

So the sentence instead came out as "It was retarded ... (pause) ...by their efforts to disrupt the..."

I was already nodding off a bit, so imagine my surprise at someone of Noam's seriousness seemingly resorting to calling something "retarded" like an immature teen. The confusion of it blindsided me and had me dumbfounded for what felt like a small eternity before he completed the sentence and I figured out what had just happened. It was a weird feeling. Like the momentary falling sensation when you're expecting one last stair step that isn't there.

I'm confident that it was unintentional, but wittingly or not, it was probably the single funniest thing I ever heard come out of his mouth.

Chomsky's ideas about of innate linguistic systems in the mind seems to jibe well with Kant [1]. Chomsky has explicitly connected his work with the Cambridge Platonists/British Neo-platonists.

[1] https://askaphilosopher.org/2011/08/15/chomsky-and-plato-com...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pndR7wrF-bo

Be sure to check out Manufacturing Consent (90s) and his criticism of the raise of (Maoist) Posmodernism in academia (interviews and lectures from the 80s). Do it before it gets removed.

You also get to understand that all there is is always action at a distance. The mechanical philosophy as based on an error: that direct action (a physical object pushing another for example) exists. In reality, again as Feynman brilliantly explains, it just electromagnetism between atoms, so action at a distance.

I'm not even going to go into what "intelligible" theories is even supposed to mean. Again, it's either intellectual fappery or infinite philosophical regression. The notion that someone could know something as an absolute truth as never existed. Every explanation at every epoch was based on assumptions, It's just that at times, people were not aware of their own limits.

Also, who pretends that nature is reducible to physics? We can't even calculate precisely the interaction of three atomic particles. These kind of claim are always an annoying strawman.

[1] https://vimeo.com/340695809

Some people say the universe is physical. Other people say the universe is material. Other people yet say it's neither of those two.

Nobody can explain what the observable difference would between a physical and a material universe.

This project seemed largely promising and successful, especially once Descartes came up with the idea of separating the mind, which didn't seem mechanical, from the physical world. So, after Descartes, the world looked pretty simple: there is a physical world that all works like a bunch of gears, and a mental/spiritual world where the mind exists, and these two together explain the universe.

However, Newton came along and discovered the law of universal attraction (gravity), which meant that the "physical world" does not in fact work like a machine, that there is no kind of physical contact that can explain the motion of the heavens. Of course, that also opened the way to the possibility that many other interactions are similarly immaterial, so the whole project falls apart. We do not in fact have a theory of the "physical world" and what it is.

I would note that Quantum Mechanics, even though it is highly unsatisfactory to our intuition, does get us back to a conception of a purely mechanical physical world (though with wave-like mechanics instead of gears). Unfortunately, for now, it STILL, 400 years later, hasn't solved the problem that Newton discovered. Gravity is still not accountable for in a mechanical, contact based way like the other forces are, even though GR has given a much more detailed model of how it works, and we have discovered gravity waves that prove it is not instantaneous action at a distance.

Of course, the main interpretations of QM have also given up realism , so while we do have an account of a physical world, it is unreal in a sense (that is, the world does not have any definite properties until you measure something; in QM a tree falling a in a forest really doesn't make any sound unless someone/something hears it). We also don't yet have any idea of how to define measurement, even though it is a kind of physical process.