09.10.07
The First Word
Reading: The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (Hardcover)
by Christine Kenneally
I have only finished the first chapter, which has interesting background on Chomsky and Pinker.
I would certainly welcome the initiative to explore the evolution of language, after resistance to the idea, but what this seems to mean is that Darwinists are going to use bluster to claim the subject for Darwinian pseudo-explanation.
Whatever the case with Chomsky’s views on grammar, his skepticism about our ability to understand its evolution is hardly surprising, and an unusual perspective in our current Darwinized propaganda system.
In any case, it is still possible to claim that Darwinism has as yet been unable to explain the evolution of language. Let’s hoope the field doesn’t get rewritten according to dogma.
From Publishers Weekly
This book grows out of Kenneally’s conviction that investigating the evolution of language is a good and worthwhile pursuit—a stance that most in the field of linguistics disparaged until about 20 years ago. The result is a book that is as much about evolutionary biology as it is about linguistics. We read about work with chimpanzees, bonobos, parrots and even robots that are being programmed to develop language evolutionarily. Kenneally, who has written about language, science and culture for the New Yorker and Discover among others, has a breezily journalistic style that is occasionally witty but more often pragmatic, as she tries to distill academic and scientific discourses into terms the casual reader will understand. She introduces the major players in the field of linguistics and behavioral studies—Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Philip Lieberman—as well as countless other anthropologists, biologists and linguists. Kenneally’s insistence upon seeing human capacity for speech on an evolutionary continuum of communication that includes all other animal species provides a respite from ideological declamations about human supremacy, but the book will appeal mainly to those who are drawn to the nuts and bolts of scientific inquiry into language. (July 23)
Stephen P. Smith said,
September 10, 2007 at 6:04 pm
In my view, language has the same precondition as does evolution, which is what I have been saying now for months: Show me the computer that feels itself using words?
James said,
September 10, 2007 at 7:36 pm
Wow…I like the new banner. Nice touch with the monkey.
nemo said,
September 10, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Thanks for feedback. Time to zoup up the site a little.
Do me a favor, you and hucklebird: go to this link
http://history-and-evolution.com/eonix-papers/
and see what you think.
Here’s my idea, I can install this joomla software in as subdirectory on this site, and fix it up as a co-blog, where people can register and write their own essays, with links to the top blog here.
Disregard all the details of the menus and the rest, those can be changed.
Luke Rondinaro said,
September 10, 2007 at 10:28 pm
Stephen P. Smith Writes:
Also in reference to his “Three Comments” response … … …
… … …
Here’s the problem with that idea … For one, there’s (at least) one such unique ‘computer’; that is, the rational human psyche (and corresponding psychological-neurobiological system) that does both KNOWING/ RATIONALITY and FEELING/AFFECT. But we can’t so easily, in regard to ourselves, tease them out from each other’s grasp in terms of saying: ‘this is clearly INTELLECT’s domain and this is AFFECTs.’ Both are interactive with respect to us. And, yet our mechanical computers themselves can most definitely simulate the manifestation and appearance of INTELLECT, but can’t still really break into the actual dimensionality of FEELING. So-called “lower”, “animals” can do FEELING, in terms of sense operations and emotion … but only to certain degrees can achieve the dynamic outcomes of higher mental functioning. So, if FEELING were truly a component of the evolution/language/consciousness continuum, then we should be able to pinpoint clear higher CONSCIOUSNESS on all levels of the evolutionary scale, right down to the iterations and descending magnitudes of material-energetic reality. Why don’t we? And why do we rather find an ascending order of complexity of FORM instead, defined in the broader Thomian theoretical sense? …
The fact is, there aren’t really any clear physical-empirical demarcations between where “life” begins from “non-life” or where “animals” are clearly set apart from “plants”, protistans, et al. … Or even where one class of higher animals can be absolutely differentiated from lower. For at a rudimentary level, “life” is “life” is “life” and “matter” is “matter” is “matter” again. So, even as we might find in fundamental physical-natural forms and substances, ever complexifying levels of what’s being called (“information-of-state”), we only ACTUALLY come to “feeling” and “knowing” later in the big history/evolution game and higher up on the scales of ordered, functional complexity.
If “consciousness” and “affect” are such a big part of the total evolutionary-macrohistorical picture of things, then why do they only constitute a metaphorical “tick of the clock” in the overall scheme of events? … The point, I would say is, that the reason THEY ARE and that THEY DO, is because the name of the game isn’t “feeling”/ ”knowing”,, but is in fact the emergent complexity of this “information-of-state” principle. The only reason, we see (metaphysical) “consciousness” in the world is due to the way we anthropomorphize nature, the manner in which we project ourselves and our own rationalities onto the world, and the way we “self-reference” ourselves against the world to borrow Chris Lofting’s choice of words on this matter. And, beyond that, it makes no more sense to describe the world/nature/the universe as being “conscious” than it does to describe a tornado as being “living” and ‘intent’ on blowing things down whether they be houses or trees.
That’s my view on the situation.
Luke Rondinaro
The Consilience Projects
Stephen P. Smith said,
September 11, 2007 at 4:14 pm
The question of how-we-know-what-we-say-we-know? has been worked out by philosophers Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Peirce, Whitehead, Husserl, Wilber, and none of these folks are saying that knowledge is even possible without feelings entering somewhere. Emergent complexity does not explain sentience, rather complexity is found cultivating what is already there as a precondition. Moreover, sentience is discovered in the smallest physical law: first the law must be conceived, and then the law must be empirically verified. Do a web search on “panpsychism”. All laws are experiential, therefore, laws are not above the experiential from principles of reason; if laws are above the experiential there must be something auxillary. Moreover, Candice Pert in “Molecules of Emotion” goes so far to imply (even say) that peptides are pivotal connectors of emotion. Moreover, DNA is found communicating with proteins. What more do I need to point too? Bats! It must be like something to be a bat!
The burden remains with scientist that claims that sentience is only a reflection of necessary conditions that have complexified, and all of this without remainder. For a science of sentience to be called science a testable theory must present itself. Where is the evidence?? Where is the computer that feels itself playing chess??? Where is the toaster that feels itself baking bread? The burden remains very heavy, and the silence presented to these questions is very telling.
Feeling cannot be disconnected from information, otherwise informtion would never be felt! Information must be felt in a primative form - the proto-emotion!
James said,
September 11, 2007 at 4:44 pm
John,
It looks like a good idea.
Luke Rondinaro said,
September 11, 2007 at 9:53 pm
Of course “feeling” is of a “primitive” form that is archetypal to our condition as human beings and as biological creatures. It is after all — as first ‘sensation’ and then rudimentary ‘affect’ — one the fundamental bulwarks of biological entities, at the very least in the animalian order and in certain microorganisms. But to somehow assume that this is, then, THE basis of knowledge and information for humankind, all life, … and indeed all the world … is problematic at best. It metaphysicalizes nature leaving us stuck in a mysticized, magical reality that bears no actual resemblance to the picture of the cosmos that sound science and good philosophy (of the rationalist, analytic variety) have shown us.
The toaster doesn’t need to feel itself baking bread. Our computer technology doesn’t need to feel itself doing things. It JUST “does”; or to put it in Parmenidean terms, it just “IS” – just as IS “IS” (and not because it “knows” that it “feels”). Only a very small slice of the world of nature is “feeling”; the rest isn’t. Does that make the rest of less import or significance that it doesn’t? … That’s what I’d like to know.
So if we’re so taken by feeling, then, what for something like a virus that stands on the cusp between life and non-life or a slime mold that runs this gamut from behaving more like an animal versus being more ‘vegetative’? Do they “feel” this same way too? … And because of that, are they are any less suitable to the world than we?
The truth is: there’s nothing spiritual, mystical, supernatural or metaphysically universal about FEELING. “Feeling” precisely fulfills a function in certain classes of biological organism,, a function to move, to develop and grow, etc, and no more. It does and can do no more But to inflate that core concept in life science into meaning that “feeling” is universal, thereby making our world into an animist universe, from humanity outwards is a bit much, and fails to account for the fact that “affect” only accounts for a mote of a sliver of the cosmological picture in nature.
Yet, the informational nature of the cosmos abounds nonetheless. Should it not because feeling ought to be central to things (in a mode ‘I feel therefore I know therefore I am’? No, because the empiric complement to information (or FORM) is not ‘affect’, as if INFORMATION were to be synonymous with MIND, but dynamic FUNCTION or activity instead.
As I said before “feeling” is not a part of this issue. As soon is at it becomes so, so one might as well cede the discussion over to the angel-in-the-machine people. In the meantime we shouldn’t be confusing our own particular situation vis a vis emotions and rationality, with either the bulk of ‘affect’ in the non-human biological world, or the in-form-ational/in-formational structure of the cosmos. They are different things!
Luke Rondinaro
The Consilience Projects
Stephen P. Smith said,
September 12, 2007 at 3:26 pm
Luke Rodinaro said: “there’s nothing spiritual, mystical, supernatural or metaphysically universal about FEELING.”
I say: Prove it! Oh, and incidentally, you can define “supernatural” as this implies something other than “natural”, and because this carries with it more dualistic thinking. And to prove it you might as well design a toaster that feels itself baking bread, and a computer that feels itself playing chess. The silence remains very telling on the inability of science to bring these inventions forward, even for something very simple as emotions only at the level of the parimessium.
Information by itself says nothing about how information finds its reception. Laws of physics having to do with symmetry and action reduce to a duality and undeclared preconditions. Therefore, “Force” is left undefined as the source of force now relates to undeclared preconditions. And all information must find its attachment to matter (energy), otherwise Landauer’s principle would not be operative. Information is as undeclared as sentience. Yet doing a web search on “panpsychism” and there are discovered many reasons to believe that sentience is as fundamental as energy (e.g., see the work of de Quincey, Skrbina and Chalmers, Clarke).
Feeling is indeed part of the issue, as worked out by Kant, Fitche, Schelling, Peirce, Whitehead, and Husserl. And its time for the pseudo-scientists that have confused themselves by ignoring the precondition for evolution and knowledge to reacquaint themselves with the philosophy that they have been avoiding. Why did Dawkins and Dennett become experts in religion? Because they studied science? No! It is because they forgot to study philosophy.
nemo said,
September 12, 2007 at 8:46 pm
Hucklebird, get with the program a little bit. You have introduced this ‘feeling’ issue over and over into posts where it’s not relevant. I had hoped for a dicussion of language evolution, and the book in question.
The basic thrust of this blog is to avoid mystical, Hegelian, metaphysical, etc, approaches to evolution, staying in a Kant/science framework. If you disagree, fine, say so, but not a hundred times in post after post, with this constant deflection of threads, it is wrecking this blog, please.
Our basic objective here is to challenge Darwin’s theory of natural selection without substituting metaphysical, design, or theologies of the trinity.