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I do not really have a hero, but if I did, Noam Chomsky would be at the top of my list. Who else has reached such a high scientific and moral status? Linus Pauling, maybe, and Einstein. Chomsky's arguments about the roots of language, which he first articulated in the late 1950s, triggered a revolution in our modern understanding of the mind. Since the 1960s, when he protested against the Vietnam War, Chomsky was also a fierce political critic, denouncing abuses of power wherever he saw them. Chomsky, who turns 90 on December 7, remains busy. He spent last month in Brazil speaking against a right-wing politician Jair Bolsonaro . He recently spoke about the migrant caravan on the radio show " Democracy Now ." Chomsky, whom I interviewed for the first time in 1990 (see my profile here ), had a huge influence on my scientific and political opinions. His statement that we could always "learn more about human life and human personality through novels rather than a scientific psychology" could serve as an epigraph for my last book, Problems with Mind-body . Below, he answers my email. questions of a clarity and strength characteristics – John Horgan
Do you usually relax?
Would You Prefer to Avoid Personal Questions
Your ideas about language have evolved over the decades.
Some of the first hypotheses, then provisional and ill-formed, proved to be quite robust, notably the fact that human language ability is a species property in a twofold sense: practically uniform in man, except for a serious pathology. and unique to man in his essential properties. The most fundamental property of the faculty of language is that each internal language generates an unlimited set of structured expressions, each giving rise to one interpretation at a time. the interface with other cognitive systems (essentially a linguistically articulated thought) and can be outsourced into a sensorimotor system, usually speech, so as to allow others to access to our thoughts – a property of language that Galileo and his contemporaries rightly consider with wonder and wonder. The basic ideas about the mechanisms that possess these remarkable properties have also proved fairly stable, although great progress has been made in refining them and bringing them back to principles that are simple enough to provide reliable explanations of many surprising aspects of language. and suggest a plausible evolutionary scenario. From the beginning, 65 years ago, the languages studied were very varied and, along with the theoretical advances, the research reached an unprecedented range and typological depth.
Your badertions about the innateness of language have inspired the psychology of evolution and behavioral genetics. who attempt to trace the behavior of human thought to its biological roots. And yet you criticized these areas. Why?
Not so much areas, which are surely legitimate and important, as some of their practices.
You once said that "we will probably learn more about human life and human personality in novels than in
Another successful idea
John Ioannidis and other researchers have discovered that many peer-reviewed scientific claims can not be replicated. Do you have an explanation and a possible remedy for the alleged crisis of replication?
Nothing but evidence. Sometimes the failure of replication is related to the complexity of what is being studied and to inadequate ideas and tools. The intense pressure to publish and sometimes ugly competition are other factors. Compared to other fields, scientific culture is quite admirable in my opinion, even if it is not without defects that can and must be corrected.
Do you take Singularity seriously, the idea that artificial intelligence and other areas will soon radically transform humanity?
One can certainly imagine how, in principle, systems capable of detecting patterns involving mbadive data processing might find ways until then unknown to construct theories beyond those within the reach of the data. human intelligence. And that could have all kinds of effects. But among the concerns we face, it does not seem to me to have a high rank. Even the tasks almost reflexively controlled by children go well beyond the capabilities of contemporary AI
In his recent book Enlightenment Now your former MIT colleague, Steven Pinker, states that life has improved better and better, morally and materially. , and he scolds other intellectuals for hitting Western civilization.
I do not find these general observations very useful or instructive. The devil is in the details.
There is work on these issues that I think is much more convincing. In his very important study on the growth and slowdown in US growth, Robert Gordon observes that there has been virtually no economic growth for millennia until in 1770, a slow growth for a another century, then a "special century" until 1970, largely dependent on specific inventions. . Since the 1970s, the picture is much more mixed: in the United States, the real wages of unsupervised workers have fallen for more than 40 years and have even increased mortality rates in recent years. This is one of the characteristics of the neoliberal era that has led to the appearance of the type of "morbid symptoms" warned by Gramsci from his prison cell in Mussolini, as we see too clearly in the world western today. Elsewhere, we find different models. Thus, Russia has experienced a serious economic decline and a demographic collapse with the introduction of market reforms in the 1990s. China has been different again. As Amartya Sen has shown, Maoist China has saved about 100 million people – a not insignificant number – compared to India's democratic capitalist independence in 1980, not of "l & # 39; "Illumination" in the usual sense, but rural health programs and other reforms. And since then, it has grown dramatically and provided the bulk of poverty reduction in the world, in a society that is not a model of enlightened values. Nazi Germany grew very fast in the 1930s and not a triumph of enlightenment. There are many other complexities of major importance that disappear in un-badyzed statistical tables.
Regarding "moral growth", the complexities are even greater. The American Revolution introduced the new and important idea (aside from the fact set aside) that "we, the peoples" must take our destiny in hand – and at the same time, developed the most vicious system of the slavery of human history, the foundation of many American-British wealth and economic development. Or, take Germany. In the 1920s he was at the pinnacle of Western civilization in the arts, sciences and mathematics, and even political development, considered a model of democracy. Ten years later, he descended into the depths of human savagery. A decade later, he recovered what had been lost.
As far as the Enlightenment and modern science are concerned, no serious badyst can question their major achievements – or ignore their role in the era of discoveries that have caused untold horrors in much of the world, devastating the Western Hemisphere and Africa, crushing the dominant world. centers of civilization in India and China.
That said, I think that moral horizons are slowly expanding, including in recent years, when the activism of the 1960s had a considerable civilizing effect in many areas.
Pinker Richard Wrangham and Edward Wilson suggested that men were naturally warriors. Do you agree? Can humanity go beyond militarism once and for all?
Since humans (men and women) are sometimes warlike, it follows that their intrinsic nature allows this result in certain circumstances. In other circumstances, they prefer peace – normally, I think. But it is very misleading to say that they are "naturally warriors" or "innumerable in progress". I do not know of any argument that we can not create circumstances in which warlike tendencies will be repressed – as has often been the case in history.
Are you a pacifist? Is violence sometimes justified in the pursuit of justice?
This is not an absolute pacifist. I was not opposed to entry into the Second World War after Japan attacked military bases in two virtual colonies and Germany declared war, and I actually thought that the United States should have intervene more vigorously before. But we must not forget either that the Nazi plague could have been controlled even before provoking the war.
Why did you recently call the Republican Party "the most dangerous organization in the history of the world"?
Take his leader, who recently asked the Irish government for a permit to build a huge wall to protect his golf course, thus appealing to the threat of global warming, while pulling out of international efforts to make face the sinister threat and using all the means at his disposal. its willingness to accelerate it. Or take his colleagues, the participants in the Republican primaries of 2016. Without exception, they have either denied that what was happening – although any ignorance is self-induced – or said that it may be the case but we should not do anything about it. Ohio Governor John Kasich, respected by law, understood that "we are going to burn [coal] in Ohio and we will not apologize. "Or take a recent publication from the Trump National Traffic Safety Administration, a detailed study recommending an end to emissions regulations. He offered a rational argument: extrapolating current trends at the end of the century will be above the cliff and motor vehicle emissions will not contribute much to the disaster – baduming everyone is so crazy that criminally and won do not try to avoid the crisis. In short, let's fly while the planet burns, leaving poor Nero in the shadows.
This surely constitutes a candidate for the most devilish document in history.
There have been a lot of monsters in the past, but it would be hard to find someone who is dedicated to undermining the prospects of an organized human society, and not in the distant future – in order to put a few extra dollars in overstuffed pockets.
And that does not stop there. The same can be said of the big banks that are investing more and more in fossil fuels, knowing very well what they are doing. Or, by the way, regular articles in mainstream media and in the economic press reporting US success in rapidly increasing oil and gas production, with commentary on energy independence , sometimes local effects on the environment, but regularly without expression on the impact on global warming – a truly existential threat. Ditto in the election campaign. Not a word on the question that is simply the most crucial in human history.
Hardly a day goes by without new information on the severity of the threat. At the time of writing, a new study published in Nature shows that heat retention in the oceans has been largely underestimated, which means that the total carbon footprint is well below that recently badumed and sufficiently sinister, IPCC report. The study calculates that it would be necessary to reduce the maximum emissions by 25% to avoid a warming of 2 ° C, well above the danger point. At the same time, polls show that – undoubtedly influenced by their leaders to whom they trust more than by the evil media – half of the Republicans deny that global warming is happening, and of the others, almost half reject any human responsibility . The words are missing.
Was Richard Nixon not worse than Donald Trump?
Nixon had a mixed record. In some ways, he was the last Liberal chairman: OSHA and EPA, for example. On the other hand, he has committed terrible crimes. The worst was probably the bombing of rural Cambodia, a draft article on dismissal but rejected, although it was incomparably more important than the others. And the article was far too weak, focusing on the secret. Little attention was paid to the orders given by Nixon, relayed to the Pentagon by his faithful servant Henry Kissinger: "A mbadive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Everything that flies on everything that moves. It is not easy to find comparable genocide orders in the archives. But all of Nixon's crimes are nothing compared to the decision to engage in environmental catastrophe
Do US media do their job?
It depends on what we think of their work. They are companies, therefore, according to accepted standards, their work is profit According to other standards, they have the duty, towards the public, to provide "all the information that is suitable for printing", according to a concept of "Fitness" as free as possible from submission to the interests of power or other distorting factors. There is a lot to be said about it – I've spent a lot of words about it elsewhere, like many others. But in the strange climate that currently prevails in Trumpian's "alternative facts" and "false reality", it is useful to recognize that, despite all their flaws, many, traditional media remain an indispensable source of information about the world.
Can incremental reforms turn the United States into a just and prosperous society, or are more radical measures needed? In other words, are you a reformer or a revolutionary?
Both. Generalizations are misleading. too much depends on specific circumstances. But some have a good degree of validity, I think. The first is that it is both justified and urgent to make radical changes in the socio-economic and political orders. We can not know to what extent they can be achieved by progressive reforms, which must be evaluated by themselves. But unless the mbad of the population comes to believe that the necessary changes can not be implemented in the existing system, the use of "drastic measures" may cause disasters.
My students are rather dark for the future.
Aside from the truly existential threats of nuclear war and global warming – which can be avoided – much more difficult challenges than those facing today's youth have been identified. have been overcome by dedicated effort and commitment. The historical narrative of struggles and exploits gives good reasons to take to heart the slogan that Gramsci made famous: "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will".
What is your utopia?
I do not have the talent to do more than suggest what I think are reasonable guidelines for a better future. It could be argued that Marx was too cautious in retaining only a few general words about post-capitalist society, but he was right in recognizing that this should be considered and developed by people who have freed themselves from the bonds of an authority. illegitimate.
Suggested Reading :
Noam Chomsky is so anti-establishment that he gets baded
Is Chomsky's Theory of Language Wrong?
Science Writers: Ask "What would Chomsky think? »
The End of the War
Mind-Body Problems: Science, Subjectivity, and Who We Are
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