The relationship of ideas to language
I'd propose two language types (actually some folks in the science of human origin proposed it.. I'm stealing it)
Basic Language: has nothing but present tense, and can't be used to express abstractions or universals. It can't be used pass on old sayings like "Never eat the yellow snow", because it doesn't contain the word "never."
Advanced Language: is pretty much how we speak today. It includes both basic language and the mechanics of expressing hypotheticals, fiction, history, etc. It offers the ability to distinguish between necessary and contingent truths. It features the word "truth".... basic language doesn't.
Maybe one could argue that basic language is in a straight-forward relationship with ideas (with one possibly being primary depending on one's metaphysics.)
But with advanced language, the relationship is far from straight-forward because there's something circular going on in the background. Though some might want to say that the idea of "never" is language dependent and therefore the flesh and bones of the idea are linguistic.. how would we have developed advanced language if not for the impetus to express the idea "never"?
So what is the relationship between ideas and language?
Basic Language: has nothing but present tense, and can't be used to express abstractions or universals. It can't be used pass on old sayings like "Never eat the yellow snow", because it doesn't contain the word "never."
Advanced Language: is pretty much how we speak today. It includes both basic language and the mechanics of expressing hypotheticals, fiction, history, etc. It offers the ability to distinguish between necessary and contingent truths. It features the word "truth".... basic language doesn't.
Maybe one could argue that basic language is in a straight-forward relationship with ideas (with one possibly being primary depending on one's metaphysics.)
But with advanced language, the relationship is far from straight-forward because there's something circular going on in the background. Though some might want to say that the idea of "never" is language dependent and therefore the flesh and bones of the idea are linguistic.. how would we have developed advanced language if not for the impetus to express the idea "never"?
So what is the relationship between ideas and language?
Comments (47)
The very first human "language" (if you accept language developed gradually, and not everyone, notably Chomsky, does) probably had no tense at all (tense is one of those things that doesn't really make sense unless you have more than one anyway). Utterances (apart from their necessarily vocal nature) would then essentially be coterminous with what we would call ideas - but these ideas constrained in scope by the bounds of a rudimentary language may be as unrecognizable as ideas as any "basic language" would be as a language - I mean the more basic you make a language, the less it is a language, and if ideas are inextricably linked with language, they may, the further you trace them back, lack the qualification of being ideas and end up as just emotions or motivations or drives.
Arguments for innate ideas sometimes feature aspects of abstraction (particularly necessity). Could an opponent attack these arguments with a materialistic view of ideas (which reduces them to features of language) while actually talking about the above mentioned "basic" language? If so.. that wouldn't be fair. Or maybe it doesn't matter.. if so, why not?
You know, honestly, I've long pictured thought as a section of a piano. Emotions and basic drives are the base notes. The intellect is the high notes. I could reference songs that I experience as blending a lot of different aspects of the psyche....
But anyway, you're reminding me that we may be analyzing the psyche... laying the pieces out on the table and then forgetting that a functioning psyche isn't nicely sorted in piles like that.
I like the metaphor; I think too that drives blend into emotions, which blend into nascent ideas, which blend into linguistically clear concepts of various levels of complexity and layering, and the process doesn't always happen in an ordered way. Where an "idea" actually begins and ends is hard to pin down.
Which makes the idea of an innate idea particularly hard to define and the argument hard to set in place. I mean you could define it as some kind of potentiality, like a physical grammar module in the brain which programs recursion and other universal aspects of language into us, or you could define it as something necessarily linguistic or at least proto-linguistic (in which case the concept becomes somewhat incoherent)..
EDIT: (I haven't read your other thread on innate ideas btw. Just noticed it now. I'll take a look before I go any further).
Like it or not, it means life is about to get much more interesting and the entire planet is about to hear the loud hissing of eons of accumulated hot air finally being ventilated from academia to loud protests over who is stinking up the room more.
What it means is language is first acquired contextually and then we fill in the details with what we consider meaningful content.
For Leibniz and Locke, it had implications that reached as far as how we deal with religious intolerance. If there are innate ideas, then we could sit all the religious leaders of the world down and let them commune with their innate ideas to realize a Grand Reconciliation. That was something near to Leibniz's heart. Locke said screw that. Life has painted a different picture on each of the tabulas that make up a room full of clergymen. Stop dividing people up by religion and divide them up by who will embrace Separation of Church and State and who won't. Kill the ones who won't (or lock them up... whichever.)
So what does it mean in our times if someone accepts innateness of ideas or doesn't? I guess this thread is about whether the question can shown to be in need of reformulation. Is it really a question about language?
Negation (and with it recursion), in turn allows language to separate into 'levels': 'object-language' and 'meta-language', where the 'meta-level' talks about things in the 'object level' (via a 'not': "I am not talking about that"). And once this starts, you can stratify 'levels' pretty much infinitely, so you get meta-meta levels of language and so on - in a word, abstraction (although we can generally handle only so many layers of abstraction, cognitively speaking). In the study of semiotics, negation basically marks the distinction between what is called either the 'icon' or the 'index' on the one hand, and the 'symbol' on the other (where only symbols employ negation, strictly speaking).
As far as ideas go, the more one can take advantage of this ability to abstract (to build level upon level, along complex with 'rules' about how 'higher levels' apply to the 'lower levels'), the more abstract, complex, and generally powerful one's ideas can become. The question then turns upon exactly how 'exclusive' the function of negation is to language. That is, is language powerful because it has 'exclusive rights' to negation, or can and does negation find expression outside of language?
Given that organic systems are known employ 'negation' in their function (nerve axons, DNA helixes), it's probably fair to say that negation is not exclusive to language, and that it just so happens that language (due to the minimal energy expenditures needed to employ it) is very well suited to take advantage of negation. So while ideas cannot be said to be wholly linguistic in nature, language does allow a kind of fantastic acceleration of idea formation - especially complex, multiply recursive ideas.
I follow your point and not to be pedantic, but let's not forget the standard use of the word "recursion" in linguistics. This sense of recursion isn't automatically introduced into language with negation allowing the latter without the former (Pirahã (arguably) lacks recursion but retains negation). And you can apply recursion to negation just as you can to other modifications. Also, you can stratify levels without recursion simply by starting new sentences that add layers of qualification to the previous ones (as Pirahã (allegedly) does).
It means that ideas are an emergent phenomenon. According to the latest study, infants only acquire the ability to imitate people after several weeks and only acquire a sense of humor at about four months. Its the brute force approach to pulling yourself up by your bootstraps when you are individually as dumb as a neuron. They are acquiring a data base of extremely complex patterns our neurons crunch and then compare against each other. Humor revolves around bullshit, what's missing from this picture, or anything low in entropy and, obviously, there is a progression of ideas that "leap out at them" from the data like assembling a tabletop puzzle.
That is what is widely known as pattern matching and its existence suggests there is an underlying systems logic that is applicable to everything. Notably, bacteria have been discovered to use quorum sensing where the sheer number of bacteria determines their behavior and how they can communicate and even use translators to pass information on to sometimes the most remotely related species giving them immunity faster than can be accounted for by how bacteria multiply and spread.
Its a numbers game, but more fundamentally it is pattern matching revolving around the most efficient way for them to organize as both individuals and collectively and it means all of nature and even the laws of physics themselves may speak a single language. Supporting both using a scalar analog logic means the same simple, but subtle, pattern matching can be applied to how they organize in every way imaginable. Its systems logic and means it should be possible for computers in the near future to instantly make themselves as amenable to conversing with anyone as its humanly possible to be. Soon enough, the entire human race will be discovering artificial intelligence can seriously lift them off the ground both individually and collectively using something as simple as a cell phone.
That may sound outrageous, but a lot of computer programmers know exactly what I'm talking about.
Using archaeological studies to guess what early hominid language would have been like semantically seems particularly ridiculous to me.
But what is basic language for? For the hominims? I'd suggest - imperatives. Then the negative must be ready to hand: to be able to refuse.
According to Quantum Cognition theory our minds obey fuzzy logic and quantum mechanics and that is rapidly becoming the consensus today. Sociologists were puzzled by some of their research which came back with nonsensical results and, while they didn't know anything about physics, they knew their statistics and applied a simplified version of quantum mechanics to the results and found answers. For example, "The Sure Thing" is an experiment where they offer people a 50-50 chance to either win $200.oo or lose $100.oo. Its a sure thing and everybody can easily see the odds are heavily stacked in their favor. Nonetheless, they discovered that although people would keep playing if they lost a few rounds, the minute they stopped telling them whether they had won or lost a particular round they would stop playing.
According to quantum mechanics, its because without that information you cannot predict what will happen next. While we might ordinarily do better in such a situation using classical logic, it implies along with a lot of other evidence that the brain itself is fundamentally quantum mechanical and analog and does these kinds of calculations first simply because they are faster and more efficient to process. You can think of a sea slug which is basically a walking tongue that can either choose to run, ignore, eat, or mate with what few sizable things it comes across on the largely barren mid-ocean floor. The ability make such decisions as quickly and efficiently as possible is critical because it only has a token of about 18,000 neurons to play with to begin with. Its a scalar or recursive architecture that also allows every cell in the animal's body to look after its own interests in times of emergency and focus on memory rather than actually trying to think.
Language appears to obey similar rules with a recent study indicating the error rates are very high, but nature is forgiving.
I agree in general, but I think it is more technically precise to talk of dichotomies or symmetry breaking rather than negation alone, and of hierarchies rather than simply recursion.
The point is that a logically crisp idea like "never" has to arise not just as a negation, but as a dichotomous division. It's logical counterpart - always - has to arise in mutually grounding fashion.
So we can imagine a basic distinction in language - frequently~rarely. And then through inductive generalisation or abstraction, this becomes the absolute distinction of always~never.
Now this shift to proper abstraction is hierarchical rather than simply recursive as recursion is already happening at the level of the dichotomy. Even the notions of frequently and rarely are negating each other in self-referential fashion. And always and never are a stronger version of this self-referential act of mutual definition.
But the strong version of the dichotomy brings in the further thing of the concrete representation of the global symmetry they break. Always and never appeal now to the backdrop notion that is eternal time.
Frequently and rarely speak about the occurrence of events - the foreground action. Always and never make it clear that they are the absolute poles marking the extremes of some idea still larger than themselves. They point hierarchically to the third thing which is "time", the global symmetry from which they could spring as a dichotomy.
So a hierarchy is about the memory, the backdrop higher level idea, that can fix a local distinction in a definite fashion. It stabilises a negation.
No doubt this might seem a pedantic analysis, but it makes an important shift from a dyadic to a triadic logic of sign relations. Negation and recursion frame matters in terms of this against that - A vs not-A, and the repetition of a distinction. Complex reference might emerge as a result, but it is essentially unaccounted for. It simply is treated as emergent in an open-ended fashion.
But a triadic sign relation closes the story. Unlike negation, the dichotomy has recursion built in as each half of the dichotomy refers to its "other". And unlike recursion, the hierarchy explains how dynamical uncertainty (where is recursion going to lead?) gains generalised stability. The third player in the triad - the global symmetry that the local symmetry-breaking claims to break - is itself now named. Always and never get their meanings fixed in terms of the further notion of time, a temporal dimension.
Triadic sign relations also introduce vagueness and asymmetry in natural fashion.
Dyadic logic always demands counterfactual crispness. The middle gets excluded. It only wants to speak of either/or. But triadic logic creates room for middles, both as points of departure and places of arrival. Middles are what get developed by dichotomisation or symmetry breakings. You start off with a vague potential and break it into a definite spectrum of states bounded by two complementary poles of being.
So frequently~rarely is a little vague as a dichotomy as it simply states that some thing is either more or less. And then always~never takes that nascent relation to its crisp or absolute limit - a polar pairing that then admits of every intervening shade of "occasionally".
Likewise, triadic logic is large enough - it has enough dimensionality - to speak directly about asymmetry.
Symmetry breaking comes in degrees of hierarchically-fixed definiteness. The simplest and most unstable symmetry breaking - because it is single-scale and easily reversible - is a negation. It is like positive and negative charge. You can produce both for free from the splitting of "nothing", but then they are so weakly separated (so eager to get back together) that they annihilate back to nothing in the next blink of an eye.
So to fix symmetry-breakings, a separation must be achieved across hierarchical scale - an asymmetry must be formed. And this is what a hierarchy does. It disconnects the global from the local, the global becoming a state of "memory" for the system, its long-term prevailing constraints, while the local becomes its individual degrees of freedom.
In the example of always~never, time is the general idea that stands orthogonally to the notion of "the event". The event itself can freely either be or not be on the local view. It seems a perfectly reversible state of affairs - a fluctuation - at that level. But step back into the background notion of time and now the event can be seen as either always or never (or occasional, periodic, intermittent, unpredictable, etc).
When it comes to language evolution, the triadic point of view allows for negation and recursion always to exist vaguely in any language use. It is there in weak form even indexically. I could shake my head to signal negation, in the way any infant would twist away from food it didn't like. As a metaphoric sign, it could gain meaning quite naturally, building on already dichotomised and hierarchically integrated reactions of approach and avoidance that we all share as part of the same biological inheritance.
But language proper is a machinery for a social memory. Habits of abstraction can become fixed in a way disconnected from the individual and held collectively as named ideas. So as you say, that makes all the difference in the world. There is the open-ended meta-possibility of infinite levels of recursion or self-reference.
So the idea that basic language - some kind of proto-speech - must have preceded more advanced language is problematic. The essential trick - the division of communicative intent into words and rules - must have been there from the start.
Again, the standard approach to language evolution relies on dyadic logic. So either the habit of naming, or the habit of grammatical organisation, must have come first, in this view. There is the classic chicken and egg dilemma that dogs anthropological speculation.
But a triadic logic has the advantage that if words and rules are the dichotomous elements of speech acts, then they must co-arise, being each other's context. The habit of abstraction is already built in from the get-go, even if its first expression is a vague as hell.
According to Hegel, Spinoza thought that all determinations are negations. “Omnis determinatio est negatio”
[i]"Determinateness is negation posited as affirmative - this is the proposition of
Spinoza: omnis determinatio est negatio. This proposition is infinitely
important. "[/i]
Science of Logic
[i]"We certainly also represent being as absolute riches, and nothing, on the
contrary, as absolute poverty. But when we consider the entire world, and say
simply that everything is, and nothing further, we leave out everything
determinate, and, in consequence, have only absolute emptiness instead of
absolute fullness
.... The basis of all determinacy is negation (omnis determinatio est negatio, as Spinoza says).[/i]
Encyclopedia of Logic
Quoted from
‘Detremination Is Negation’: The Adventures of a Doctrine: From Spinoza to Hegel to the British Idealists by Robert Stern
" The process of abstraction" seems to begin with determination, and when we determine something we determine it as being of some kind, which is to say we implicitly determine it as 'not being of any other (exclusive) kind'. To determine anything as something seems to be to identify it as a member of a category; isn't this the beginning of the process of abstraction?
Socialization is a two way street; the rock might mean a lot to me; but I can't make any sense of the idea that I might mean a lot to the rock.
You gotta love speculative pseudo science, aintcha?! Here's a thought. Just throw it out there. What if the reason for the development of language is precisely the need to express abstract thought? We know that the basics of survival, finding food sources or hunting, parenting, even tool use etc. can all be achieved easily without any form of language because every creature on the planet does just that.
I've honestly given up trying to make sense of anything wuliheron says. He seems to be post-linguistic!
According to quantum mechanics it just depends upon the context. If nothing else, the two of you will feel a mutual gravitational attraction and could be a marriage made in heaven. Gravity can be viewed as social and inertia as anti-social with the two always coming together.
Or it could be the step that allowed human culture to think. The necessity could lie in sociality achieving a concrete memetic presence in the evolutionary game itself.
Again, a dyadic way of thinking about origins always has to decide which is chicken, which is egg. Humans obviously evolved to get where they are. So either the power of abstract thought came first, and speech became the way to express those ideas to others, or the communal habit of language came first, and abstraction became possible through the use of this new tool.
You can argue either as the necessary first step forever and a day because - dichotomously - each is the perfect "other" of the other.
A triadic view recognises that both sides of the equation do in fact emerge together. And then can be "caused" - in finalistic fashion - by their future outcome.
So cultural evolution was already a (vague) fact even before articulate speech came along. It can be seen in the tool use and other survival practices of chimp troops and other primates even.
But then this nascent level of memetics - that we can say encodes a preformative desire in "wanting to join the evolutionary game as fully as possible" - got properly expressed once human language finally started to take shape.
A lot of tool use didn't really change the game for culture. But the tiniest inkling of speech suddenly broke things wide open. Culture could express its latent desire to exist in fully autonomous fashion. A play of abstraction, a play of symbols, could become part of the wider evolutionary game.
So in a sense, language could be the product of the needs of abstract thought. But now this doesn't mean that Homo sapiens had evolved an individual biological capacity of abstract thought that needs its expression. We are now talking rather more Platonically of the Cosmos as a realm of ideas that had to have a speaking animal to use as the vehicle of its expression.
One minute, we were hunter-gatherers slathering our faces in red ochre and painting magical eidetic images of our prey, the next we found ourselves spouting the eternal truths of maths and philosophy, eventually even science. The Universe had discovered us as its suitable mouthpiece. :)
Of course I am exaggerating the cosmic-ness of it all. But the point is to illustrate that we habitually think about issues of origination as a problem of bottom-up construction. For humans to start speaking, they must have already had a definite reason. And a frustration at not being to articulate the big ideas buzzing around their brains seems the kind of definite reason - the crisp first cause - that has persuaded many in the traditional "thought first vs language first" philosophical debate.
But a triadic logic allows for finality to be a true cause of origination. Abstract thought - of the definite kind we are now familiar with - could have acted to favour the evolution of articulate speech right from the beginning. Even the tiniest first steps towards organised symbolism - words and rules - was an opening that was going to grow itself every wider.
It established a disconnect between individual psychology and social mental habits that was hierarchically-enduring, and so also the most powerful form of connection. The constraints organising individual minds no longer depended on those minds but became cultural-level systems themselves in inter-tribal and inter-generational competition.
(Y) Now you're speaking my language....
Everything I say obeys the simple rule that words only have demonstrable meaning according to their function in specific contexts. That's a Functionalist or Contextualist approach that I use to express Asian ideas. Philosophical Taoism has proven particularly difficult to reconcile with western philosophy because the law of identity can go completely down the rabbit hole or toilet of your personal preference, while I'm attempting to do so using a more Pragmatic Taoist approach that meets the standards of academia for being self-consistent and nontrivial because it eschews both metaphysics and mysticism.
But, that's like saying that if the woolly heron flies too close to the Sun before she reaches the gates of Paradise the result will be either an excluded middle or an extruded muddle, or perhaps even a great stinking colonic mud pie, that disappears without further ado down a badly encrusted cosmic s-bend.
(Y) I was gonna go with 'a load of dingo's kidneys' but it looks a bit inadequate now! X-)
It implies synergy comes at the price of normalizing the impact of its own individual parts. Like the Hindu Goddess Kali synergy becomes synonymous with destruction and logic itself becomes context dependent. What we call living can also depend upon the context and, for example, IBM's computer "Watson" surprised everyone when it acquired an unsolicited case of potty mouth. Humor itself can be said to be an intrinsic expression of nature rather than exclusive to humanity with humor and beauty becoming complimentary-opposites. In fact, Watson was deliberately designed not to resemble a human mind and brain to avoid just such incidents.
There are two distinct types of Merge, external which involves the merging of two separate items, and internat which involves merging of two related items, one item within the other.
Interesting theory here is lecture he gave at the end of last year about the Merge Theory
Whether of not language was formed over a long period of gradual changes vs formed quickly, abruptly in evolutionary terms has been a topic of debate for a long time. Chomsky thinks that humans language ability arose from a single mutation about 100,000 years ago and it quickly spread.
That's an example of where you can go off the rails if you can only think about recursion/negation in crisp computational terms.
To Chomsky, it seems like the basic trick of articulate speech is an all or nothing affair. And therefore, if the ability for language is biologically based, it had to emerge abruptly as a "hopeful monster" mutant.
But neuroscience should tell you that recursion and negation are a generalised feature of brain architecture - brains being organised by dichotomies and hierarchies. So the kind of nested hierarchical organisation that characterises syntactical speech acts is simply the general rule for all motor planning. Even opening a door or chipping away a flint axe is a hierarchically developed plan with general intents and a sequence of sub-acts.
So what Chomsky sees as the hard part - the evolution of recursion - is already a general fact of brains. It is just that other kinds of motor act are less socially programmatic, more fluid and dynamic, than grammatical speech. The rules for opening doors and chipping flints exist, but only in a much vaguer or more localised sense. They are task specific assemblages, not universalised and abstracted.
The far more plausible evolutionary hypothesis is the "singing ape".
Hominids are social species and making emotional or expressive noises communicates a lot of useful information. Chimps screech and howl and chatter. So there would have been selective pressure that would have led to an articulate vocal tract in early humans. A greater complexity of noise-making would have justified changes to the mouth and throat so that air could be vibrated and bitten into phonemic chunks, and chained together with syntactic variety.
It is in fact quite a neural feat to be able to control the vocal cords so that distinctive trains of noise can be produced at the rate of five or more contrasting sounds a second. The underlying morphological changes would have taken at least a few hundred thousand years to evolve, and so must have had a good justification just in terms of the advantages in social co-ordination they allowed.
So we start with apes making analog expressive noises - the screeches and mutters that communicate indexically by how loud or soft they are, how angry or reassuring they sound. There is modulation and pattern, but it varies in continuous fashion and so any communicative distinctions are vague. It is noise making of a kind that couldn't represent the sharp binary distinctions of symbolic logic, for example. Well a chimp could hoot a morse code perhaps, but that level of binariness is unnatural even for us.
Then as an extension of this, hominids developed the trick of vocal digitisation. The voice box, throat, tongue and lips all changed so that rapid and distinctively varied patterns of noise could be produced.
Exactly when this happened is controversial. There used to be good arguments that Neanderthals lacked the vocal equipment of Homo sap - no fat tongue in an arched palate, no dropped larynx and altered hyoid bone. But now the evidence seems to be swinging towards Neanderthals being more human-like both in vocalisation ability and symbolic capacity.
But whatever, the morphological changes involved are all standard gradual genetic adjustments. Nothing new needed to evolve. It was just the shape of existing structures being tweaked. So that argues for a steady reason for a direction of change that pre-existed the cultural development of actual grammatical habits of reference. But once the vocal machinery had been refined, then it would have been only a matter of time before the habit of rules and words got invented.
So in paleolinguistic circles, Chomsky's hopeful monster story seems puzzlingly naive.
However Chomsky is an arch-rationalist/semi-Platonist and he sort of argues what I argued partly in jest - that the Cosmos has ideas it wants to express, and we are its evolutionary vehicle. So the habit of universal grammar is like Turing computation or Boolean logic - something so damn mathematically true that it was just lying there in wait to pounce as final cause. As soon as some creature evolved vocal equipment (or in Chomsky's view, neural circuitry) that contained the basic digital elements of computation, such as the power of recursion and negation, then the whole weight of abstract symbol processing machinery was going to come tumbling out of the closet.
As I say, I agree on this. It is what has happened. Humans lucked into a semiotic regime where suddenly there was all this sequentially ordered, computationally rational,stuff just waiting to exert its machine like grip over the world. The evolutionary leap was not about us humans as thinking individuals. It was about the eruption of a mechanistic social order that could interact with the entropic world in its own new way - a way that expresses universalised abstraction.
But Chomsky is wrong in thinking the genetic advance was about some computational novelty arising in individual brain structure - and that in itself immediately unlocking computational or rational thought capacities.
As I argue, the computational novelty was far more prosaic - the rise of a digital noise-making ability which, with its sequencing demands, put a new kind of constraint on the already hierarchically organised brain. From there, it was a short step at the cultural level to stumble into the vast possibilities opened up by a collection of minds all getting organised to think and speak in a language-structured fashion.
Give or take the interruption of a few ice ages, the exponential development of Homo sapiens in terms of symbolic culture and collective rational control over the environment is then clear in the historical record. A door had been opened and we walked right on through.
As did, at the same time, the massively-enlarged forebrain that enabled abstract thought and conceptual representation.
And speaking of 'walking through the door', the transformation to the two-legged gait, when combined with the enormous enlargement of the fore-brain, required the development of infants with soft skulls, due to the narrowing of the birth canal (which also lead to large increases in infant and maternal mortality compared to earlier primates) and also the requirement for very long periods of extrasomatic adaption, again very unlike that of the preceding species.
So all in all, I would think the appearance of h. sapiens seems a lot more like an illustration of Gouldian 'punctuated equilibrium' rather than Darwinian evolutionary gradualism.
Does the "massively enlarged fore-brain" enable abstract thought and symbolic representation, or does conceptual thought enable the massively enlarged forebrain?
Yes, I do see what you mean, but does not the forebrain equally require conceptual thought. I have the Conway-Morris book but i haven't more than dipped into it.
Well upright walking hominids have been around for about 5 million years - an evolutionary response to the retreat of the jungles with climate change.
And then the use of fire is at least 800,000 years old. Stone-tipped spears were being used 500,000 years ago.
And it can be argued that the spectacularly life-like cave paintings of animals betray what is in fact a simpler stage of language sophistication. They seem eidetic, and so painted by minds less structured by a linguistic habit.
If you check kid's art, they paint houses and people as if they are assembling a collection of words. A crude circle for the head. A few dashes to represent hair or fingers. It is the opposite of photographic in being linguistic.
So yes, hominid evolution has been rapid - in ways that can be explained primarily by rapid climate change. Why did Neanderthals die out? Were they too physically adapted to the ice ages and so it was the lighter bodied, but bigger brained, lineage of Homo - us - that had the more general purpose design that could survive through warm and cold abrupt climate shifts?
So it depends on your level of magnification whether the story looks gradual or abrupt. But certainly, the rise of civilised Homo sap - wearing clothes, living in small villages with a hierarchical social organisation and rich ornamental culture - was much too abrupt for it to be explained genetically.
And the most plausible way to account for that degree of shift is that Homo sap was pre-adapted for articulate speech, the climate then allowed Homo sap to flourish in population numbers, and then the social density/complexity was the fertile ground on which a new social habit - speaking in grammatically organised sentences that supported rational trains of thought - could quickly (over just a few hundred generations) get established.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well that might be how you think of the prefrontal cortex. But as you say, there was only the relative enlargement of areas, not new areas evolving. So if you are claiming that some part of the brain is responsible for abstraction and conception in a big way in humans, then by the same logic, it does the same in a small way for squirrel monkeys and lemurs.
What is indisputable when it comes to sharp discontinuities is that the human vocal tract is unique. And the brain changes that went with that are really just an increase in the top-down connectivity needed to have intentional control over what comes out of the mouth.
It is like the opposable thumb in that regard. Or even bipedal walking. Standing up right allowed us to carry stuff across an open landscape. Carrying stuff meant there was a reason for hands to become specialised for manipulation and thus pre-adapted for a culture of tool-making.
So for paleoanthropology, there is a reasonably standard way of explaining the co-evolution of bodies and culture. And it doesn't need to involve hopeful monsters.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again you are ignoring the gradual story. Bipedalism wasn't a problem for early hominids as they still had small brains. But it did then become an issue as brains got larger.
The result was that babies got more immature and helpless at birth. So this would have driven the need for a particular level of sociality and technological sophistication in late hominids (as compared to even extremely social chimps). And being born with barely formed brains would also have made late hominid infants far more "programmable" by whatever their cultural environment happened to be. Again this is a pre-adaptation. There was a natural window of the first 7 years in which the rather unnatural thing of grammatical organisation and phonemic structure could be hardwired by experience.
So there are lots of pieces to the puzzle that fit together quite nicely.
Even adolescence looks to be a relatively recent evolutionary change. The brains of Homo erectus up to 400,000 years ago seem to jump straight from the child to the adult. But we have a further 10 years of teenagehood where the highest levels of impulse control and social thinking are still busy maturing.
So every thing about our brain maturation is stretched out in ways that apparently maximise the chances for culture to get in there and shape the patterns of what goes on.
Again, the popular view of human evolution - to which Chomsky falls prey - is that it is all about the magical development of the thinking and feeling self conscious human individual. This is the romantic picture of the ape that found its rational soul.
But the science supports a much more prosaic co-evolutionary story of culture and biology, All the action when it comes to the impressive intellectual advances are about cultural evolution - the rationally-structured habits of thought that language enables. Human biology - via a mix of accidental pre-adaptation and consequent purposeful fine-tuning - then changed as much as it could to support that cultural evolutionary trajectory.
So it is culture and the collective that led the way, not the genetics and the individual mind.
So that is the intelligent design argument? God created our particular kind of Universe because it had the constraints within which Homo sapiens becomes a historical inevitability?
I think I go one step further than that. ;)
I say constraint itself has a logical inevitability sufficient to conjure up worlds. You don't need a God of the Blue Touchpaper to figure out the initial conditions. Platonically, some kind of semiotic organisation or regularity can do it all for itself, no need for a divine maker.
Nevertheless, whenever you talk about 'constraints' at all, then - why those constraints? The way I understand it is that, if big bang cosmology is correct (and it sure seems it) then it unfolded in just such a way that stars>matter>life were able to evolve. And it might not have - there is no logical reason why it couldn't have evolved in such a way that nothing existed at all. Why those constraints - those 'six numbers' - I don't think we'll ever know, will we? They're simply givens.
But I don't want to convey the idea that I believe in 'God's plan' in any kind of literalistic sense. There are other religious models - the Hindus see the Universe as 'the creative play of Brahman'. Buddhists don't even really concern themselves with 'how it all began' yet they manage to concieve of an exquisite cosmic order, through such concepts as the Net of Indra. But I'm dead sure, exploring such ideas is a real raison d'être.
I mostly agree with what you have said, but a couple of points.
Thought uses language for itself, to enable it to construct complex ideas, as a tool of thought. You may be right that negation is built into the structure of the brain, as in on/off switches, but I think it is thought that turns these switches off for the most part.
I like the idea of the conjunction of simple words, yielding more complex ideas, a bottom up construction of the hierarchies (interesting bit about this in paper by Shigeru Miyagawa, reference following) in language as the result of the Merge function. I get the mechanism/computational aspect in this, it is almost as though Chomsky were trying to construct a foundation for a machine language. Chomsky's Minimalist Program (they don't call it a theory because it is a position being studied by a variety of specialists) is an attempt to explain language using the fewest possible terms.
There is a paper which touches on your singing hominid explanation:
Researchers from MIT, along with a scholar from the University of Tokyo believe that human language is a grafting of two communication forms found elsewhere in the animal kingdom: first, the elaborate songs of birds, and second, the more utilitarian, information-bearing types of expression seen in a diversity of other animals. http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00071/full
They also argue for the abrupt change happened around the same period around 100,000 years ago. (Shigeru Miyagawa and Chomsky are from MIT, it is not that surprising they agree)
That is focusing on the material questions. And I am stressing the semiotic dimension to existence.
So the fundamental question in that light becomes about the historical inevitability (or conversely, the contingency) of the critical levels of semiosis.
The Planck scale would define the most basic scale at which something pan-semiotic happened. There is a reason why three spatial dimensions was the optimal solution for organising a dissipative chain reaction - the emergence of the Big Bang universe as a cooling-spreading heat sink of radiation.
Then life would be another level of semiosis. And biophysics has indeed discovered that there is a particular nano-scale thermal regime - poised between the quantum and classical scale - where molecular machines can organise cellular metabolism with almost magical effectiveness.
And also over the past decade, biology has realised that another very remarkable semiotic transition had to take place at the scale of bacteria and archea. These simple single cell lifeforms, on their own, could never have evolved into anything more complex. And yet each - in arising as complementary ways of milking work from respiratory chains and proton gradients - could then get combined to allow large multi-cellular life.
In essence, archea could ingest bacteria and turn them into mitrochondrial power-houses. The waste product of one kind of simple life could become the fuel being produced inside the other form of simple life, closing the dissipative loop in the one creature.
So no, you won't see much if you just focus on the material aspects of being like most cosmology does. You have to have the larger semiotic perspective to see what were the critical transition thresholds and so make some judgement about the historical inevitability/historical contingency of what followed.
For example, the theorising about archea and bacteria symbiosis would seem to dramatically narrow the probability of complex life ever arising. Only an organic chemistry that was very earth-like indeed could seem to do the trick.
But anyway, then after single cell genetics and multicellular genetic combos, you then get neural semiosis and linguistic semiosis as further crucial advances in semiotic mechanism. And mathematiical cyberspace could be next.
So what I mean by constraints is the semiotic approach to constraints, not merely a materialist approach.
Quoting Wayfarer
From memory, it was Conway-Morris who is Christian and so wrote in ways sympathetic to ID. Eastern philosophy is generally more immanent and organic in its thinking as you say.
Selective attention can certainly modulate the receptive fields of neurons in top-down fashion, either suppressing or enhancing their responses.
So what you say is right - if "thought" is understood in terms of attentional processes. It is certainly what would be meant by thought in pre-linguistic animals.
Quoting Cavacava
I've only got the time to quickly skim the paper.
But it is certainly reasonable in a general fashion. One of the things we know is that the lower level limbic system control over human expressive noises - our rather involuntary acts of swearing - had to have a higher level motor planning control built over the top.
So that is why you get Tourettes, for example. Humans evolved new connectivity so pre-motor areas - what we now call the grammar areas, but which are just as much tool using or other complex action planning areas - could start to over-ride the more instinctual or emotional level of vocalisation. And Tourettes is where the wiring doesn't quite give full control. And also why we actually shout fuck or shit, or some actual word, when we hit our thumb with a hammer.
So the paper's connecting of bird song and honeybee dances is a bit strained. Not wrong, but you can also talk more directly about the known neuroanatomy of the brain and see that speech is a combination of complex goal-directed planning and simpler emotional social expressiveness.
That is why speaking does always involves both what you say, and how you say it. Prosody feeds in from another part of the brain to give every word an appropriate social inflection.