It's the same internal system. So if we keep to the internal system, the core of language, turns out it pays NO ATTENTION to things like linear order; only pays attention to the structure of expressions, which has a very funny consequence: It means your children, for example, when they are acquiring language, pay NO ATTENTION to 100% of what they hear, and ONLY pay attention to what they NEVER HEAR. They hear things in linear order but the rules that they use pay attention to structure which they don't hear, they construct it in their minds.new Chomsky interview
Now this principle, called Structured Independence, allows you right away to develop impossible languages, namely languages that use linear order. So for example, you could construct the language which is like ordinary language except the way it uses negation, say, is not the way ordinary languages do, by structural positions, but by linear order. So suppose you invent a language in which if you want to negate a sentence, the third word would ends would be NOT. OK that's a trivial to solve but if you give it to humans to invent language. Turns out they can solve it as a puzzle but their language areas of the brain are NOT the ones being activated, rather you get diffuse activation for puzzle solving. If you give them invented language which keeps to the rules of ordinary language, then they can learn it with the language areas that work. So you can indeed study impossible languages and the way the brain reacts to them and this is strike one of the most striking examples.
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Let me ask you a question. When you're typing a letter, not paying a lot of attention; just typing, not paying much attention. Do you ever notice that you make typographical errors, where you type a word that sounds the same way? Like, suppose you're planning to say write but you write, right?...Happens to me too. I think what it means is you're HEARING the things. You're writing but you're actually HEARING. And that writing is a kind of very peripheral activity and HEARING is much DEEPER EMBEDDED.
...So actually when you're doing something like typing you're often just HEARING yourself. That's why you make mistakes like that. Are their differences in the way people do this? As far as I know it hasn't been investigated that much, the kind of deep questions... a certain kind of brain injury, what's that gonna do to your language faculty....hearing of thoughts and so forth....
A child is genetically programmed to pick up all the noise in the environment and say... it's kind of striking, in fact, an infant doesn't pay attention to 100% of what it hears, linear order. It pays attention to what it NEVER HEARS, the structure that it brains constructs: which is a pretty dramatic finding.
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at that stage the child is understanding MUCH MORE COMPLEX sentences....You can show that by trying to introduce errors into the more complex sentences: the kid can't understand. In fact there's been studies: THIS IS CALLED TELEGRAPHIC SPEECH: None of the small words. Just nouns and verbs. Give a Kid who is in the "telegraphic speech stage" three conditions: One, normal speech. two: the child's one telegraphic speech. Third: small random words introduced in telegraphic speech. Turns out the Kid can't understand his OWN speech nor the random distributed ones. But it CAN UNDERSTAND NORMAL SPEECH BECAUSE WHAT's going on in the HEAD is much beyond what's coming out of the Printer....
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Each other goes back to the UNHEARD, "the girls," but why don't you pronounce, "the girls"? Principle of Least Effort. The Print wants to do the least possible. So it eliminates a lot of stuff. It has to pronounce something or you don't know the question is even being asked, so it just pronounces the most prominent thing. That leads to major problems in communication. In fact for people who do automatic parsing, one of the biggest problem is called "filler gap problems.".... the words not there and that ... when you get to more complicated to sentences it'd be a HUGE problem. So because of computational efficiency, the analog of the Law of Least Action, you're getting HUGE communication problems, but the INTERNAL SYSTEM is working with maximal efficiency. It doesn't erase anything: that would be an extra operation. And in fact this is related to the question of what we call, "Talking to yourself" - we're not talking to our self in INTERNAL LANGUAGE. When you think - you're thinking the way it's pronounced - you're NOT thinking the way it's going on in your MIND: That's inaccessible. That can only be understood by EXTERNAL INVESTIGATION.
So almost all of our thinking is INACCESSIBLE. We're only getting a periphery of it: What's around the printer level. what's REALLY going on: you have to study as if its some physical system you have no access to. Because there's no way to INTROSPECT to it. If you could Introspect it'd be real easy: but you can't cuz it's all inaccessible. Now this bears on the Consciousness issue because what were conscious of is little bits and fragments of what's going on inside. But if you get really introspective of what's going on in your mind, it's NOT sentences: It's Bit and Pieces of ... you can make decisions VERY QUICKLY - microseconds - complex decisions about a variety of things - like you walk into a room, and see a guy sitting over there .. but you notice somebody else who will be insulted if you say that so you say something else and so on, this happens instantaneously. But Bits and Pieces of the conservation that you're having DO reach consciousness. But what reaches consciousness is a VERY superficial, partial reflection of the internal computation of what's going on.
If you want to REALLY STUDY consciousness you're going to have to learn about the INTERNAL Processes that are putting forth the bits and pieces that pass forward and reach consciousness - very small and superficial...
the brain that's in our head - we can see little bits and pieces that surface. We're totally unconscious of what's going on and there's no way to become conscious of it and the same is true of the meaning of the simplest words. Take the first case that was studied in the history of science: it was Heraclitus, the Pre-Socratic. He asked a very profound question: Now how can you cross the same river twice? If you think about it it's not a trivial question. The second time you cross it it's totally different but it's the same river. You start playing with this: you realize this, you could make radical changes in the river, it would STILL be the same river. You can make tiny changes: like a phase changes that switches it to a glassy state and then run cars on it: It's not a river, it's a highway. Almost in-detectable change but it's not a river. HUGE changes but it will still be a river. Now EVERY INFANT knows this and its very complex when you look into it. You can't introspect this. You have to do experiments to figure it out. These thoughts ...every word in the language, all the constructions in the language, all the methods for producing the constructions of the thoughts of language - TOTALLY BEYOND the consciousness. It may sound strange but if you think about it for a minute, it's almost obvious.
I work on the Inner Mind all the time...students of language, that's what they're doing; studying visual perception that's what you're doing: anything in the cognitive sciences, that's what you're doing. We're NOT AWARE of our INNER MIND. We're only aware of Bits and Fragments that come out. There's a machine there that spits out a little bit of this and that. That's what we're aware of but it's NOT the INNER mind.
The Inner Mind you can ONLY STUDY From the OUTSIDE. It's the same way you study the gut brain. NO introspection. But sure we can study it. On the other hand why don't you go around constantly talking what's on your mind. We'll there are people who do that: they're called children. They haven't learned to keep it quiet yet. So that's ok...But a two year old would be a pretty awful world of a 40 year old...
We are looking at the radical irrationality of the intellectual culture...
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