Speaker 1: Have you ever had trouble getting your message across to someone?
Speaker 1: Maybe you've had an argument with a friend or a
Speaker 1: disagreement with a coworker, and try to talk it through. Sometimes,
Speaker 1: if you can get to a point of common understanding,
Speaker 1: you can find a way out the other side. Other times, well,
Speaker 1: it can feel like you're seeing the same facts in
Speaker 1: a different light. Maybe where you grew up, it's not
Speaker 1: rude to belch at the table, or maybe it's rude
Speaker 1: do not belch at the table. When misunderstandings come from
Speaker 1: deep cultural differences, it can be very hard to bridge
Speaker 1: the divide and understand each other. Now consider this, what
Speaker 1: are the chances we'll be able to make that kind
Speaker 1: of connection with alien intelligence? Are we likely to accidentally
Speaker 1: belch or not belch our way into planet wide extermination? Hi?
Speaker 1: I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I have so
Speaker 1: many questions about how the universe works, from basic questions
Speaker 1: like what's inside the electrons and quarks that make us up?
Speaker 1: To deeper questions such as why these particles and not
Speaker 1: other particles? To cosmic questions like is what we are
Speaker 1: learning about the cosmos something that's true and universal? Or
Speaker 1: hopelessly human centric and Welcome to the podcast. Daniel and
Speaker 1: Jorge Explain the Universe, where we ask all of these
Speaker 1: questions and much more and dive into what science does
Speaker 1: and does not know about the answer. We don't shy
Speaker 1: away from exploring the biggest and deepest of cosmic mysteries
Speaker 1: because we think that everyone out there wants to know
Speaker 1: the meaning and the context of our lives. How did
Speaker 1: it all start, how does it all work? How will
Speaker 1: it all end? And every one deserves to share in
Speaker 1: our understanding, limited as it may be, and in our confusion,
Speaker 1: extensive as it is. Because science is just people being
Speaker 1: curious and methodically building knowledge about the universe, and we
Speaker 1: are all curious creatures. You might be curious why we
Speaker 1: call it. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe When today
Speaker 1: is just Daniel, My friend and co host Jorge is
Speaker 1: away today, so it's just me. But you are in
Speaker 1: for a very special treat today. We have an interview
Speaker 1: today with a guest who I am super excited to
Speaker 1: talk to, Professor Noam Chomsky, world famous linguists and world
Speaker 1: class intellectual. I invited Professor Chomsky on the show today
Speaker 1: to talk about a question that I suspect nobody has
Speaker 1: ever asked him before. As regular listeners of the show
Speaker 1: are no doubt awhere. I am very keen to believe
Speaker 1: in aliens, not that I'm hoping to be abducted and probed,
Speaker 1: but that I am desperate to meet extraterrestrial intelligence. Desperate
Speaker 1: because just meeting them would answer one of the biggest
Speaker 1: and most important questions in modern science. Are we alone
Speaker 1: in the universe? I suspect the answer is no, and
Speaker 1: that the galaxy is teeming with intelligent beings, but we
Speaker 1: can't know until we actually know, so I'd like to believe,
Speaker 1: but as a scientist, I'm also a skeptic. We did
Speaker 1: a fun program recently on those Navy UFO videos where
Speaker 1: Mick West gave us some pretty convincing non alien interpretations
Speaker 1: of those videos. I know that some of you out
Speaker 1: there are not fans of his and his relentless debunking,
Speaker 1: but I have respect for the skeptical approach as long
Speaker 1: as you stay open minded enough to be persuadable given
Speaker 1: enough evidence. But today's episode is not about whether there
Speaker 1: are aliens or whether they have visited Earth. That's very
Speaker 1: well trodden territory today's episode is about what happens next.
Speaker 1: Say that aliens do exist and do visit the Earth,
Speaker 1: and don't fry us from space with the planet wide
Speaker 1: death ray. Here's what really excites me about that alien visit.
Speaker 1: Beyond knowing that we're not alone, what excites me is
Speaker 1: that we might be able to ask them science questions.
Speaker 1: If they have traveled tween stars to get here, assuming
Speaker 1: they are octopied from seas under Europa, then they must
Speaker 1: know more about the universe than we do. At the
Speaker 1: very least, they probably know different things about the universe,
Speaker 1: and so we could compare notes and learn rather than
Speaker 1: just struggling for decades or centuries to unravel the puzzles
Speaker 1: of the universe ourselves. We could get the answers straight
Speaker 1: away from our new alien friends, or could we could
Speaker 1: we manage to set up a communication system that would
Speaker 1: allow us to talk to the aliens, to communicate with
Speaker 1: them deeply enough that we can get past the welcome
Speaker 1: to Earth, please don't kill us all the way to
Speaker 1: what's inside an electron? Or what happened before the Big Bang?
Speaker 1: Or even just how does your warp drive work? Is
Speaker 1: that actually possible? So on today's episode, we'll be asking
Speaker 1: the question will we be able to learn science from aliens?
Speaker 1: To help me explore this topic, I'm very pleased to
Speaker 1: introduce Professor G. Noam Chomsky, pleased to be with. Well,
Speaker 1: let me get it started with something of a less
Speaker 1: serious question. One thing you're famous for is answering all
Speaker 1: of your emails, and that's something that I try to
Speaker 1: do as well, though I'm sure I don't receive nearly
Speaker 1: as many as you do, and I'll admit to having
Speaker 1: been inspired by your approach here, but it's very much
Speaker 1: counter to what most of our colleagues in academia do,
Speaker 1: who treat email from the public as a nuisance. So
Speaker 1: what motivates you to be so accessible and so responsive? Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, I I don't answer all of it.
Speaker 1: Anything that's within the realm of sanity, moderate seriousness witches
Speaker 1: a lot I try to answer. I just assume that
Speaker 1: people ought to be taken seriously, well wonderful. I hope
Speaker 1: that when aliens arrive and start talking to us, that
Speaker 1: they also take us seriously. So the question we're diving
Speaker 1: into today is first, how do we begin to talk
Speaker 1: to aliens? And then I want to get deeper into
Speaker 1: the question of whether we could actually learn things from them,
Speaker 1: understand their mental model, also the universe. But let's start
Speaker 1: with imagining what it might be like as a linguist
Speaker 1: to work on this problem. How do you begin? Say
Speaker 1: you receive a recording from CT and they ask you
Speaker 1: if you think a series of pulses from spaces language,
Speaker 1: if it has information? Is it possible to know whether
Speaker 1: there's information in there without being able to decode it
Speaker 1: first and actually translated. If there are any intelligent aliens,
Speaker 1: which is an open question, and if they exist, we
Speaker 1: could ever get in contact with them, which is an
Speaker 1: even more open question, then the question would arise. It's
Speaker 1: a pretty remote question, and the only way to proceed,
Speaker 1: as usual would be to try to find some common ground.
Speaker 1: Begin with that. So what's the likely common ground? Well,
Speaker 1: there's some closable openings. There's an interesting article by Marvin Minsky,
Speaker 1: you want, of the founders of artificial and diligence, maybe
Speaker 1: thirty years ago, when he addressed this problem in an
Speaker 1: interesting way. He pointed out that he and one of
Speaker 1: his students had done a thought experiment with the touring
Speaker 1: machines abstract computers and had it's known that you can
Speaker 1: have a universal touring machine, one in which you can
Speaker 1: put a program for any possible algorithm and it will
Speaker 1: implement it, and it can be reduced to a small size.
Speaker 1: I think the smallest is maybe two states and three
Speaker 1: symbols or something like that. So they what they did
Speaker 1: was pick the simplest possible touring machines, the ones with
Speaker 1: the smallest intrinsic characteristic states and symbols, and just let
Speaker 1: them run freely and see what they did. Most of
Speaker 1: them either got into endless loops or crashed, but some
Speaker 1: of them lived and what they produced basically was the
Speaker 1: successor function. So Minski suggested that maybe if an intelligence
Speaker 1: existed somewhere, they would at least have the successor function,
Speaker 1: and that might be a way to establish contact with them,
Speaker 1: says some linguistic interests, because you can show that if
Speaker 1: you take the simplest possible human language, one which has
Speaker 1: only one word in its vocabulary and uses the simplest
Speaker 1: version of the computational principles that are used in human language,
Speaker 1: if you do that, you basically get the successor function.
Speaker 1: So maybe there's a point of contact these systems. Also
Speaker 1: with a little bit of tweaking give you arithmetic. So
Speaker 1: maybe that's a broader point of contact. You could established
Speaker 1: that for you could try to spread the range of
Speaker 1: intercommunication beyond. There's a lot of things you can do
Speaker 1: with just a arithmetic, coding thoughts and expressions. For example,
Speaker 1: she really get sophisticated about it. You can do girdle number,
Speaker 1: and you get to the assumption there is that they
Speaker 1: may have discovered similar mathematical principles which they would recognize
Speaker 1: if we sort of expressed our version of them, they
Speaker 1: might identify them and then recognize us as intelligent creatures
Speaker 1: worthy of discussion. Well, there's a good chance that at
Speaker 1: least a arithmetic maybe not mathematics, but at least the
Speaker 1: arithmetic is universal and absolutely To really get fancy, there
Speaker 1: are models of non standard models of arithmetic that don't
Speaker 1: satisfy on those axioms, but we can put that aside.
Speaker 1: Basic arithmetic is very possibly an absolute system, as the
Speaker 1: rest of mathematics is. Import at least the human construction
Speaker 1: can be done in different ways and still be consistent.
Speaker 1: Some of the major results of modern mathematics have been
Speaker 1: to demonstrate then, so it could be that if you
Speaker 1: go off into broader demands, Like said theory, you might
Speaker 1: find other ways of looking at things. Fair gus that
Speaker 1: at least the arithmetic would be close enough to be absolute,
Speaker 1: so that anything we might call intelligence, that we would
Speaker 1: recognize as intelligence would at least hit on that. How
Speaker 1: do we know the difference between what's absolute and what's
Speaker 1: just human thinking? I mean, is it a question of
Speaker 1: definition that these is the class of intelligence that we
Speaker 1: can communicate with, and therefore we define intelligence to be
Speaker 1: people who think with a mathematical basis, Or can we
Speaker 1: actually make some argument that basic mathematics is inherent to
Speaker 1: the universe rather than just a property of our thinking. Well,
Speaker 1: you're reaching into a my debated and rather obscure area
Speaker 1: of foundations of mathematics. That there are viewpoints like Kurt Kirtle,
Speaker 1: for example, who argued, these are just the truths of mathematics,
Speaker 1: or like the truths of physics, they're just part of
Speaker 1: the world. You know, nothing to do with us. We
Speaker 1: can grasp them the way we can grasp other phenomena.
Speaker 1: The numbers are there in some ideal platonic world, and
Speaker 1: we grasp them the with same way I can see
Speaker 1: the sun in the sky. Just perception. There are others
Speaker 1: who try to argue that these are human creations, the
Speaker 1: characteristic of the mind that we construct these things. I
Speaker 1: don't know of a really solid way of resolving this question.
Speaker 1: There are many sophisticated debate about it. It strikes me
Speaker 1: that in some sense we ask similar questions about the
Speaker 1: nature of biological life, even putting aside aliens and intelligence,
Speaker 1: we wonder what life might look like on other planets.
Speaker 1: To make educated but ignorant guesses based on the diversity
Speaker 1: or the lack of diversity here on Earth, So we
Speaker 1: imagine common structures that are everywhere on Earth might be
Speaker 1: universal to all life. Can we play the same game
Speaker 1: and think about how alien languages might work based on
Speaker 1: the diversity or the universality of elements of language here
Speaker 1: on Earth. Are there common structures to human languages or
Speaker 1: Earth languages that might be universal. You can make some
Speaker 1: speculations based on what we know. What we know is
Speaker 1: not enormous, but there's speaking of human language, there's fairly
Speaker 1: solid evidence that it's an essential species property common to
Speaker 1: human support severe pathology, and without any analog in other
Speaker 1: organic systems. So it seems to be something unique to
Speaker 1: humans and common to humans. No archaeological evidence is not
Speaker 1: definitive by any means, but there is substantial archaeological evidence
Speaker 1: that indicates fairly strongly that before Homo sapiens appeared, roughly
Speaker 1: two to three hundred thousand years ago, there's no significant
Speaker 1: sign of symbolic activity, maybe a scratch on a piece
Speaker 1: of wood or something like that. Not long after modern
Speaker 1: humans appear, means in evolutionary time, like maybe tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of years, and not long after that you do
Speaker 1: start to get rich symbolical evidence of extensive symbolic act
Speaker 1: of it. Pretty soon you get really remarkable examples like
Speaker 1: the cave drawings and so on. There's genomic evidence now
Speaker 1: that humans began to separate at least a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty thousand years ago now, and evolutionary time that's not
Speaker 1: long after humans appeared. So putting all this together to
Speaker 1: plausible speculation that along with anatomically modern humans came some
Speaker 1: rewiring of the brain which led to the basis for
Speaker 1: human language, human symbolic activity, human thought, which doesn't exist
Speaker 1: elsewhere and hasn't changed since it emerged, which is a
Speaker 1: short period of time. If that's true, we can then
Speaker 1: ask is there something about human language that makes it
Speaker 1: possibly maybe as universal as arithmetic might be. So if
Speaker 1: you think about the nature of evolution, what kind of
Speaker 1: a process is evolution? Well, what happens is, first some
Speaker 1: accident takes place. You have a functioning system, maybe bacteria,
Speaker 1: around for millions of years. Then some accident takes place.
Speaker 1: In this case, the accident apparently was one bacterium swallowing
Speaker 1: another microorganism. By accident, Well, that broke structural barriers. Could
Speaker 1: be a mutation, could be gene transposition. There are lots
Speaker 1: of possible kinds of accidents that can happen. Could be
Speaker 1: a shower of cosmic race, you know, volcanic eruption. But
Speaker 1: some diseruption took takes place in this case back a
Speaker 1: couple of billion years ago, it was apparently a bacterium
Speaker 1: swallowing another microorganism. Well, then the second stage of evolution
Speaker 1: is nature comes along and it tries to construct the
Speaker 1: simplest way of handling the system that was disrupted. There's
Speaker 1: a standard principle, sometimes called the Galilean principle, that nature
Speaker 1: is simple and it's the responsibility of scientists to prove it.
Speaker 1: Then it is an assumption, but it has been so
Speaker 1: successful that it's not challenged really, so I think we
Speaker 1: can take it to be a plausible assumption. So nature
Speaker 1: steps in constructs the simplest answer to how to deal
Speaker 1: with this disruption. Then comes the third stage of evolution,
Speaker 1: which is winnowing basically, of the organisms that survived the
Speaker 1: second stage, which ones are more reproductively successful, and then
Speaker 1: it will turn out those proliferate. That's natural selection. Going
Speaker 1: back to the case of language, what may very well
Speaker 1: have happened is that some disruption took place which lead
Speaker 1: to modern humans. They're different obviously and anyways, and we
Speaker 1: can roughly time it on the order of two to
Speaker 1: three thousand years ago. Then nature came along found the
Speaker 1: simplest way of dealing with it. That's the basis for
Speaker 1: human language and human thought. It was fixed. We have
Speaker 1: some idea of what it might be. We're getting to
Speaker 1: the point where you can begin to explain complex phenomenal
Speaker 1: language on the basis of the assumption that nature picked
Speaker 1: the simplest possible computational system. Then it never changed because
Speaker 1: there everybody's gone it. So that's a possibility if you
Speaker 1: count heads among linguists and people who study evolution almost
Speaker 1: nobody accepted. But I think it's very likely correct, and
Speaker 1: I think we're moving towards showing it well. I suppose
Speaker 1: you could. Then we would have reason to believe that
Speaker 1: if the kind of disruption that led to intelligence, life
Speaker 1: ever occurred elsewhere in the universe could very well follow
Speaker 1: the same course. It's essentially you're arguing that our language
Speaker 1: might be some optimal solution to this problem and therefore
Speaker 1: a common point in evolution even on other planets. Um
Speaker 1: there is a thesis as a names called the strong
Speaker 1: minimalist thesis, which sets as an ideal to see if
Speaker 1: you can show the language is the simplest form of
Speaker 1: a computational system that will meet an external criterion, And
Speaker 1: the external criterion is that it constitutes thought. Means it
Speaker 1: has to have semantically significant atoms which can combine. Has
Speaker 1: to meet that condition. So the simplest way of conforming
Speaker 1: to pro properties of computational efficiency could be language. Now,
Speaker 1: we're very far from having demonstrated that their steps towards
Speaker 1: Does that mean therefore, that we should be able to
Speaker 1: decode every human language? And is that the case? Aren't
Speaker 1: there examples of human languages that we've had a great
Speaker 1: difficulty decoding, for example, Egyptian hieroglyphics. Would we have unraveled
Speaker 1: their mysteries without the Rosetta stone. In the past several
Speaker 1: decades serve been thousands of human languages of every typological
Speaker 1: variety that have been studied in some depth, and when
Speaker 1: you first look at them, they seem very diverse. The
Speaker 1: same is true if you look at anything you don't understand,
Speaker 1: it looks wildly diverse. Or if you go back in biology,
Speaker 1: well for their fifty years, it was assumed that organisms
Speaker 1: are so radically diverse that each one has to be
Speaker 1: studied on its own terms, can't throw any conclusions from
Speaker 1: one to others. But now that's them to be radically false.
Speaker 1: It turns out that organisms are sharply restricted in the
Speaker 1: forms that they can too, and the nature of the
Speaker 1: way they're can constituted. It's so extreme that it's even
Speaker 1: been suggested tentatively that there might be a universal genome,
Speaker 1: just basically one organism and then minor variations on it.
Speaker 1: It's not considered an impossible assumption, applausible, though not demonstrated.
Speaker 1: Some well, the same has happened in the case of language.
Speaker 1: You go back to the days when I was a
Speaker 1: student nineteen forties, the virtually universal assumption was languages can
Speaker 1: vary in every possible way, and each one has to
Speaker 1: be studied on its own, and you can't draw any
Speaker 1: conclusions from one about other. Kind of a foundation of
Speaker 1: philosophy of language liquids sticks and and still pretty widely held.
Speaker 1: I think we're moving in the same direction as biology.
Speaker 1: It's as you study would appear to be radically diverse languages,
Speaker 1: seems that it's a deeper level you do find uniformities,
Speaker 1: and it's even becoming increasingly possible to see component of
Speaker 1: language which basically creates thoughts, is close to uniform or
Speaker 1: maybe even uniform on humans. And that the very the
Speaker 1: locus of variation is in the superficial aspect of how
Speaker 1: you externalize it. Like as if you had to take
Speaker 1: an analogy, it's take your laptop computer which as a
Speaker 1: program and another program doesn't care what printer you link
Speaker 1: it up to. Language maybe something like that, there's an
Speaker 1: internal program you can link it to one or another computer.
Speaker 1: In fact, it doesn't even have to be sound, could
Speaker 1: be signed, could even be touched any sufficiently rich sensory
Speaker 1: motor system seems to be available as a means of
Speaker 1: externalizing the internal thought system. This incidentally, is taking up
Speaker 1: on a tradition of about several millennium which lasted into
Speaker 1: the twenty century. There was a sharp break in the
Speaker 1: twentieth century with the rise of behaviorism and the structuralism
Speaker 1: and linguistics, both of which were kind of like operationalism
Speaker 1: and physics. You should just look at the phenomenon the data,
Speaker 1: no complicated theories, that was it. And the conception of
Speaker 1: language changed in the twentieth century. Became viewed as basically
Speaker 1: an instrument of communication, because that's what you can observe.
Speaker 1: I think we're no learning lest the tradition was correct.
Speaker 1: It's basically a form of constituting thought with communication and
Speaker 1: ancillary property. Okay, very little of our use of languages communications.
Speaker 1: It's almost all internal what we call thinking. Well, this
Speaker 1: is super fascinating and I have a lot more questions,
Speaker 1: but first let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back,
Speaker 1: and we're talking to Professor Noam Chomsky about the possibility
Speaker 1: of communicating with aliens, whether we could understand what's going
Speaker 1: on inside an alien mind and whether we might actually
Speaker 1: eventually be able to steal their physics ideas. So the
Speaker 1: picture you're painting is of language is just a way
Speaker 1: to get a thought from one brain to an other,
Speaker 1: and that there is some sort of internal concept which
Speaker 1: might be much more universal. And the details of whether
Speaker 1: you're sending an email or using social media or using
Speaker 1: semaphore flags don't matter as much as the information that's
Speaker 1: being communicated. But how do we know that that information
Speaker 1: could be universal? And doesn't there have to be some
Speaker 1: sort of internal representation inside the brain of that information.
Speaker 1: Doesn't that require some assumption of, you know, a basis
Speaker 1: set of vectors to define the space of that information.
Speaker 1: How could we ever know whether the aliens or or
Speaker 1: any other species for that matter, I really do share
Speaker 1: that universal sort of internal thought, or whether the differences
Speaker 1: are just in the communication patterns. How could we unravel that?
Speaker 1: Imagine you met the aliens, how would you go about
Speaker 1: figuring that out? Experimentation start by trying to find common grounds,
Speaker 1: maybe arithmetic, maybe even some aspect of what called universal
Speaker 1: grammar core six properties of language. If you can really
Speaker 1: show that these are the optimal solution to the problem
Speaker 1: of restructuring and organizing a computable function, the cursor function
Speaker 1: that generates intinto the many things. That's the basis of language.
Speaker 1: So if language is a kind of an optimal solution
Speaker 1: to that, you can explore whether that's shared. At some
Speaker 1: point you may get the points that are not shared, okay,
Speaker 1: and you try to discover what they are. It's not
Speaker 1: fundamentally any different than trying to find out what are
Speaker 1: the elementary particles, what's the chemical composition of water? We
Speaker 1: don't perceive it, you know, it's a foreign universe or us.
Speaker 1: We have found very extensive and successful ways to understand
Speaker 1: a great deal about these totally alien systems, namely all science.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a very interesting history of this. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you want to go into it, but
Speaker 1: to go back to the early modern science, Galileo and Newton, Leibnantz,
Speaker 1: you know, Wigan's the great figures who founded modern science.
Speaker 1: Because they had a conception of what the world must be.
Speaker 1: It must be what they called the mechanical universe, the
Speaker 1: kind of thing that an artisan could construct out of
Speaker 1: years and levers and so on. That was what the
Speaker 1: world must be. That's the basis of modern science. Newton's
Speaker 1: great discovery was to show that there are no machines.
Speaker 1: There's nothing mechanical. Everything has what we're considered to be
Speaker 1: ghostly property's interaction without contact, and repulsion without contact, and
Speaker 1: so on. Newton thought this was completely observed. He wrote
Speaker 1: that no one who has the slightest scientific understanding could
Speaker 1: believe any of this, and in fact, if you look
Speaker 1: at his great work Principia, it's mathematical principles, not physical principles. Course,
Speaker 1: Newton felt along with his contemporaries, that he had not
Speaker 1: found a physical basis for motion interaction, and so he
Speaker 1: only had a mathematical theory of it. For the rest
Speaker 1: of his life he tried to find some mechanical formulation
Speaker 1: of this, of course, in vain. In later years, a
Speaker 1: major change took place in the pursuit of science. Scientists
Speaker 1: gave up the hope of finding an intelligible universe. All
Speaker 1: they wanted was intelligible theories of the universe. Newton's theories
Speaker 1: where intelligible. Leibniz could understand Newton's theories like Newton live,
Speaker 1: that's considered them observed. Basically, the goals of science were lowered.
Speaker 1: Let's just try to find theories that are intelligible and
Speaker 1: explain things, even if the universe that it provides is
Speaker 1: unintelligible to us, because it doesn't matter what's intelligible though.
Speaker 1: That's a fact about our cognitive systems. So any child
Speaker 1: will assume that the world is mechanical, Like when you
Speaker 1: do experiments with young children and you have see two
Speaker 1: lines that move in common, a child will automatically assume
Speaker 1: there's an invisible bar connecting them. Let's just have to
Speaker 1: have a mechanical universe. Well you don't. Unfortunately, it's not
Speaker 1: a mechanical universe. So that's a case where cognitive capacities
Speaker 1: just don't happen to inform to the nature of the universe.
Speaker 1: So we have to proceed in other ways, like trying
Speaker 1: to find intelligible theories that will explain things. And I
Speaker 1: think it's the same growth as we deal with an
Speaker 1: alien might be that they have a form of intelligence
Speaker 1: that is inaccessible to us. It's fine. If so, we'll
Speaker 1: try to discover explanatory theories which account for their form
Speaker 1: of intelligence, maybe account for theirs and theirs A super
Speaker 1: theory will show what kinds of intelligence there might be.
Speaker 1: It's such a far off dream that you can barely
Speaker 1: speculate about it. But I think that's the way, were
Speaker 1: the only way I can imagine. We just to proceed,
Speaker 1: in fact, using our own experience, with our own history
Speaker 1: of science. It strikes me that you draw such a
Speaker 1: sharp line between humans and every other species on the planet.
Speaker 1: If I've understood correctly, you arguing that humans are the
Speaker 1: only intelligent species on the planet and the only ones
Speaker 1: with its capacity for symbolic thought and expression. What about
Speaker 1: other species like dolphins, or whales or pigs, which are
Speaker 1: known to be intelligent and have some examples of communication.
Speaker 1: Can we exercise these principles on dolphins? Every organism ass communication,
Speaker 1: Trees communicate, so communication is kind of the universal and
Speaker 1: if you think that language is just an instrument of communication.
Speaker 1: The modern behavior structuralist approach, which essentially rejects the conception
Speaker 1: of inner structure, which is radically anti scientific. In my view,
Speaker 1: all of science is talking about inner structures, not just
Speaker 1: arrangement and organization of data. But structuralism and behaviorism as
Speaker 1: chewed the search for inner structures not allowed to do that.
Speaker 1: You can only look at the data and the organization
Speaker 1: of the well that's a sure way of guaranteeing you'll
Speaker 1: never find anything, And exactly pretty much that's what's happened. Well,
Speaker 1: I think we've extricated ourselves from that period of human thought,
Speaker 1: at least we should have, and we're now back to
Speaker 1: what great physicists Jean Baptiste and his Nobel laure ed
Speaker 1: address described the essential nature of science as finding the
Speaker 1: hidden invisibles that makes sense of the complex visibles. I
Speaker 1: think every scientist knows that behaviorism was a sharp departure
Speaker 1: from it, but it's a pathology which I think has
Speaker 1: to be overcome. When we overcome it, we see the communication. Though.
Speaker 1: It's what we observe is the complex visibles. It's not
Speaker 1: the hidden invisibles. The hidden invisibles turn out to be.
Speaker 1: I think pretty much what the tradition assumed the construction
Speaker 1: of thought. Now, what about in religience? That's too loose
Speaker 1: a concept. So I happen to live in Arizona, not
Speaker 1: far from the desert out in my backyard. There are
Speaker 1: desert ants that have cognitive capacities that humans can't begin
Speaker 1: to approach. I mean, they can navigate in ways which
Speaker 1: are impossible for humans, knowing figuring out from where the
Speaker 1: sun is, whether they're in the northern or southern hemisphere.
Speaker 1: Using solar evidence solar asimus to carry out what's called
Speaker 1: dead breckoning, you can wander around the desert and finally
Speaker 1: something to eat when you go on a straight line
Speaker 1: back to the Humans can't do that. We can do it.
Speaker 1: We need complex technical instruments to be able to duplicate that.
Speaker 1: Sailors on the ocean have to have complex instrumentation to
Speaker 1: head back to port. They can't just do it the
Speaker 1: way in AUNT. So are they more intelligent than we are?
Speaker 1: Open some dimensions? Point is intelligence at least if it
Speaker 1: means things like ability to solve problems as many dimensions.
Speaker 1: Humans are very good at some of them, awful at others.
Speaker 1: Other organs and them is different when you get the
Speaker 1: whales and dolphins. They have big brains, big even relative
Speaker 1: to bodies. It's complex pains. They do communicate over long
Speaker 1: distances in the ocean for them, and they have complex behavior.
Speaker 1: They cooperate, they've worked together as I've watched dolphins. I
Speaker 1: used to sail when I was younger. You could sail
Speaker 1: through areas where they were dolphins and you could see them.
Speaker 1: If they caught a bunch of fish, they'd start circling
Speaker 1: around the area the fish, driving them into a smaller
Speaker 1: area and finally eating them all up. All right, that's
Speaker 1: complex cooperative behavior. You woman's couldn't do it that easily.
Speaker 1: We'd have to have a more complicated way of doing it. Well,
Speaker 1: do they have anything like human language? The kind of
Speaker 1: stranger if they did, but there's no evidence for it.
Speaker 1: They have their capacities accommodating to their ecosystem. We have ers.
Speaker 1: Something peculiar happened in the history of life on Earth.
Speaker 1: Couple hundred thousand years ago, a very strange organism emerged accidentally.
Speaker 1: You look at the history of the long evolution of humans,
Speaker 1: it's a long series of accidents, and started with them,
Speaker 1: as I said, the formation of complex sells back billions
Speaker 1: of years ago. Then many other accidents, one of them
Speaker 1: sixty five million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth,
Speaker 1: wiped out about eight percententive species and at the age
Speaker 1: of the dinosaurs that we're some small mammals around but
Speaker 1: managed to survive. Okay, that's us pure accident. A million
Speaker 1: other accidents along the way, and this series of accidents
Speaker 1: ended up at a point where one last accident seems
Speaker 1: to have provided a computational procedure or a human language
Speaker 1: which is not found elsewhere in the organic world, and
Speaker 1: then seems that nature just found the simplest way to
Speaker 1: deal with it. Maybe that's what happened, We don't know,
Speaker 1: but that's what it begins to look like. If so,
Speaker 1: it's very unlikely that we're going to find anything like
Speaker 1: human language in dolphins or whales. In fact, take our
Speaker 1: closest relatives, chimpanzees. There have been extensive efforts, totally pointless
Speaker 1: in my opinion, but very extensive effort to see if
Speaker 1: you could, with massive training from infancy, see if you
Speaker 1: could elicit any language like behavior from a chimpanzee or
Speaker 1: total failures. A lot of my students were involved in this,
Speaker 1: and very good psychologists. My own feeling is that it's
Speaker 1: about us ridiculous as trying to teach humans to do
Speaker 1: the waggle dance of bees. I mean, you could probably
Speaker 1: train graduate students to do something that look kind of
Speaker 1: like the waggle dance, but totally pointless endeavor. They're not
Speaker 1: doing it the same way. It's a different organisms functioning
Speaker 1: differently we're not at the peak of intelligence. There's no
Speaker 1: great chain of being, you know, starting with bacteria ending
Speaker 1: up with us. That's a long abandoned idea. There's many
Speaker 1: different branches. Organisms do in many different ways, and they
Speaker 1: have their own forms of what we might call intelligence.
Speaker 1: We have or desert ants of theirs, dolphins of theirs.
Speaker 1: It would be absolutely a biological miracle if we found
Speaker 1: that chimpanzees could acquire a language. It would be like
Speaker 1: saying that chimpanzees have this amazing ability with enormous survival value,
Speaker 1: but they never thought of human using it until humans
Speaker 1: came around. This is if someone were to come along
Speaker 1: and show humans how you can fly. You can get
Speaker 1: away from that lion that's chasing you, Why don't just fly?
Speaker 1: And humans said, oh, I never thought of that, and
Speaker 1: you go like that and you started flying. That's not
Speaker 1: going to happen. That's not the way biology works. If
Speaker 1: there's a capacity that's of survival value, you're going to
Speaker 1: use it. So the message I'm getting is that you
Speaker 1: don't consider there to be sufficient intelligence in other creatures
Speaker 1: on the Earth to develop the kind of symbolic language
Speaker 1: that we could decode. So it's not a fair proxy
Speaker 1: for the question of could we understand and alien intelligence? Okay, well,
Speaker 1: I have a lot more I want to ask you about,
Speaker 1: but first let's take another break. Okay, we're back and
Speaker 1: we're discussing with esteem Professor Chomsky. It's a possibility of
Speaker 1: communicating with aliens and whether or not anybody in the
Speaker 1: scientific community takes this prospect seriously. You mentioned something earlier,
Speaker 1: you said that the possibility of trying to decode an
Speaker 1: alien language is a remote possibility, and I'm wondering if
Speaker 1: it's something that linguists as a field are excited about
Speaker 1: or think about. You know, biologists, If you told a
Speaker 1: biologist I have a sample of life from another planet,
Speaker 1: they would be very excited. They would dive in immediately,
Speaker 1: they would be salivating at the opportunity. Are linguists excited
Speaker 1: about this as well? Or is this something that just
Speaker 1: is so remote that nobody really takes seriously. Some linguists
Speaker 1: are interested in it. Actually, I'm one of the very few.
Speaker 1: We I'm a co author of a couple of articles
Speaker 1: and what's called xeno linguistics. What could you do if
Speaker 1: you found an alien intelligence? And what we suggested is
Speaker 1: something along the ones of what it discussed. I don't
Speaker 1: think it's a topic that interests many linguists because there's
Speaker 1: nothing to say about it. First of all, we have
Speaker 1: no idea whether an intelligence of anything we'd call intelligence
Speaker 1: even exists. You're familiar, I'm sure with Fermi's paradox. Where
Speaker 1: are they? You know? I mean, from a point of
Speaker 1: view an astrophysicist, Fermi could show that there's huge numbers
Speaker 1: of planets which have conditions for life pretty much like ours.
Speaker 1: So there ought to be lots of life. It should
Speaker 1: have evolved into higher intelligence. We've made massive efforts to
Speaker 1: investigated searching for any signal of intelligent life. So far
Speaker 1: total zero nothing. So where are they? Well, one possibility
Speaker 1: is they're just not there, that the series of accidents
Speaker 1: that led to humans was so totally improbable that just
Speaker 1: wasn't duplicated. In fact, is even I'm not confident to
Speaker 1: judge their accuracy, But there are studies published in serious
Speaker 1: pere reviewed biological journals arguing that even the complexity of
Speaker 1: RNA is so improbable that it's very unlikely to have
Speaker 1: found in any accessible part of the universe. Of course,
Speaker 1: lots of the universe just isn't accessible, but the parts
Speaker 1: that we can conceivably have contact with, or maybe that's true.
Speaker 1: If so, there won't be any the answer to Family's paradoxes.
Speaker 1: There aren't any. There are other possible answers. Actually we're
Speaker 1: in the process of giving an answer. There's several aspects
Speaker 1: to intelligence. One is the capacity to destroy. Human intelligence
Speaker 1: has discovered the capacity developed the capacity to destroy everything.
Speaker 1: The domesday clock of the atomic scientists measures that every
Speaker 1: year now has the human species developed the moral capacity
Speaker 1: to constrain its ability to do everything? Well, so far
Speaker 1: the evidence on that is not very strong. Maybe it doesn't,
Speaker 1: and it may turn out that one aspect of intelligence
Speaker 1: is that the capacity to destroy simply exceeds the capacity
Speaker 1: to constrain it. If so, there might have been any
Speaker 1: number of human civilizations and they all destroyed themselves because
Speaker 1: just natural law, that's the way it works. Could be
Speaker 1: another answer to Fermi's parados. But the fact of them
Speaker 1: utter is they're just not there, or at least we
Speaker 1: can't find them. So given that it's doesn't attract a
Speaker 1: great deal of interest to look into how to deal
Speaker 1: with it, except just kind of thing we're talking about
Speaker 1: amusing puzzle to think about, how could you proceed to say,
Speaker 1: in my own opinion, and we proceed very much in
Speaker 1: the way that humans proceeded with human science, which is
Speaker 1: an alien world. The universe is an alien world, totally alien.
Speaker 1: We have no grasp with it, but nevertheless we've been
Speaker 1: able to learn a lot about it. Well. I think
Speaker 1: it's a very intriguing question because it goes to the
Speaker 1: heart of lots of fascinating topics about whether what we've
Speaker 1: learned is universal. And of course we won't know anything
Speaker 1: until we actually meet aliens, if that ever happened. But
Speaker 1: you know, as a scientist, I see the depiction of
Speaker 1: my field of science in popular literature all the time,
Speaker 1: and sometimes it's very accurate and sometimes it's cringe inducing.
Speaker 1: There are lots of fictional descriptions of how linguists might
Speaker 1: communicate with alien intelligence. I wonder what your thoughts are
Speaker 1: on various fictional depictions. Are there a particular fictional depiction
Speaker 1: of linguist decoding alien language that you find plausible or
Speaker 1: at least amusing. The only thing that I think is
Speaker 1: clausible is what I just destroyed. It's like the problem
Speaker 1: of finding out the inner nature of organic compound. We
Speaker 1: don't have any intuition about that. It is what it is.
Speaker 1: There was a period of human science, a flourishing, active,
Speaker 1: vigorous period created modern science basically got Leo to Newton
Speaker 1: in which there was such a picture. Turned out there
Speaker 1: isn't any such picture, so we give up on that hope.
Speaker 1: We now study everything from the outside, including our own
Speaker 1: intelligence or intuitive belief of what it all will be.
Speaker 1: Is an interesting comment about our cognitive nature, but it
Speaker 1: tells us nothing about what we're studying. That was a
Speaker 1: lesson of new Tony in physics, and I think, well,
Speaker 1: I think the deep question that I'm curious about here
Speaker 1: is whether the invisible truths that we're revealing, as you say,
Speaker 1: we use the visible evidence to try to decode with
Speaker 1: the invisible truths about the universe, are whether those really
Speaker 1: are universal? And the way you're describing and it sounds
Speaker 1: to me like you use the universe as fundamentally ununderstandable.
Speaker 1: We are putting together sort of mathematical stories that we
Speaker 1: tell ourselves as humans to make sense of it. But
Speaker 1: doesn't that mean that it's very likely that, for example,
Speaker 1: alien scientists are coming up with completely different stories that
Speaker 1: makes sense to them, you know, even the human stories
Speaker 1: have varied over the last few hundred years, or our
Speaker 1: understanding for what might be going on inside. So is
Speaker 1: there a chance if we ever met aliens that we
Speaker 1: could talk science with them, that we shared some sort
Speaker 1: of fundamental mental constructs about what's going on inside the universe? Well,
Speaker 1: I can only repeat the only way we could find
Speaker 1: out is by starting with common ground. No other way.
Speaker 1: Common grounds might be arithmetic. Maybe it could be something
Speaker 1: like the universals of human cognition, human language. Maybe if
Speaker 1: it's a fact that that's the optimal way for nature
Speaker 1: to construct any system of infinite generative capacity, then it's
Speaker 1: likely that it will be universal in all forms of intelligence.
Speaker 1: It's about as far as we can go after that.
Speaker 1: It's just asking forgetting aliens. What might we discover about
Speaker 1: the nature of elementary particles? Who knows? You know, discover
Speaker 1: it when you discover it. Well, episode of sociological questioning
Speaker 1: for you, which is, if aliens made themselves known and
Speaker 1: arrived on Earth and were curious and peaceful and wanted
Speaker 1: to communicate with death, you think that linguists and scientists
Speaker 1: would be allowed contact. You think that the society and
Speaker 1: politicians would allow sort of unfettered scientific communication with extra
Speaker 1: refuels forward to know what humans will do. Take a
Speaker 1: look at the United States, with the country we know best.
Speaker 1: There's a couple of dozen states where the state legislatures
Speaker 1: are passing laws. Let's say that parents can sue teachers
Speaker 1: if they teach things that parents don't like. Okay, that's
Speaker 1: the kind of creature we are installing. As Russia, you
Speaker 1: could be sent to the gulag for it in states.
Speaker 1: In the United States, you can be suited by parents
Speaker 1: for it. Will going back to your question, will politicians
Speaker 1: allow scientific communication? Many of them don't evelow human communication.
Speaker 1: We speaking of communications, there is some history. We have
Speaker 1: sent some messages out into space. There's you know, encodings
Speaker 1: on the voyager. There's a message we've sent from aris Ebo.
Speaker 1: Looking back on those messages, which we're designed with some
Speaker 1: attempt to be founded in mathematics, do you think that
Speaker 1: it's possible for alien intelligence to decode those you look,
Speaker 1: you find those to be well constructed in general, or
Speaker 1: do you think that they're sort just reflective of the
Speaker 1: thinking at the moment. Well, we have to begin with
Speaker 1: things like simple arithmetical truth. If you have two things
Speaker 1: over here, three things over there, do you have five
Speaker 1: things altogether? If you can get that for we can
Speaker 1: go on from there. So it seems to me that
Speaker 1: to summarize what I think is your view is that
Speaker 1: it's likely that mathematics is at the core of all
Speaker 1: intelligence and language. From that we might be able to
Speaker 1: build up some grammar based on the most basic operations.
Speaker 1: That fair summary. It's a fair summary tempted by platonism,
Speaker 1: the idea that numbers are real, they're just there. We
Speaker 1: discover them, we don't create them, contentious idea. It's not
Speaker 1: very clear what it means, but something on that order
Speaker 1: seems at least plausible. If so, they're going to be
Speaker 1: there for every form of intelligence as far as language
Speaker 1: and thought are concerned. That depends on the answer to
Speaker 1: an open and significant scientific question. Is human language the
Speaker 1: optimal solution for meeting the minimal external condition of expressing food,
Speaker 1: having ways to express thought, agents, actions, events, and so on.
Speaker 1: I think there's this work pointing in that direction. They're
Speaker 1: steps towards the conclusion. It's a minority opinion. Most languists
Speaker 1: don't pay any attention to this, but and those who
Speaker 1: don't doesn't make any sense. But I think there is
Speaker 1: a work tending strongly in that direction. If it turns
Speaker 1: out to be true, well then we have another way
Speaker 1: to deal with an intelligence if it is really optimal,
Speaker 1: basically as a natural law should show up everywhere where
Speaker 1: nature operates. Okay, that's a possible, whige possible based on
Speaker 1: a lot of empirical assumptions. Well, let me ask you
Speaker 1: a silly question then to end, which is all human
Speaker 1: culture and all human languages seem to have a uniform
Speaker 1: concept of what is a joke? You think that it's
Speaker 1: likely the hact aliens. If they're intelligent and communicate in
Speaker 1: some way that's intelligible to us, we'll be able to
Speaker 1: make jokes. We'll get our jokes that we could understand
Speaker 1: alien humor. Actually, I just read an interesting book about
Speaker 1: that about humans. It's social history to study of early
Speaker 1: modern conceptions, behavior, and so on, including what we're jokes.
Speaker 1: So it turns out that one of the great jokes
Speaker 1: in uh, I guess the eighteenth century was massacreing cats.
Speaker 1: The book is called The Great Cat Massacre. It's a
Speaker 1: very interesting book. That's a study of the ways in
Speaker 1: which people looked at things. It's not mostly about cuts,
Speaker 1: just one example, the way they looked at things, and
Speaker 1: the early modern period not that far from us eighteenth century,
Speaker 1: and a lot of things that look like jokes. Jokes
Speaker 1: does all right? Well, I'm I hope when the aliens
Speaker 1: arrived they leave our cats alone. Thanks very much, Really
Speaker 1: appreciate your humoring me for these silly but I think
Speaker 1: are fascinating questions that probe not just the needs of
Speaker 1: our language, but the nature of our thoughts and to
Speaker 1: be the nature of our understanding of the universe. So
Speaker 1: thanks again very much for coming on the podcast. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you very much for joining us for this conversation
Speaker 1: with Professor Chomsky. His reactions gave me a lot to
Speaker 1: think about, especially on the topic of whether or not
Speaker 1: some of the ideas the stories we tell about elementary
Speaker 1: particles are fundamentally true, universal to alien physicists as well,
Speaker 1: or just sort of mathematical stories that we tell ourselves
Speaker 1: in our ongoing effort to understand is crazy bonkers universe
Speaker 1: that's out there. To me, one of the deepest ways
Speaker 1: to get a handle on this mystery will be to
Speaker 1: talk to aliens physicists about it if it ever happens,
Speaker 1: because they might reveal that the way we are looking
Speaker 1: at the universe is very human centric, that we have
Speaker 1: missed something obvious because we don't have one of the
Speaker 1: senses that they have, where we have not developed a
Speaker 1: branch of mathematics, or maybe even mathematics is holding us back,
Speaker 1: but we won't know until we have a chance to
Speaker 1: interview one of them on the podcast. So thanks very
Speaker 1: much for joining us to an in next time. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The
Speaker 1: Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. Or more
Speaker 1: podcast from my heart Radio visit the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.