Noam Chomsky: Language, Cognition, and Deep Learning
生物与进化技术与编程音乐与艺术AI 与机器学习心理与人性
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AI 智能总结
诺姆·乔姆斯基谈语言、认知与深度学习
这是 Lex Fridman 与语言学家、认知科学家、政治哲学家诺姆·乔姆斯基的深度对话。乔姆斯基分享了他对语言本质的革命性理论、对深度学习的批判性看法，以及他对政治、权力和人类本性的深刻见解。
语言学生成语法深度学习批判认知科学政治哲学AI局限
诺姆·乔姆斯基是麻省理工学院荣誉教授、亚利桑那大学教授，被誉为「现代语言学之父」，同时也是 20 世纪最重要的政治异见人士之一，著有《句法结构》《制造共识》等数十部影响深远的著作。
📌 核心观点
- 生成语法与普遍语法：乔姆斯基认为人类语言能力是天生的，存在一个所有语言共享的普遍语法结构，这是人类独有的认知能力，不能通过统计学习获得。
- 对深度学习的批判：乔姆斯基认为深度学习本质上是曲线拟合，它可以识别模式但无法真正理解语言的结构和意义。他将其比作「行为主义的复辟」——只关注输入输出，忽视内在机制。
- 语言与思维的关系：乔姆斯基认为语言不仅是交流工具，更是思维的基础结构。人类独特的递归语法能力使我们能够表达无限的思想，这是其他动物无法做到的。
- 关于政治与权力：乔姆斯基一贯批判美国外交政策和媒体对权力的服从，他认为「制造共识」（媒体操控公众舆论）是现代民主的核心问题。
- 关于 AI 的未来：乔姆斯基对 AGI 持怀疑态度，认为当前 AI 系统缺乏真正的理解能力，它们是强大的工具但不是智能主体，将其与人类智能混淆是一个根本性错误。
✨ 金句摘录
乔姆斯基：深度学习本质上是行为主义的复辟——它只关注输入输出，完全忽视了内在的认知结构。
乔姆斯基：语言不仅是交流工具，它是思维本身的结构——没有语言，就没有我们所知道的人类思维。
乔姆斯基：媒体的功能是制造共识，让公众接受精英阶层的决策——这是现代民主的核心悖论。
📋 章节目录
暂无章节信息
🔑 关键词
languagesciencenaturehumanappstructurecapacitycarefullynewtonlinguisticscognitivemomentdoingcashbrainlearningconversationnoamthoughtpodcast
💬 精彩语录
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🎙️ 完整对话（693 条）
Lex Fridman (00:00.000)
The following is a conversation with Noam Chomsky.
以下是与诺姆·乔姆斯基的对话。
Lex Fridman (00:03.800)
He's truly one of the great minds of our time
他确实是我们这个时代最伟大的思想家之一
Lex Fridman (00:06.760)
and is one of the most cited scholars
是被引用最多的学者之一
Lex Fridman (00:08.400)
in the history of our civilization.
在我们的文明史上。
Lex Fridman (00:10.760)
He has spent over 60 years at MIT
他在麻省理工学院工作了 60 多年
Lex Fridman (00:13.400)
and recently also joined the University of Arizona,
最近还加入了亚利桑那大学，
Lex Fridman (00:16.320)
where we met for this conversation.
我们在这次谈话中见面的地方。
Lex Fridman (00:18.640)
But it was at MIT about four and a half years ago
但那是大约四年半前在麻省理工学院的事了
Lex Fridman (00:21.760)
when I first met Noam.
当我第一次见到诺姆时。
Noam Chomsky (00:23.440)
My first few days there,
我在那里的头几天，
Lex Fridman (00:24.760)
I remember getting into an elevator at Stata Center,
我记得走进斯塔塔中心的电梯时
Noam Chomsky (00:27.400)
pressing the button for whatever floor,
按下任何楼层的按钮，
Lex Fridman (00:29.480)
looking up and realizing it was just me and Noam Chomsky
抬头一看，发现只有我和诺姆·乔姆斯基
Noam Chomsky (00:33.560)
riding the elevator,
乘坐电梯，
Lex Fridman (00:35.480)
just me and one of the seminal figures of linguistics,
只有我和语言学的一位开创性人物，
Noam Chomsky (00:38.400)
cognitive science, philosophy,
认知科学、哲学、
Lex Fridman (00:40.000)
and political thought in the past century, if not ever.
以及上个世纪（如果不是曾经）的政治思想。
Noam Chomsky (00:43.920)
I tell that silly story because I think life is made up
我讲那个愚蠢的故事是因为我认为生活是编造的
Lex Fridman (00:47.320)
of funny little defining moments that you never forget
您永远不会忘记的有趣的小决定时刻
Noam Chomsky (00:50.740)
for reasons that may be too poetic to try and explain.
其原因可能过于诗意而无法解释。
Lex Fridman (00:54.880)
That was one of mine.
Noam Chomsky (00:56.140)
Noam has been an inspiration to me and millions of others.
Lex Fridman (00:59.940)
It was truly an honor for me
Noam Chomsky (01:01.500)
to sit down with him in Arizona.
Lex Fridman (01:03.580)
I traveled there just for this conversation.
Lex Fridman (01:06.500)
And in a rare, heartbreaking moment,
Lex Fridman (01:09.140)
after everything was set up and tested,
Noam Chomsky (01:11.740)
the camera was moved and accidentally,
Lex Fridman (01:13.500)
the recording button was pressed, stopping the recording.
Lex Fridman (01:17.540)
So I have good audio of both of us, but no video of Noam.
Lex Fridman (01:21.140)
Just the video of me and my sleep deprived but excited face
Noam Chomsky (01:25.340)
that I get to keep as a reminder of my failures.
Lex Fridman (01:29.620)
Most people just listen to this audio version
Noam Chomsky (01:31.500)
for the podcast as opposed to watching it on YouTube.
Lex Fridman (01:34.860)
But still, it's heartbreaking for me.
Noam Chomsky (01:38.140)
I hope you understand and still enjoy this conversation
Lex Fridman (01:40.900)
as much as I did.
Noam Chomsky (01:42.220)
The depth of intellect that Noam showed
Lex Fridman (01:44.460)
and his willingness to truly listen to me,
Noam Chomsky (01:47.460)
a silly looking Russian in a suit.
Lex Fridman (01:50.300)
It was humbling and something I'm deeply grateful for.
Noam Chomsky (01:55.580)
As some of you know, this podcast is a side project for me,
Lex Fridman (01:59.660)
where my main journey and dream is to build AI systems
Noam Chomsky (02:03.580)
that do some good for the world.
Lex Fridman (02:05.480)
This latter effort takes up most of my time,
Lex Fridman (02:07.820)
but for the moment has been mostly private.
Lex Fridman (02:10.540)
But the former, the podcast,
Noam Chomsky (02:12.820)
is something I put my heart and soul into.
Lex Fridman (02:15.380)
And I hope you feel that, even when I screw things up.
Noam Chomsky (02:18.600)
I recently started doing ads
Lex Fridman (02:21.120)
at the end of the introduction.
Noam Chomsky (02:22.840)
I'll do one or two minutes after introducing the episode
Lex Fridman (02:25.640)
and never any ads in the middle
Noam Chomsky (02:27.400)
that break the flow of the conversation.
Lex Fridman (02:29.720)
I hope that works for you
Lex Fridman (02:31.160)
and doesn't hurt the listening experience.
Lex Fridman (02:33.960)
This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
Noam Chomsky (02:37.200)
If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube,
Lex Fridman (02:39.800)
give it five stars on Apple Podcast,
Noam Chomsky (02:41.840)
support it on Patreon,
Lex Fridman (02:43.240)
or simply connect with me on Twitter,
Noam Chomsky (02:45.400)
at Lex Friedman, spelled F R I D M A N.
Lex Fridman (02:49.440)
This show is presented by Cash App,
Noam Chomsky (02:51.720)
the number one finance app in the App Store.
Lex Fridman (02:54.240)
I personally use Cash App to send money to friends,
Lex Fridman (02:56.800)
but you can also use it to buy, sell,
Lex Fridman (02:58.760)
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Noam Chomsky (03:01.320)
Cash App also has a new investing feature.
Lex Fridman (03:04.160)
You can buy fractions of a stock, say $1 worth,
Noam Chomsky (03:07.120)
no matter what the stock price is.
Lex Fridman (03:09.200)
Broker services are provided by Cash App Investing,
Noam Chomsky (03:11.960)
a subsidiary of Square and member SIPC.
Lex Fridman (03:15.560)
I'm excited to be working with Cash App
Noam Chomsky (03:17.680)
to support one of my favorite organizations called The First,
Lex Fridman (03:20.920)
best known for their FIRST Robotics and Lego competitions.
Noam Chomsky (03:24.360)
They educate and inspire hundreds of thousands of students
Lex Fridman (03:27.720)
in over 110 countries
Lex Fridman (03:29.640)
and have a perfect rating on Charity Navigator,
Lex Fridman (03:31.840)
which means the donated money
Noam Chomsky (03:33.840)
is used to maximum effectiveness.
Lex Fridman (03:36.560)
When you get Cash App from the App Store,
Noam Chomsky (03:38.680)
Google Play and use code LexPodcast,
Lex Fridman (03:42.800)
you'll get $10 and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST,
Noam Chomsky (03:47.120)
which again is an organization that I've personally seen
Lex Fridman (03:49.800)
inspire girls and boys to dream of engineering a better world.
Lex Fridman (03:54.520)
And now here's my conversation with Noam Chomsky.
Lex Fridman (03:59.840)
I apologize for the absurd philosophical question,
Lex Fridman (04:04.160)
but if an alien species were to visit Earth,
Lex Fridman (04:07.120)
do you think we would be able to find a common language
Lex Fridman (04:10.920)
or protocol of communication with them?
Lex Fridman (04:13.680)
There are arguments to the effect that we could.
Noam Chomsky (04:18.320)
In fact, one of them was Marv Minsky's.
Lex Fridman (04:22.440)
Back about 20 or 30 years ago,
Noam Chomsky (04:24.760)
he performed a brief experiment with a student of his,
Lex Fridman (04:30.040)
Dan Bobrow, they essentially ran
Noam Chomsky (04:33.760)
the simplest possible touring machines,
Lex Fridman (04:36.720)
just free to see what would happen.
Lex Fridman (04:39.560)
And most of them crashed,
Lex Fridman (04:42.560)
either got into an infinite loop or stopped.
Noam Chomsky (04:47.800)
The few that persisted,
Lex Fridman (04:51.000)
essentially gave something like arithmetic.
Lex Fridman (04:55.960)
And his conclusion from that was that
Lex Fridman (04:59.980)
if some alien species developed higher intelligence,
Noam Chomsky (05:04.980)
they would at least have arithmetic,
Lex Fridman (05:07.440)
they would at least have what the simplest computer would do.
Lex Fridman (05:12.940)
And in fact, he didn't know that at the time,
Lex Fridman (05:16.040)
but the core principles of natural language
Noam Chomsky (05:20.760)
are based on operations which yield something
Lex Fridman (05:25.220)
like arithmetic in the limiting case, in the minimal case.
Lex Fridman (05:29.360)
So it's conceivable that a mode of communication
Lex Fridman (05:34.040)
could be established based on the core properties
Noam Chomsky (05:38.560)
of human language and the core properties of arithmetic,
Lex Fridman (05:41.460)
which maybe are universally shared.
Lex Fridman (05:44.920)
So it's conceivable.
Lex Fridman (05:46.680)
What is the structure of that language,
Noam Chomsky (05:50.800)
of language as an internal system inside our mind
Lex Fridman (05:55.160)
versus an external system as it's expressed?
Noam Chomsky (05:58.920)
It's not an alternative,
Lex Fridman (06:00.880)
it's two different concepts of language.
Noam Chomsky (06:02.960)
Different.
Lex Fridman (06:03.780)
It's a simple fact that there's something about you,
Noam Chomsky (06:07.280)
a trait of yours, part of the organism, you,
Lex Fridman (06:11.640)
that determines that you're talking English
Lex Fridman (06:14.600)
and not Tagalog, let's say.
Lex Fridman (06:16.980)
So there is an inner system.
Noam Chomsky (06:19.480)
It determines the sound and meaning
Lex Fridman (06:22.960)
of the infinite number of expressions of your language.
Noam Chomsky (06:27.120)
It's localized.
Lex Fridman (06:28.720)
It's not on your foot, obviously, it's in your brain.
Noam Chomsky (06:31.760)
If you look more closely, it's in specific configurations
Lex Fridman (06:35.240)
of your brain.
Lex Fridman (06:36.480)
And that's essentially like the internal structure
Lex Fridman (06:40.600)
of your laptop, whatever programs it has are in there.
Noam Chomsky (06:44.960)
Now, one of the things you can do with language,
Lex Fridman (06:47.840)
it's a marginal thing, in fact,
Noam Chomsky (06:50.040)
is use it to externalize what's in your head.
Lex Fridman (06:54.800)
Actually, most of your use of language
Noam Chomsky (06:56.660)
is thought, internal thought.
Lex Fridman (06:58.820)
But you can do what you and I are now doing.
Noam Chomsky (07:00.920)
We can externalize it.
Lex Fridman (07:02.640)
Well, the set of things that we're externalizing
Noam Chomsky (07:05.640)
are an external system.
Lex Fridman (07:07.680)
They're noises in the atmosphere.
Lex Fridman (07:11.160)
And you can call that language
Lex Fridman (07:12.920)
in some other sense of the word.
Lex Fridman (07:14.360)
But it's not a set of alternatives.
Lex Fridman (07:16.800)
These are just different concepts.
Lex Fridman (07:18.980)
So how deep do the roots of language go in our brain?
Lex Fridman (07:23.500)
Our mind, is it yet another feature like vision,
Noam Chomsky (07:26.780)
or is it something more fundamental
Lex Fridman (07:28.480)
from which everything else springs in the human mind?
Noam Chomsky (07:31.520)
Well, in a way, it's like vision.
Lex Fridman (07:33.720)
There's something about our genetic endowment
Noam Chomsky (07:38.580)
that determines that we have a mammalian
Lex Fridman (07:41.600)
rather than an insect visual system.
Lex Fridman (07:44.720)
And there's something in our genetic endowment
Lex Fridman (07:47.440)
that determines that we have a human language faculty.
Noam Chomsky (07:51.440)
No other organism has anything remotely similar.
Lex Fridman (07:55.200)
So in that sense, it's internal.
Noam Chomsky (07:58.280)
Now there is a long tradition,
Lex Fridman (07:59.720)
which I think is valid going back centuries
Noam Chomsky (08:03.600)
to the early scientific revolution,
Lex Fridman (08:05.500)
at least that holds that language
Noam Chomsky (08:09.340)
is the sort of the core of human cognitive nature.
Lex Fridman (08:13.620)
It's the source, it's the mode for constructing thoughts
Lex Fridman (08:18.080)
and expressing them.
Lex Fridman (08:19.640)
That is what forms thought.
Lex Fridman (08:22.760)
And it's got fundamental creative capacities.
Lex Fridman (08:27.200)
It's free, independent, unbounded, and so on.
Lex Fridman (08:31.320)
And undoubtedly, I think the basis
Lex Fridman (08:34.860)
for our creative capacities
Lex Fridman (08:38.480)
and the other remarkable human capacities
Lex Fridman (08:43.840)
that lead to the unique achievements
Lex Fridman (08:47.500)
and not so great achievements of the species.
Lex Fridman (08:51.300)
The capacity to think and reason,
Lex Fridman (08:53.620)
do you think that's deeply linked with language?
Lex Fridman (08:56.240)
Do you think the way we,
Noam Chomsky (08:58.200)
the internal language system is essentially the mechanism
Lex Fridman (09:01.560)
by which we also reason internally?
Noam Chomsky (09:04.120)
It is undoubtedly the mechanism by which we reason.
Lex Fridman (09:06.920)
There may also be other fact,
Noam Chomsky (09:09.320)
there are undoubtedly other faculties involved in reasoning.
Lex Fridman (09:14.720)
We have a kind of scientific faculty,
Noam Chomsky (09:17.520)
nobody knows what it is,
Lex Fridman (09:18.840)
but whatever it is that enables us
Noam Chomsky (09:20.920)
to pursue certain lines of endeavor and inquiry
Lex Fridman (09:25.440)
and to decide what makes sense and doesn't make sense
Lex Fridman (09:29.760)
and to achieve a certain degree
Lex Fridman (09:32.200)
of understanding of the world,
Noam Chomsky (09:33.640)
that uses language, but goes beyond it.
Lex Fridman (09:37.440)
Just as using our capacity for arithmetic
Noam Chomsky (09:42.000)
is not the same as having the capacity.
Lex Fridman (09:44.880)
The idea of capacity, our biology, evolution,
Noam Chomsky (09:49.360)
you've talked about it defining essentially our capacity,
Lex Fridman (09:52.520)
our limit and our scope.
Lex Fridman (09:55.200)
Can you try to define what limit and scope are?
Lex Fridman (09:58.840)
And the bigger question,
Lex Fridman (10:01.160)
do you think it's possible to find the limit
Lex Fridman (10:04.800)
of human cognition?
Noam Chomsky (10:07.560)
Well, that's an interesting question.
Lex Fridman (10:09.880)
It's commonly believed, most scientists believe
Noam Chomsky (10:13.080)
that human intelligence can answer any question
Lex Fridman (10:17.640)
in principle.
Noam Chomsky (10:19.340)
I think that's a very strange belief.
Lex Fridman (10:21.800)
If we're biological organisms,
Noam Chomsky (10:24.280)
which are not angels,
Lex Fridman (10:26.160)
then our capacities ought to have scope
Lex Fridman (10:31.800)
and limits which are interrelated.
Lex Fridman (10:34.920)
Can you define those two terms?
Noam Chomsky (10:36.620)
Well, let's take a concrete example.
Lex Fridman (10:40.740)
Your genetic endowment determines
Noam Chomsky (10:44.040)
that you can have a male in visual system,
Lex Fridman (10:46.840)
arms and legs and so on,
Lex Fridman (10:49.260)
but it therefore become a rich, complex organism.
Lex Fridman (10:53.440)
But if you look at that same genetic endowment,
Noam Chomsky (10:56.240)
it prevents you from developing in other directions.
Lex Fridman (10:59.980)
There's no kind of experience
Noam Chomsky (11:01.720)
which would yield the embryo
Lex Fridman (11:05.760)
to develop an insect visual system
Noam Chomsky (11:08.760)
or to develop wings instead of arms.
Lex Fridman (11:11.960)
So the very endowment that confers richness and complexity
Noam Chomsky (11:16.960)
also sets bounds on what can be attained.
Lex Fridman (11:23.600)
Now, I assume that our cognitive capacities
Noam Chomsky (11:27.440)
are part of the organic world.
Lex Fridman (11:29.640)
Therefore, they should have the same properties.
Noam Chomsky (11:32.260)
If they had no built in capacity
Lex Fridman (11:35.700)
to develop a rich and complex structure,
Noam Chomsky (11:39.180)
we would understand nothing.
Lex Fridman (11:41.920)
Just as if your genetic endowment
Noam Chomsky (11:46.080)
did not compel you to develop arms and legs,
Lex Fridman (11:50.320)
you would just be some kind of random amoeboid creature
Noam Chomsky (11:54.000)
with no structure at all.
Lex Fridman (11:56.080)
So I think it's plausible to assume that there are limits
Lex Fridman (12:00.240)
and I think we even have some evidence as to what they are.
Lex Fridman (12:03.680)
So for example, there's a classic moment
Noam Chomsky (12:06.660)
in the history of science at the time of Newton.
Lex Fridman (12:11.620)
There was a from Galileo to Newton modern science
Noam Chomsky (12:15.360)
developed on a fundamental assumption
Lex Fridman (12:17.920)
which Newton also accepted.
Noam Chomsky (12:20.120)
Namely that the world is an entire universe
Lex Fridman (12:24.100)
is a mechanical object.
Lex Fridman (12:26.340)
And by mechanical, they meant something like
Lex Fridman (12:29.260)
the kinds of artifacts that were being developed
Noam Chomsky (12:31.640)
by skilled artisans all over Europe,
Lex Fridman (12:34.260)
the gears, levers and so on.
Lex Fridman (12:37.120)
And their belief was well,
Lex Fridman (12:39.320)
the world is just a more complex variant of this.
Noam Chomsky (12:42.000)
Newton, to his astonishment and distress,
Lex Fridman (12:48.400)
proved that there are no machines,
Noam Chomsky (12:50.960)
that there's interaction without contact.
Lex Fridman (12:54.300)
His contemporaries like Leibniz and Huygens
Noam Chomsky (12:57.640)
just dismissed this as returning to the mysticism
Lex Fridman (13:02.560)
of the neo scholastics.
Lex Fridman (13:03.960)
And Newton agreed.
Lex Fridman (13:05.840)
He said it is totally absurd.
Noam Chomsky (13:08.240)
No person of any scientific intelligence
Lex Fridman (13:11.120)
could ever accept this for a moment.
Noam Chomsky (13:13.760)
In fact, he spent the rest of his life
Lex Fridman (13:15.280)
trying to get around it somehow,
Noam Chomsky (13:17.720)
as did many other scientists.
Lex Fridman (13:20.320)
That was the very criterion of intelligibility
Noam Chomsky (13:24.040)
for say Galileo or Newton.
Lex Fridman (13:27.640)
Theory did not produce an intelligible world
Noam Chomsky (13:31.260)
unless you could duplicate it in a machine.
Lex Fridman (13:34.040)
He showed you can't, there are no machines, any.
Noam Chomsky (13:37.520)
Finally, after a long struggle, took a long time,
Lex Fridman (13:41.240)
scientists just accepted this as common sense.
Lex Fridman (13:45.240)
But that's a significant moment.
Lex Fridman (13:47.400)
That means they abandoned the search
Noam Chomsky (13:49.360)
for an intelligible world.
Lex Fridman (13:51.780)
And the great philosophers of the time
Noam Chomsky (13:54.800)
understood that very well.
Lex Fridman (13:57.000)
So for example, David Hume in his encomium to Newton
Noam Chomsky (14:02.320)
wrote that who was the greatest thinker ever and so on.
Lex Fridman (14:05.560)
He said that he unveiled many of the secrets of nature,
Lex Fridman (14:10.520)
but by showing the imperfections
Lex Fridman (14:13.320)
of the mechanical philosophy, mechanical science,
Noam Chomsky (14:17.520)
he left us with, he showed that there are mysteries
Lex Fridman (14:21.240)
which ever will remain.
Lex Fridman (14:23.560)
And science just changed its goals.
Lex Fridman (14:26.760)
It abandoned the mysteries.
Noam Chomsky (14:28.720)
It can't solve it, we'll put it aside.
Lex Fridman (14:31.480)
We only look for intelligible theories.
Noam Chomsky (14:34.740)
Newton's theories were intelligible.
Lex Fridman (14:36.680)
It's just what they described wasn't.
Noam Chomsky (14:39.080)
Well, Locke said the same thing.
Lex Fridman (14:42.780)
I think they're basically right.
Lex Fridman (14:44.800)
And if so, that showed something
Lex Fridman (14:47.000)
about the limits of human cognition.
Noam Chomsky (14:49.680)
We cannot attain the goal of understanding the world,
Lex Fridman (14:55.680)
of finding an intelligible world.
Noam Chomsky (14:58.400)
This mechanical philosophy Galileo to Newton,
Lex Fridman (15:02.540)
there's a good case that can be made
Noam Chomsky (15:05.260)
that that's our instinctive conception of how things work.
Lex Fridman (15:10.980)
So if say infants are tested with things that,
Noam Chomsky (15:16.220)
if this moves and then this moves,
Lex Fridman (15:18.660)
they kind of invent something that must be invisible
Noam Chomsky (15:22.060)
that's in between them that's making them move and so on.
Lex Fridman (15:24.940)
Yeah, we like physical contact.
Noam Chomsky (15:26.500)
Something about our brain seeks.
Lex Fridman (15:28.940)
Makes us want a world like that.
Noam Chomsky (15:31.540)
Just like it wants a world
Lex Fridman (15:32.940)
that has regular geometric figures.
Lex Fridman (15:36.620)
So for example, Descartes pointed this out
Lex Fridman (15:38.900)
that if you have an infant
Noam Chomsky (15:41.820)
who's never seen a triangle before and you draw a triangle,
Lex Fridman (15:47.660)
the infant will see a distorted triangle,
Noam Chomsky (15:52.220)
not whatever crazy figure it actually is.
Lex Fridman (15:56.340)
Three lines not coming quite together,
Noam Chomsky (15:58.420)
one of them a little bit curved and so on.
Lex Fridman (16:00.300)
We just impose a conception of the world
Noam Chomsky (16:04.500)
in terms of geometric, perfect geometric objects.
Lex Fridman (16:09.340)
It's now been shown that goes way beyond that.
Noam Chomsky (16:12.140)
That if you show on a tachistoscope,
Lex Fridman (16:15.420)
let's say a couple of lights shining,
Noam Chomsky (16:18.540)
you do it three or four times in a row.
Lex Fridman (16:20.860)
What people actually see is a rigid object in motion,
Noam Chomsky (16:25.240)
not whatever's there.
Lex Fridman (16:26.900)
We all know that from a television set basically.
Lex Fridman (16:31.900)
So that gives us hints of potential limits
Lex Fridman (16:34.660)
to our cognition.
Noam Chomsky (16:35.980)
I think it does, but it's a very contested view.
Lex Fridman (16:39.420)
If you do a poll among scientists,
Noam Chomsky (16:42.300)
it's impossible we can understand anything.
Lex Fridman (16:46.360)
Let me ask and give me a chance with this.
Lex Fridman (16:48.620)
So I just spent a day at a company called Neuralink
Lex Fridman (16:52.540)
and what they do is try to design
Noam Chomsky (16:56.380)
what's called the brain machine, brain computer interface.
Lex Fridman (16:59.580)
So they try to do thousands readings in the brain,
Noam Chomsky (17:03.300)
be able to read what the neurons are firing
Lex Fridman (17:05.580)
and then stimulate back, so two way.
Lex Fridman (17:08.540)
Do you think their dream is to expand the capacity
Lex Fridman (17:12.780)
of the brain to attain information,
Noam Chomsky (17:16.660)
sort of increase the bandwidth
Lex Fridman (17:18.180)
of which we can search Google kind of thing?
Lex Fridman (17:22.460)
Do you think our cognitive capacity might be expanded
Lex Fridman (17:26.260)
our linguistic capacity, our ability to reason
Lex Fridman (17:29.340)
might be expanded by adding a machine into the picture?
Lex Fridman (17:33.180)
Can be expanded in a certain sense,
Lex Fridman (17:35.620)
but a sense that was known thousands of years ago.
Lex Fridman (17:39.860)
A book expands your cognitive capacity.
Noam Chomsky (17:43.700)
Okay, so this could expand it too.
Lex Fridman (17:46.060)
But it's not a fundamental expansion.
Noam Chomsky (17:47.940)
It's not totally new things could be understood.
Lex Fridman (17:50.940)
Well, nothing that goes beyond
Noam Chomsky (17:53.060)
their native cognitive capacities.
Lex Fridman (17:56.500)
Just like you can't turn the visual system
Noam Chomsky (17:58.620)
into an insect system.
Lex Fridman (18:00.660)
Well, I mean, the thought is,
Noam Chomsky (18:04.220)
the thought is perhaps you can't directly,
Lex Fridman (18:06.820)
but you can map sort of.
Noam Chomsky (18:08.660)
You couldn't, but we already,
Lex Fridman (18:10.060)
we know that without this experiment.
Noam Chomsky (18:12.380)
You could map what a bee sees and present it in a form
Lex Fridman (18:16.740)
so that we could follow it.
Noam Chomsky (18:17.980)
In fact, every bee scientist does that.
Lex Fridman (18:19.940)
But you don't think there's something greater than bees
Noam Chomsky (18:25.380)
that we can map and then all of a sudden discover something,
Lex Fridman (18:29.700)
be able to understand a quantum world, quantum mechanics,
Noam Chomsky (18:33.780)
be able to start to be able to make sense.
Lex Fridman (18:35.980)
Students at MIT study and understand quantum mechanics.
Lex Fridman (18:41.660)
But they always reduce it to the infant, the physical.
Lex Fridman (18:45.100)
I mean, they don't really understand.
Noam Chomsky (18:46.900)
Oh, you don't, there's thing, that may be another area
Lex Fridman (18:50.260)
where there's just a limit to understanding.
Noam Chomsky (18:52.740)
We understand the theories,
Lex Fridman (18:54.500)
but the world that it describes doesn't make any sense.
Noam Chomsky (18:58.420)
So, you know, the experiment, Schrodinger's cat,
Lex Fridman (19:01.460)
for example, can understand the theory,
Lex Fridman (19:03.700)
but as Schrodinger pointed out,
Lex Fridman (19:05.780)
it's an unintelligible world.
Noam Chomsky (19:09.300)
One of the reasons why Einstein
Lex Fridman (19:11.140)
was always very skeptical about quantum theory,
Noam Chomsky (19:14.420)
was that he described himself as a classical realist,
Lex Fridman (19:19.340)
in one's intelligibility.
Noam Chomsky (19:23.060)
He has something in common with infants in that way.
Lex Fridman (19:27.460)
So, back to linguistics.
Noam Chomsky (19:30.940)
If you could humor me, what are the most beautiful
Lex Fridman (19:34.020)
or fascinating aspects of language
Noam Chomsky (19:36.100)
or ideas in linguistics or cognitive science
Lex Fridman (19:38.740)
that you've seen in a lifetime of studying language
Lex Fridman (19:42.060)
and studying the human mind?
Lex Fridman (19:44.180)
Well, I think the deepest property of language
Lex Fridman (19:50.140)
and puzzling property that's been discovered
Lex Fridman (19:52.820)
is what is sometimes called structure dependence.
Noam Chomsky (19:57.180)
We now understand it pretty well,
Lex Fridman (19:59.580)
but it was puzzling for a long time.
Noam Chomsky (20:01.940)
I'll give you a concrete example.
Lex Fridman (20:03.620)
So, suppose you say the guy who fixed the car
Noam Chomsky (20:09.420)
carefully packed his tools, it's ambiguous.
Lex Fridman (20:13.100)
He could fix the car carefully or carefully pack his tools.
Noam Chomsky (20:17.940)
Suppose you put carefully in front,
Lex Fridman (20:21.060)
carefully the guy who fixed the car packed his tools,
Noam Chomsky (20:25.860)
then it's carefully packed, not carefully fixed.
Lex Fridman (20:29.380)
And in fact, you do that even if it makes no sense.
Noam Chomsky (20:32.300)
So, suppose you say carefully,
Lex Fridman (20:34.620)
the guy who fixed the car is tall.
Noam Chomsky (20:39.340)
You have to interpret it as carefully he's tall,
Lex Fridman (20:41.860)
even though that doesn't make any sense.
Lex Fridman (20:44.300)
And notice that that's a very puzzling fact
Lex Fridman (20:47.180)
because you're relating carefully
Noam Chomsky (20:50.060)
not to the linearly closest verb,
Lex Fridman (20:53.620)
but to the linearly more remote verb.
Noam Chomsky (20:57.300)
A linear closeness is an easy computation,
Lex Fridman (21:02.340)
but here you're doing a much more,
Lex Fridman (21:03.700)
what looks like a more complex computation.
Lex Fridman (21:06.780)
You're doing something that's taking you essentially
Noam Chomsky (21:10.180)
to the more remote thing.
Lex Fridman (21:13.580)
It's now, if you look at the actual structure
Noam Chomsky (21:16.620)
of the sentence, where the phrases are and so on,
Lex Fridman (21:20.140)
turns out you're picking out the structurally closest thing,
Lex Fridman (21:24.180)
but the linearly more remote thing.
Lex Fridman (21:27.940)
But notice that what's linear is 100% of what you hear.
Noam Chomsky (21:32.500)
You never hear structure, can't.
Lex Fridman (21:35.140)
So, what you're doing is,
Lex Fridman (21:37.300)
and certainly this is universal, all constructions,
Lex Fridman (21:40.660)
all languages, and what we're compelled to do
Noam Chomsky (21:44.660)
is carry out what looks like the more complex computation
Lex Fridman (21:48.660)
on material that we never hear,
Lex Fridman (21:52.260)
and we ignore 100% of what we hear
Lex Fridman (21:55.380)
and the simplest computation.
Noam Chomsky (21:57.500)
By now, there's even a neural basis for this
Lex Fridman (22:00.700)
that's somewhat understood,
Lex Fridman (22:02.860)
and there's good theories by now
Lex Fridman (22:04.380)
that explain why it's true.
Noam Chomsky (22:06.620)
That's a deep insight into the surprising nature of language
Lex Fridman (22:11.580)
with many consequences.
Noam Chomsky (22:14.100)
Let me ask you about a field of machine learning,
Lex Fridman (22:17.540)
deep learning.
Noam Chomsky (22:18.940)
There's been a lot of progress in neural networks based,
Lex Fridman (22:22.060)
neural network based machine learning in the recent decade.
Noam Chomsky (22:26.380)
Of course, neural network research goes back many decades.
Lex Fridman (22:30.780)
What do you think are the limits of deep learning,
Lex Fridman (22:35.580)
of neural network based machine learning?
Lex Fridman (22:38.500)
Well, to give a real answer to that,
Noam Chomsky (22:41.140)
you'd have to understand the exact processes
Lex Fridman (22:44.940)
that are taking place, and those are pretty opaque.
Noam Chomsky (22:47.940)
So, it's pretty hard to prove a theorem
Lex Fridman (22:50.260)
about what can be done and what can't be done,
Lex Fridman (22:54.060)
but I think it's reasonably clear.
Lex Fridman (22:56.820)
I mean, putting technicalities aside,
Lex Fridman (22:59.180)
what deep learning is doing
Lex Fridman (23:01.940)
is taking huge numbers of examples
Lex Fridman (23:05.340)
and finding some patterns.
Lex Fridman (23:07.740)
Okay, that could be interesting in some areas it is,
Lex Fridman (23:11.980)
but we have to ask here a certain question.
Lex Fridman (23:15.060)
Is it engineering or is it science?
Noam Chomsky (23:18.220)
Engineering in the sense of just trying
Lex Fridman (23:20.580)
to build something that's useful,
Noam Chomsky (23:22.820)
or science in the sense that it's trying
Lex Fridman (23:24.780)
to understand something about elements of the world.
Noam Chomsky (23:28.740)
So, take, say, a Google parser.
Lex Fridman (23:31.820)
We can ask that question.
Noam Chomsky (23:33.860)
Is it useful, yeah, it's pretty useful.
Lex Fridman (23:36.860)
I use a Google translator, so on engineering grounds,
Noam Chomsky (23:41.860)
it's kind of worth having, like a bulldozer.
Lex Fridman (23:45.740)
Does it tell you anything about human language?
Noam Chomsky (23:48.900)
Zero, nothing, and in fact, it's very striking.
Lex Fridman (23:54.940)
From the very beginning,
Noam Chomsky (23:56.780)
it's just totally remote from science.
Lex Fridman (24:00.300)
So, what is a Google parser doing?
Noam Chomsky (24:02.580)
It's taking an enormous text,
Lex Fridman (24:05.140)
let's say the Wall Street Journal corpus,
Lex Fridman (24:07.700)
and asking how close can we come
Lex Fridman (24:10.540)
to getting the right description
Noam Chomsky (24:14.100)
of every sentence in the corpus.
Lex Fridman (24:16.380)
Well, every sentence in the corpus
Noam Chomsky (24:18.500)
is essentially an experiment.
Lex Fridman (24:21.540)
Each sentence that you produce is an experiment
Lex Fridman (24:24.740)
which says, am I a grammatical sentence?
Lex Fridman (24:27.700)
The answer is usually yes.
Noam Chomsky (24:29.620)
So, most of the stuff in the corpus
Lex Fridman (24:31.300)
is grammatical sentences.
Lex Fridman (24:33.220)
But now, ask yourself, is there any science
Lex Fridman (24:36.820)
which takes random experiments
Noam Chomsky (24:40.140)
which are carried out for no reason whatsoever
Lex Fridman (24:43.700)
and tries to find out something from them?
Noam Chomsky (24:46.500)
Like if you're, say, a chemistry PhD student,
Lex Fridman (24:49.660)
you wanna get a thesis, can you say,
Noam Chomsky (24:51.180)
well, I'm just gonna mix a lot of things together,
Lex Fridman (24:55.380)
no purpose, and maybe I'll find something.
Noam Chomsky (24:59.660)
You'd be laughed out of the department.
Lex Fridman (25:02.420)
Science tries to find critical experiments,
Noam Chomsky (25:06.180)
ones that answer some theoretical question.
Lex Fridman (25:09.100)
Doesn't care about coverage of millions of experiments.
Noam Chomsky (25:12.940)
So, it just begins by being very remote from science
Lex Fridman (25:16.220)
and it continues like that.
Noam Chomsky (25:18.220)
So, the usual question that's asked about,
Lex Fridman (25:21.620)
say, a Google parser is how well does it do,
Lex Fridman (25:25.180)
or some parser, how well does it do on a corpus?
Lex Fridman (25:28.300)
But there's another question that's never asked.
Lex Fridman (25:31.100)
How well does it do on something
Lex Fridman (25:32.900)
that violates all the rules of language?
Noam Chomsky (25:36.060)
So, for example, take the structure dependence case
Lex Fridman (25:38.700)
that I mentioned.
Noam Chomsky (25:39.660)
Suppose there was a language
Lex Fridman (25:41.580)
in which you used linear proximity
Noam Chomsky (25:45.780)
as the mode of interpretation.
Lex Fridman (25:49.020)
These deep learning would work very easily on that.
Noam Chomsky (25:51.700)
In fact, much more easily on an actual language.
Lex Fridman (25:54.740)
Is that a success?
Noam Chomsky (25:55.900)
No, that's a failure from a scientific point of view.
Lex Fridman (25:59.020)
It's a failure.
Noam Chomsky (26:00.340)
It shows that we're not discovering
Lex Fridman (26:03.460)
the nature of the system at all,
Noam Chomsky (26:05.780)
because it does just as well or even better
Lex Fridman (26:07.700)
on things that violate the structure of the system.
Lex Fridman (26:10.820)
And it goes on from there.
Lex Fridman (26:12.660)
It's not an argument against doing it.
Noam Chomsky (26:14.740)
It is useful to have devices like this.
Lex Fridman (26:17.140)
So, yes, so neural networks are kind of approximators
Lex Fridman (26:20.620)
that look, there's echoes of the behavioral debates, right?
Lex Fridman (26:24.340)
Behavioralism.
Noam Chomsky (26:26.140)
More than echoes.
Lex Fridman (26:27.580)
Many of the people in deep learning
Noam Chomsky (26:30.060)
say they've vindicated Terry Sanyosky, for example,
Lex Fridman (26:34.540)
in his recent books,
Noam Chomsky (26:35.700)
as this vindicates Skinnerian behaviors.
Lex Fridman (26:39.500)
It doesn't have anything to do with it.
Noam Chomsky (26:41.420)
Yes, but I think there's something
Lex Fridman (26:44.620)
actually fundamentally different
Noam Chomsky (26:46.140)
when the data set is huge.
Lex Fridman (26:48.260)
But your point is extremely well taken.
Lex Fridman (26:51.140)
But do you think we can learn, approximate
Lex Fridman (26:55.380)
that interesting complex structure of language
Noam Chomsky (26:58.780)
with neural networks
Lex Fridman (27:00.100)
that will somehow help us understand the science?
Noam Chomsky (27:03.620)
It's possible.
Lex Fridman (27:04.460)
I mean, you find patterns that you hadn't noticed,
Noam Chomsky (27:07.220)
let's say, could be.
Lex Fridman (27:09.700)
In fact, it's very much like a kind of linguistics
Noam Chomsky (27:13.580)
that's done, what's called corpus linguistics.
Lex Fridman (27:18.060)
When you, suppose you have some language
Noam Chomsky (27:21.060)
where all the speakers have died out,
Lex Fridman (27:23.420)
but you have records.
Lex Fridman (27:25.100)
So you just look at the records
Lex Fridman (27:28.060)
and see what you can figure out from that.
Noam Chomsky (27:30.580)
It's much better than,
Lex Fridman (27:31.900)
it's much better to have actual speakers
Noam Chomsky (27:33.660)
where you can do critical experiments.
Lex Fridman (27:36.060)
But if they're all dead, you can't do them.
Lex Fridman (27:38.500)
So you have to try to see what you can find out
Lex Fridman (27:40.780)
from just looking at the data that's around.
Noam Chomsky (27:43.860)
You can learn things.
Lex Fridman (27:45.020)
Actually, paleoanthropology is very much like that.
Noam Chomsky (27:48.380)
You can't do a critical experiment on
Lex Fridman (27:51.220)
what happened two million years ago.
Lex Fridman (27:53.500)
So you're kind of forced just to take what data's around
Lex Fridman (27:56.540)
and see what you can figure out from it.
Noam Chomsky (27:59.220)
Okay, it's a serious study.
Lex Fridman (28:01.420)
So let me venture into another whole body of work
Lex Fridman (28:05.580)
and philosophical question.
Lex Fridman (28:08.380)
You've said that evil in society arises from institutions,
Noam Chomsky (28:13.060)
not inherently from our nature.
Lex Fridman (28:15.540)
Do you think most human beings are good,
Lex Fridman (28:17.780)
they have good intent?
Lex Fridman (28:19.580)
Or do most have the capacity for intentional evil
Noam Chomsky (28:22.860)
that depends on their upbringing,
Lex Fridman (28:24.620)
depends on their environment, on context?
Noam Chomsky (28:27.180)
I wouldn't say that they don't arise from our nature.
Lex Fridman (28:30.960)
Anything we do arises from our nature.
Lex Fridman (28:34.020)
And the fact that we have certain institutions, not others,
Lex Fridman (28:38.100)
is one mode in which human nature has expressed itself.
Lex Fridman (28:43.700)
But as far as we know,
Lex Fridman (28:45.420)
human nature could yield many different kinds
Noam Chomsky (28:48.500)
of institutions.
Lex Fridman (28:50.220)
The particular ones that have developed
Noam Chomsky (28:53.140)
have to do with historical contingency,
Lex Fridman (28:56.940)
who conquered whom, and that sort of thing.
Noam Chomsky (29:00.560)
They're not rooted in our nature
Lex Fridman (29:03.840)
in the sense that they're essential to our nature.
Lex Fridman (29:06.740)
So it's commonly argued that these days
Lex Fridman (29:10.140)
that something like market systems
Noam Chomsky (29:12.920)
is just part of our nature.
Lex Fridman (29:15.580)
But we know from a huge amount of evidence
Noam Chomsky (29:18.660)
that that's not true.
Lex Fridman (29:19.500)
There's all kinds of other structures.
Noam Chomsky (29:21.740)
It's a particular fact of a moment of modern history.
Lex Fridman (29:26.220)
Others have argued that the roots of classical liberalism
Noam Chomsky (29:30.740)
actually argue that what's called sometimes
Lex Fridman (29:34.420)
an instinct for freedom,
Noam Chomsky (29:36.460)
the instinct to be free of domination
Lex Fridman (29:39.920)
by illegitimate authority is the core of our nature.
Noam Chomsky (29:43.660)
That would be the opposite of this.
Lex Fridman (29:45.620)
And we don't know.
Noam Chomsky (29:47.500)
We just know that human nature can accommodate both kinds.
Lex Fridman (29:52.220)
If you look back at your life,
Noam Chomsky (29:54.900)
is there a moment in your intellectual life
Lex Fridman (29:58.100)
or life in general that jumps from memory
Noam Chomsky (30:00.180)
that brought you happiness
Lex Fridman (30:02.100)
that you would love to relive again?
Noam Chomsky (30:05.100)
Sure.
Lex Fridman (30:06.460)
Falling in love, having children.
Lex Fridman (30:10.100)
What about, so you have put forward into the world
Lex Fridman (30:13.860)
a lot of incredible ideas in linguistics,
Noam Chomsky (30:17.660)
in cognitive science, in terms of ideas
Lex Fridman (30:22.300)
that just excites you when it first came to you
Noam Chomsky (30:26.060)
that you would love to relive those moments.
Lex Fridman (30:28.940)
Well, I mean, when you make a discovery
Noam Chomsky (30:32.140)
about something that's exciting,
Lex Fridman (30:34.100)
like, say, even the observation of structure dependence
Lex Fridman (30:40.500)
and on from that, the explanation for it.
Lex Fridman (30:44.440)
But the major things just seem like common sense.
Lex Fridman (30:49.460)
So if you go back to take your question
Lex Fridman (30:53.160)
about external and internal language,
Noam Chomsky (30:55.820)
you go back to, say, the 1950s,
Lex Fridman (30:59.140)
almost entirely languages regarded an external object,
Noam Chomsky (31:03.900)
something outside the mind.
Lex Fridman (31:06.260)
It just seemed obvious that that can't be true.
Noam Chomsky (31:10.700)
Like I said, there's something about you
Lex Fridman (31:13.220)
that determines you're talking English,
Noam Chomsky (31:15.340)
not Swahili or something.
Lex Fridman (31:18.640)
But that's not really a discovery.
Noam Chomsky (31:20.280)
That's just an observation, what's transparent.
Lex Fridman (31:24.100)
You might say it's kind of like the 17th century,
Noam Chomsky (31:30.660)
the beginnings of modern science, 17th century.
Lex Fridman (31:33.460)
They came from being willing to be puzzled
Noam Chomsky (31:37.980)
about things that seemed obvious.
Lex Fridman (31:40.400)
So it seems obvious that a heavy ball of lead
Noam Chomsky (31:44.280)
will fall faster than a light ball of lead.
Lex Fridman (31:47.580)
But Galileo was not impressed by the fact
Noam Chomsky (31:50.900)
that it seemed obvious.
Lex Fridman (31:52.680)
So he wanted to know if it's true.
Noam Chomsky (31:54.900)
They carried out experiments, actually thought experiments,
Lex Fridman (31:59.140)
never actually carried them out,
Noam Chomsky (32:01.180)
which that can't be true.
Lex Fridman (32:04.460)
And out of things like that, observations of that kind,
Lex Fridman (32:11.600)
why does a ball fall to the ground instead of rising,
Lex Fridman (32:15.740)
let's say, seems obvious, till you start thinking about it,
Noam Chomsky (32:20.060)
because why does steam rise, let's say.
Lex Fridman (32:23.900)
And I think the beginnings of modern linguistics,
Noam Chomsky (32:27.260)
roughly in the 50s, are kind of like that,
Lex Fridman (32:30.060)
just being willing to be puzzled about phenomena
Noam Chomsky (32:33.620)
that looked, from some point of view, obvious.
Lex Fridman (32:38.020)
And for example, a kind of doctrine,
Noam Chomsky (32:41.340)
almost official doctrine of structural linguistics
Lex Fridman (32:44.960)
in the 50s was that languages can differ
Noam Chomsky (32:49.620)
from one another in arbitrary ways,
Lex Fridman (32:52.660)
and each one has to be studied on its own
Noam Chomsky (32:56.460)
without any presuppositions.
Lex Fridman (32:58.900)
In fact, there were similar views among biologists
Noam Chomsky (33:02.380)
about the nature of organisms, that each one's,
Lex Fridman (33:05.880)
they're so different when you look at them
Noam Chomsky (33:07.780)
that almost anything, you could be almost anything.
Lex Fridman (33:10.980)
Well, in both domains, it's been learned
Noam Chomsky (33:13.140)
that that's very far from true.
Lex Fridman (33:15.500)
There are narrow constraints on what could be an organism
Noam Chomsky (33:18.860)
or what could be a language.
Lex Fridman (33:21.580)
But these are, that's just the nature of inquiry.
Noam Chomsky (33:25.540)
Inquiry. Science in general, yeah, inquiry.
Lex Fridman (33:29.380)
So one of the peculiar things about us human beings
Noam Chomsky (33:33.420)
is our mortality.
Lex Fridman (33:35.300)
Ernest Becker explored it in general.
Lex Fridman (33:38.220)
Do you ponder the value of mortality?
Lex Fridman (33:40.460)
Do you think about your own mortality?
Noam Chomsky (33:43.460)
I used to when I was about 12 years old.
Lex Fridman (33:48.100)
I wondered, I didn't care much about my own mortality,
Lex Fridman (33:51.940)
but I was worried about the fact that
Lex Fridman (33:54.540)
if my consciousness disappeared,
Lex Fridman (33:57.700)
would the entire universe disappear?
Lex Fridman (34:00.300)
That was frightening.
Lex Fridman (34:01.580)
Did you ever find an answer to that question?
Lex Fridman (34:03.740)
No, nobody's ever found an answer,
Lex Fridman (34:05.900)
but I stopped being bothered by it.
Lex Fridman (34:07.900)
It's kind of like Woody Allen in one of his films,
Noam Chomsky (34:10.380)
you may recall, he starts, he goes to a shrink
Lex Fridman (34:14.100)
when he's a child and the shrink asks him,
Lex Fridman (34:16.460)
what's your problem?
Lex Fridman (34:17.500)
He says, I just learned that the universe is expanding.
Noam Chomsky (34:21.700)
I can't handle that.
Lex Fridman (34:22.740)
And then another absurd question is,
Lex Fridman (34:27.220)
what do you think is the meaning of our existence here,
Lex Fridman (34:32.620)
our life on Earth, our brief little moment in time?
Noam Chomsky (34:35.980)
That's something we answer by our own activities.
Lex Fridman (34:40.620)
There's no general answer.
Noam Chomsky (34:42.340)
We determine what the meaning of it is.
Lex Fridman (34:46.620)
The action determine the meaning.
Noam Chomsky (34:48.700)
Meaning in the sense of significance,
Lex Fridman (34:50.580)
not meaning in the sense that chair means this.
Lex Fridman (34:55.420)
But the significance of your life is something you create.
Lex Fridman (35:01.060)
No, thank you so much for talking to me today.
Noam Chomsky (35:02.540)
It was a huge honor.
Lex Fridman (35:04.140)
Thank you so much.
Noam Chomsky (35:05.940)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Noah Chomsky
Lex Fridman (35:08.660)
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Noam Chomsky (35:11.980)
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Lex Fridman (35:16.180)
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Noam Chomsky (35:19.660)
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Lex Fridman (35:22.340)
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Noam Chomsky (35:25.980)
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Lex Fridman (35:28.620)
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Noam Chomsky (35:32.060)
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Lex Fridman (35:34.260)
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