Noam Chomsky - Thought

Noam Chomsky on thought, consciousness and free will.

We have very little information about what thought is.

In fact it's not really very clear how you could have such information.

But the mass of information about thought is what we get by looking at language.

So the yields the suggestion that say, Humboldt, took to an extreme

that they're the same.

But, again, you can introspect if you like, it's the only kind of evidence we have.

Doesn't look as if it's the same.

There seems to be lots of kinds of thought that just never can get articulated.

And I don't see any reason to doubt that some kind of thought is going with non-verbal...

with organisms that don't have language.

There is... in cognitive computational science there's a big enterprise.

Which in my view is a total waste of time.

Which goes back to a misreading of a very short paper by Alan Turing.

Back in 1950, Alan Turing, great mathematician, founder of modern computational science and so on...

He had a paper called, something like, 'Do Machines Think?'

And he devised a test, it's now called the Turing Test.

He called it an 'Imitation Game'.

And there's been a lot of effort to try to...

What he argued is if...

Or what he's been interpreted as arguing, he didn't say it, is that...

If a machine, machine means program, not a physical computer but a program...

If a program can pass this test, that'll show that it thinks.

And if you're an employee of IBM, you get paid to construct Watson and other huge programs

that are supposed to pass the test.

They defeat people in chess or Jeopardy or something.

And you can get a $100,000 if you pass the... if you construct such a program.

There's one line in Turing's paper which seems to have been ignored.

What he said is, "The question whether machines think, is too meaningless to deserve discussion."

[Audience laughs]

And he's right.

The question whether machines think is like asking whether submarines swim.

[Audience laughs]

If you want to call that swimming, yeah, they swim.

If you don't want to call it swimming, they don't.

But it's not a factual question.

Do humans fly?

I think in Japanese they do, somebody told me, but in English they don't.

But these are not factual questions.

They're a question about how we only use the word.

Now there is something going on that we loosely refer to as thought

but we don't know much about what it is.

And we'll never find out as long as attention is restricted to what is accessible to consciousness.

Some of you may know that there are recent experimental results showing that...

decisions about say, motor actions,

like whether I pick this up.

The decision is actually made

microseconds before you're aware of making the decision.

That's been misinterpreted as an argument about freedom of will.

(It's got) nothing to do with freedom of will.

What it means is that decisions are made in a way that's inaccessible to consciousness.

I don't think that should surprise anyone who's alive and has ever thought about what they do.

But it is contrary to a widely-held dogma.

And I think that dogma has to collapse if we don't learn about these things.