March 29, 2022 • 52 mins
Daniel talks to Noam Chomsky about how to communicate with aliens?
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Have you ever had trouble getting your message across to someone?
Maybe you've had an argument with a friend or a
disagreement with a coworker, and try to talk it through. Sometimes,
if you can get to a point of common understanding,
you can find a way out the other side. Other times, well,
it can feel like you're seeing the same facts in
a different light. Maybe where you grew up, it's not
(00:29):
rude to belch at the table, or maybe it's rude
do not belch at the table. When misunderstandings come from
deep cultural differences, it can be very hard to bridge
the divide and understand each other. Now consider this, what
are the chances we'll be able to make that kind
of connection with alien intelligence? Are we likely to accidentally
belch or not belch our way into planet wide extermination? Hi?
(01:09):
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I have so
many questions about how the universe works, from basic questions
like what's inside the electrons and quarks that make us up?
To deeper questions such as why these particles and not
other particles? To cosmic questions like is what we are
learning about the cosmos something that's true and universal? Or
(01:32):
hopelessly human centric and Welcome to the podcast. Daniel and
Jorge Explain the Universe, where we ask all of these
questions and much more and dive into what science does
and does not know about the answer. We don't shy
away from exploring the biggest and deepest of cosmic mysteries
because we think that everyone out there wants to know
(01:52):
the meaning and the context of our lives. How did
it all start, how does it all work? How will
it all end? And every one deserves to share in
our understanding, limited as it may be, and in our confusion,
extensive as it is. Because science is just people being
curious and methodically building knowledge about the universe, and we
(02:12):
are all curious creatures. You might be curious why we
call it. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe When today
is just Daniel, My friend and co host Jorge is
away today, so it's just me. But you are in
for a very special treat today. We have an interview
today with a guest who I am super excited to
talk to, Professor Noam Chomsky, world famous linguists and world
class intellectual. I invited Professor Chomsky on the show today
(02:35):
to talk about a question that I suspect nobody has
ever asked him before. As regular listeners of the show
are no doubt awhere. I am very keen to believe
in aliens, not that I'm hoping to be abducted and probed,
but that I am desperate to meet extraterrestrial intelligence. Desperate
because just meeting them would answer one of the biggest
and most important questions in modern science. Are we alone
(02:59):
in the universe? I suspect the answer is no, and
that the galaxy is teeming with intelligent beings, but we
can't know until we actually know, so I'd like to believe,
but as a scientist, I'm also a skeptic. We did
a fun program recently on those Navy UFO videos where
Mick West gave us some pretty convincing non alien interpretations
of those videos. I know that some of you out
(03:20):
there are not fans of his and his relentless debunking,
but I have respect for the skeptical approach as long
as you stay open minded enough to be persuadable given
enough evidence. But today's episode is not about whether there
are aliens or whether they have visited Earth. That's very
well trodden territory today's episode is about what happens next.
(03:41):
Say that aliens do exist and do visit the Earth,
and don't fry us from space with the planet wide
death ray. Here's what really excites me about that alien visit.
Beyond knowing that we're not alone, what excites me is
that we might be able to ask them science questions.
If they have traveled tween stars to get here, assuming
(04:02):
they are octopied from seas under Europa, then they must
know more about the universe than we do. At the
very least, they probably know different things about the universe,
and so we could compare notes and learn rather than
just struggling for decades or centuries to unravel the puzzles
of the universe ourselves. We could get the answers straight
away from our new alien friends, or could we could
(04:25):
we manage to set up a communication system that would
allow us to talk to the aliens, to communicate with
them deeply enough that we can get past the welcome
to Earth, please don't kill us all the way to
what's inside an electron? Or what happened before the Big Bang?
Or even just how does your warp drive work? Is
that actually possible? So on today's episode, we'll be asking
(04:46):
the question will we be able to learn science from aliens?
To help me explore this topic, I'm very pleased to
introduce Professor G. Noam Chomsky, pleased to be with. Well,
let me get it started with something of a less
serious question. One thing you're famous for is answering all
of your emails, and that's something that I try to
(05:08):
do as well, though I'm sure I don't receive nearly
as many as you do, and I'll admit to having
been inspired by your approach here, but it's very much
counter to what most of our colleagues in academia do,
who treat email from the public as a nuisance. So
what motivates you to be so accessible and so responsive? Well,
first of all, I I don't answer all of it.
(05:30):
Anything that's within the realm of sanity, moderate seriousness witches
a lot I try to answer. I just assume that
people ought to be taken seriously, well wonderful. I hope
that when aliens arrive and start talking to us, that
they also take us seriously. So the question we're diving
(05:51):
into today is first, how do we begin to talk
to aliens? And then I want to get deeper into
the question of whether we could actually learn things from them,
understand their mental model, also the universe. But let's start
with imagining what it might be like as a linguist
to work on this problem. How do you begin? Say
you receive a recording from CT and they ask you
(06:11):
if you think a series of pulses from spaces language,
if it has information? Is it possible to know whether
there's information in there without being able to decode it
first and actually translated. If there are any intelligent aliens,
which is an open question, and if they exist, we
could ever get in contact with them, which is an
(06:32):
even more open question, then the question would arise. It's
a pretty remote question, and the only way to proceed,
as usual would be to try to find some common ground.
Begin with that. So what's the likely common ground? Well,
there's some closable openings. There's an interesting article by Marvin Minsky,
(06:57):
you want, of the founders of artificial and diligence, maybe
thirty years ago, when he addressed this problem in an
interesting way. He pointed out that he and one of
his students had done a thought experiment with the touring
machines abstract computers and had it's known that you can
(07:20):
have a universal touring machine, one in which you can
put a program for any possible algorithm and it will
implement it, and it can be reduced to a small size.
I think the smallest is maybe two states and three
symbols or something like that. So they what they did
(07:41):
was pick the simplest possible touring machines, the ones with
the smallest intrinsic characteristic states and symbols, and just let
them run freely and see what they did. Most of
them either got into endless loops or crashed, but some
of them lived and what they produced basically was the
(08:04):
successor function. So Minski suggested that maybe if an intelligence
existed somewhere, they would at least have the successor function,
and that might be a way to establish contact with them,
says some linguistic interests, because you can show that if
(08:27):
you take the simplest possible human language, one which has
only one word in its vocabulary and uses the simplest
version of the computational principles that are used in human language,
if you do that, you basically get the successor function.
(08:49):
So maybe there's a point of contact these systems. Also
with a little bit of tweaking give you arithmetic. So
maybe that's a broader point of contact. You could established
that for you could try to spread the range of
intercommunication beyond. There's a lot of things you can do
(09:09):
with just a arithmetic, coding thoughts and expressions. For example,
she really get sophisticated about it. You can do girdle number,
and you get to the assumption there is that they
may have discovered similar mathematical principles which they would recognize
if we sort of expressed our version of them, they
(09:30):
might identify them and then recognize us as intelligent creatures
worthy of discussion. Well, there's a good chance that at
least a arithmetic maybe not mathematics, but at least the
arithmetic is universal and absolutely To really get fancy, there
are models of non standard models of arithmetic that don't
(09:50):
satisfy on those axioms, but we can put that aside.
Basic arithmetic is very possibly an absolute system, as the
rest of mathematics is. Import at least the human construction
can be done in different ways and still be consistent.
Some of the major results of modern mathematics have been
(10:12):
to demonstrate then, so it could be that if you
go off into broader demands, Like said theory, you might
find other ways of looking at things. Fair gus that
at least the arithmetic would be close enough to be absolute,
so that anything we might call intelligence, that we would
recognize as intelligence would at least hit on that. How
(10:32):
do we know the difference between what's absolute and what's
just human thinking? I mean, is it a question of
definition that these is the class of intelligence that we
can communicate with, and therefore we define intelligence to be
people who think with a mathematical basis, Or can we
actually make some argument that basic mathematics is inherent to
(10:54):
the universe rather than just a property of our thinking. Well,
you're reaching into a my debated and rather obscure area
of foundations of mathematics. That there are viewpoints like Kurt Kirtle,
for example, who argued, these are just the truths of mathematics,
(11:17):
or like the truths of physics, they're just part of
the world. You know, nothing to do with us. We
can grasp them the way we can grasp other phenomena.
The numbers are there in some ideal platonic world, and
we grasp them the with same way I can see
the sun in the sky. Just perception. There are others
(11:42):
who try to argue that these are human creations, the
characteristic of the mind that we construct these things. I
don't know of a really solid way of resolving this question.
There are many sophisticated debate about it. It strikes me
that in some sense we ask similar questions about the
(12:04):
nature of biological life, even putting aside aliens and intelligence,
we wonder what life might look like on other planets.
To make educated but ignorant guesses based on the diversity
or the lack of diversity here on Earth, So we
imagine common structures that are everywhere on Earth might be
universal to all life. Can we play the same game
(12:25):
and think about how alien languages might work based on
the diversity or the universality of elements of language here
on Earth. Are there common structures to human languages or
Earth languages that might be universal. You can make some
speculations based on what we know. What we know is
(12:46):
not enormous, but there's speaking of human language, there's fairly
solid evidence that it's an essential species property common to
human support severe pathology, and without any analog in other
(13:08):
organic systems. So it seems to be something unique to
humans and common to humans. No archaeological evidence is not
definitive by any means, but there is substantial archaeological evidence
that indicates fairly strongly that before Homo sapiens appeared, roughly
(13:32):
two to three hundred thousand years ago, there's no significant
sign of symbolic activity, maybe a scratch on a piece
of wood or something like that. Not long after modern
humans appear, means in evolutionary time, like maybe tens of
thousands of years, and not long after that you do
(13:54):
start to get rich symbolical evidence of extensive symbolic act
of it. Pretty soon you get really remarkable examples like
the cave drawings and so on. There's genomic evidence now
that humans began to separate at least a hundred and
(14:14):
fifty thousand years ago now, and evolutionary time that's not
long after humans appeared. So putting all this together to
plausible speculation that along with anatomically modern humans came some
rewiring of the brain which led to the basis for
(14:37):
human language, human symbolic activity, human thought, which doesn't exist
elsewhere and hasn't changed since it emerged, which is a
short period of time. If that's true, we can then
ask is there something about human language that makes it
possibly maybe as universal as arithmetic might be. So if
(14:59):
you think about the nature of evolution, what kind of
a process is evolution? Well, what happens is, first some
accident takes place. You have a functioning system, maybe bacteria,
around for millions of years. Then some accident takes place.
In this case, the accident apparently was one bacterium swallowing
(15:23):
another microorganism. By accident, Well, that broke structural barriers. Could
be a mutation, could be gene transposition. There are lots
of possible kinds of accidents that can happen. Could be
a shower of cosmic race, you know, volcanic eruption. But
(15:43):
some diseruption took takes place in this case back a
couple of billion years ago, it was apparently a bacterium
swallowing another microorganism. Well, then the second stage of evolution
is nature comes along and it tries to construct the
simplest way of handling the system that was disrupted. There's
(16:05):
a standard principle, sometimes called the Galilean principle, that nature
is simple and it's the responsibility of scientists to prove it.
Then it is an assumption, but it has been so
successful that it's not challenged really, so I think we
can take it to be a plausible assumption. So nature
steps in constructs the simplest answer to how to deal
(16:29):
with this disruption. Then comes the third stage of evolution,
which is winnowing basically, of the organisms that survived the
second stage, which ones are more reproductively successful, and then
it will turn out those proliferate. That's natural selection. Going
back to the case of language, what may very well
(16:51):
have happened is that some disruption took place which lead
to modern humans. They're different obviously and anyways, and we
can roughly time it on the order of two to
three thousand years ago. Then nature came along found the
simplest way of dealing with it. That's the basis for
(17:14):
human language and human thought. It was fixed. We have
some idea of what it might be. We're getting to
the point where you can begin to explain complex phenomenal
language on the basis of the assumption that nature picked
the simplest possible computational system. Then it never changed because
(17:36):
there everybody's gone it. So that's a possibility if you
count heads among linguists and people who study evolution almost
nobody accepted. But I think it's very likely correct, and
I think we're moving towards showing it well. I suppose
you could. Then we would have reason to believe that
(17:58):
if the kind of disruption that led to intelligence, life
ever occurred elsewhere in the universe could very well follow
the same course. It's essentially you're arguing that our language
might be some optimal solution to this problem and therefore
a common point in evolution even on other planets. Um
(18:18):
there is a thesis as a names called the strong
minimalist thesis, which sets as an ideal to see if
you can show the language is the simplest form of
a computational system that will meet an external criterion, And
the external criterion is that it constitutes thought. Means it
(18:41):
has to have semantically significant atoms which can combine. Has
to meet that condition. So the simplest way of conforming
to pro properties of computational efficiency could be language. Now,
we're very far from having demonstrated that their steps towards
Does that mean therefore, that we should be able to
(19:03):
decode every human language? And is that the case? Aren't
there examples of human languages that we've had a great
difficulty decoding, for example, Egyptian hieroglyphics. Would we have unraveled
their mysteries without the Rosetta stone. In the past several
decades serve been thousands of human languages of every typological
(19:26):
variety that have been studied in some depth, and when
you first look at them, they seem very diverse. The
same is true if you look at anything you don't understand,
it looks wildly diverse. Or if you go back in biology,
well for their fifty years, it was assumed that organisms
(19:49):
are so radically diverse that each one has to be
studied on its own terms, can't throw any conclusions from
one to others. But now that's them to be radically false.
It turns out that organisms are sharply restricted in the
forms that they can too, and the nature of the
(20:10):
way they're can constituted. It's so extreme that it's even
been suggested tentatively that there might be a universal genome,
just basically one organism and then minor variations on it.
It's not considered an impossible assumption, applausible, though not demonstrated.
(20:32):
Some well, the same has happened in the case of language.
You go back to the days when I was a
student nineteen forties, the virtually universal assumption was languages can
vary in every possible way, and each one has to
be studied on its own, and you can't draw any
conclusions from one about other. Kind of a foundation of
(20:57):
philosophy of language liquids sticks and and still pretty widely held.
I think we're moving in the same direction as biology.
It's as you study would appear to be radically diverse languages,
seems that it's a deeper level you do find uniformities,
(21:18):
and it's even becoming increasingly possible to see component of
language which basically creates thoughts, is close to uniform or
maybe even uniform on humans. And that the very the
locus of variation is in the superficial aspect of how
(21:41):
you externalize it. Like as if you had to take
an analogy, it's take your laptop computer which as a
program and another program doesn't care what printer you link
it up to. Language maybe something like that, there's an
internal program you can link it to one or another computer.
(22:01):
In fact, it doesn't even have to be sound, could
be signed, could even be touched any sufficiently rich sensory
motor system seems to be available as a means of
externalizing the internal thought system. This incidentally, is taking up
on a tradition of about several millennium which lasted into
(22:25):
the twenty century. There was a sharp break in the
twentieth century with the rise of behaviorism and the structuralism
and linguistics, both of which were kind of like operationalism
and physics. You should just look at the phenomenon the data,
no complicated theories, that was it. And the conception of
(22:51):
language changed in the twentieth century. Became viewed as basically
an instrument of communication, because that's what you can observe.
I think we're no learning lest the tradition was correct.
It's basically a form of constituting thought with communication and
ancillary property. Okay, very little of our use of languages communications.
(23:17):
It's almost all internal what we call thinking. Well, this
is super fascinating and I have a lot more questions,
but first let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back,
(23:39):
and we're talking to Professor Noam Chomsky about the possibility
of communicating with aliens, whether we could understand what's going
on inside an alien mind and whether we might actually
eventually be able to steal their physics ideas. So the
picture you're painting is of language is just a way
to get a thought from one brain to an other,
(24:00):
and that there is some sort of internal concept which
might be much more universal. And the details of whether
you're sending an email or using social media or using
semaphore flags don't matter as much as the information that's
being communicated. But how do we know that that information
could be universal? And doesn't there have to be some
sort of internal representation inside the brain of that information.
(24:24):
Doesn't that require some assumption of, you know, a basis
set of vectors to define the space of that information.
How could we ever know whether the aliens or or
any other species for that matter, I really do share
that universal sort of internal thought, or whether the differences
are just in the communication patterns. How could we unravel that?
(24:45):
Imagine you met the aliens, how would you go about
figuring that out? Experimentation start by trying to find common grounds,
maybe arithmetic, maybe even some aspect of what called universal
grammar core six properties of language. If you can really
(25:05):
show that these are the optimal solution to the problem
of restructuring and organizing a computable function, the cursor function
that generates intinto the many things. That's the basis of language.
So if language is a kind of an optimal solution
to that, you can explore whether that's shared. At some
(25:29):
point you may get the points that are not shared, okay,
and you try to discover what they are. It's not
fundamentally any different than trying to find out what are
the elementary particles, what's the chemical composition of water? We
don't perceive it, you know, it's a foreign universe or us.
(25:49):
We have found very extensive and successful ways to understand
a great deal about these totally alien systems, namely all science.
I mean, there's a very interesting history of this. I
don't know if you want to go into it, but
to go back to the early modern science, Galileo and Newton, Leibnantz,
(26:14):
you know, Wigan's the great figures who founded modern science.
Because they had a conception of what the world must be.
It must be what they called the mechanical universe, the
kind of thing that an artisan could construct out of
years and levers and so on. That was what the
(26:35):
world must be. That's the basis of modern science. Newton's
great discovery was to show that there are no machines.
There's nothing mechanical. Everything has what we're considered to be
ghostly property's interaction without contact, and repulsion without contact, and
(26:56):
so on. Newton thought this was completely observed. He wrote
that no one who has the slightest scientific understanding could
believe any of this, and in fact, if you look
at his great work Principia, it's mathematical principles, not physical principles. Course,
(27:17):
Newton felt along with his contemporaries, that he had not
found a physical basis for motion interaction, and so he
only had a mathematical theory of it. For the rest
of his life he tried to find some mechanical formulation
of this, of course, in vain. In later years, a
(27:41):
major change took place in the pursuit of science. Scientists
gave up the hope of finding an intelligible universe. All
they wanted was intelligible theories of the universe. Newton's theories
where intelligible. Leibniz could understand Newton's theories like Newton live,
(28:02):
that's considered them observed. Basically, the goals of science were lowered.
Let's just try to find theories that are intelligible and
explain things, even if the universe that it provides is
unintelligible to us, because it doesn't matter what's intelligible though.
That's a fact about our cognitive systems. So any child
(28:26):
will assume that the world is mechanical, Like when you
do experiments with young children and you have see two
lines that move in common, a child will automatically assume
there's an invisible bar connecting them. Let's just have to
have a mechanical universe. Well you don't. Unfortunately, it's not
(28:48):
a mechanical universe. So that's a case where cognitive capacities
just don't happen to inform to the nature of the universe.
So we have to proceed in other ways, like trying
to find intelligible theories that will explain things. And I
think it's the same growth as we deal with an
(29:08):
alien might be that they have a form of intelligence
that is inaccessible to us. It's fine. If so, we'll
try to discover explanatory theories which account for their form
of intelligence, maybe account for theirs and theirs A super
theory will show what kinds of intelligence there might be.
(29:30):
It's such a far off dream that you can barely
speculate about it. But I think that's the way, were
the only way I can imagine. We just to proceed,
in fact, using our own experience, with our own history
of science. It strikes me that you draw such a
sharp line between humans and every other species on the planet.
If I've understood correctly, you arguing that humans are the
(29:52):
only intelligent species on the planet and the only ones
with its capacity for symbolic thought and expression. What about
other species like dolphins, or whales or pigs, which are
known to be intelligent and have some examples of communication.
Can we exercise these principles on dolphins? Every organism ass communication,
Trees communicate, so communication is kind of the universal and
(30:16):
if you think that language is just an instrument of communication.
The modern behavior structuralist approach, which essentially rejects the conception
of inner structure, which is radically anti scientific. In my view,
(30:36):
all of science is talking about inner structures, not just
arrangement and organization of data. But structuralism and behaviorism as
chewed the search for inner structures not allowed to do that.
You can only look at the data and the organization
of the well that's a sure way of guaranteeing you'll
(30:56):
never find anything, And exactly pretty much that's what's happened. Well,
I think we've extricated ourselves from that period of human thought,
at least we should have, and we're now back to
what great physicists Jean Baptiste and his Nobel laure ed
address described the essential nature of science as finding the
(31:23):
hidden invisibles that makes sense of the complex visibles. I
think every scientist knows that behaviorism was a sharp departure
from it, but it's a pathology which I think has
to be overcome. When we overcome it, we see the communication. Though.
(31:43):
It's what we observe is the complex visibles. It's not
the hidden invisibles. The hidden invisibles turn out to be.
I think pretty much what the tradition assumed the construction
of thought. Now, what about in religience? That's too loose
a concept. So I happen to live in Arizona, not
(32:07):
far from the desert out in my backyard. There are
desert ants that have cognitive capacities that humans can't begin
to approach. I mean, they can navigate in ways which
are impossible for humans, knowing figuring out from where the
sun is, whether they're in the northern or southern hemisphere.
(32:29):
Using solar evidence solar asimus to carry out what's called
dead breckoning, you can wander around the desert and finally
something to eat when you go on a straight line
back to the Humans can't do that. We can do it.
We need complex technical instruments to be able to duplicate that.
(32:50):
Sailors on the ocean have to have complex instrumentation to
head back to port. They can't just do it the
way in AUNT. So are they more intelligent than we are?
Open some dimensions? Point is intelligence at least if it
means things like ability to solve problems as many dimensions.
(33:10):
Humans are very good at some of them, awful at others.
Other organs and them is different when you get the
whales and dolphins. They have big brains, big even relative
to bodies. It's complex pains. They do communicate over long
distances in the ocean for them, and they have complex behavior.
(33:34):
They cooperate, they've worked together as I've watched dolphins. I
used to sail when I was younger. You could sail
through areas where they were dolphins and you could see them.
If they caught a bunch of fish, they'd start circling
around the area the fish, driving them into a smaller
area and finally eating them all up. All right, that's
(33:57):
complex cooperative behavior. You woman's couldn't do it that easily.
We'd have to have a more complicated way of doing it. Well,
do they have anything like human language? The kind of
stranger if they did, but there's no evidence for it.
They have their capacities accommodating to their ecosystem. We have ers.
(34:23):
Something peculiar happened in the history of life on Earth.
Couple hundred thousand years ago, a very strange organism emerged accidentally.
You look at the history of the long evolution of humans,
it's a long series of accidents, and started with them,
(34:44):
as I said, the formation of complex sells back billions
of years ago. Then many other accidents, one of them
sixty five million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth,
wiped out about eight percententive species and at the age
of the dinosaurs that we're some small mammals around but
(35:07):
managed to survive. Okay, that's us pure accident. A million
other accidents along the way, and this series of accidents
ended up at a point where one last accident seems
to have provided a computational procedure or a human language
(35:28):
which is not found elsewhere in the organic world, and
then seems that nature just found the simplest way to
deal with it. Maybe that's what happened, We don't know,
but that's what it begins to look like. If so,
it's very unlikely that we're going to find anything like
human language in dolphins or whales. In fact, take our
(35:51):
closest relatives, chimpanzees. There have been extensive efforts, totally pointless
in my opinion, but very extensive effort to see if
you could, with massive training from infancy, see if you
could elicit any language like behavior from a chimpanzee or
(36:12):
total failures. A lot of my students were involved in this,
and very good psychologists. My own feeling is that it's
about us ridiculous as trying to teach humans to do
the waggle dance of bees. I mean, you could probably
train graduate students to do something that look kind of
like the waggle dance, but totally pointless endeavor. They're not
(36:36):
doing it the same way. It's a different organisms functioning
differently we're not at the peak of intelligence. There's no
great chain of being, you know, starting with bacteria ending
up with us. That's a long abandoned idea. There's many
different branches. Organisms do in many different ways, and they
have their own forms of what we might call intelligence.
(36:59):
We have or desert ants of theirs, dolphins of theirs.
It would be absolutely a biological miracle if we found
that chimpanzees could acquire a language. It would be like
saying that chimpanzees have this amazing ability with enormous survival value,
(37:19):
but they never thought of human using it until humans
came around. This is if someone were to come along
and show humans how you can fly. You can get
away from that lion that's chasing you, Why don't just fly?
And humans said, oh, I never thought of that, and
you go like that and you started flying. That's not
going to happen. That's not the way biology works. If
(37:41):
there's a capacity that's of survival value, you're going to
use it. So the message I'm getting is that you
don't consider there to be sufficient intelligence in other creatures
on the Earth to develop the kind of symbolic language
that we could decode. So it's not a fair proxy
for the question of could we understand and alien intelligence? Okay, well,
I have a lot more I want to ask you about,
(38:03):
but first let's take another break. Okay, we're back and
we're discussing with esteem Professor Chomsky. It's a possibility of
communicating with aliens and whether or not anybody in the
(38:25):
scientific community takes this prospect seriously. You mentioned something earlier,
you said that the possibility of trying to decode an
alien language is a remote possibility, and I'm wondering if
it's something that linguists as a field are excited about
or think about. You know, biologists, If you told a
biologist I have a sample of life from another planet,
(38:47):
they would be very excited. They would dive in immediately,
they would be salivating at the opportunity. Are linguists excited
about this as well? Or is this something that just
is so remote that nobody really takes seriously. Some linguists
are interested in it. Actually, I'm one of the very few.
We I'm a co author of a couple of articles
and what's called xeno linguistics. What could you do if
(39:10):
you found an alien intelligence? And what we suggested is
something along the ones of what it discussed. I don't
think it's a topic that interests many linguists because there's
nothing to say about it. First of all, we have
no idea whether an intelligence of anything we'd call intelligence
even exists. You're familiar, I'm sure with Fermi's paradox. Where
(39:33):
are they? You know? I mean, from a point of
view an astrophysicist, Fermi could show that there's huge numbers
of planets which have conditions for life pretty much like ours.
So there ought to be lots of life. It should
have evolved into higher intelligence. We've made massive efforts to
(39:56):
investigated searching for any signal of intelligent life. So far
total zero nothing. So where are they? Well, one possibility
is they're just not there, that the series of accidents
that led to humans was so totally improbable that just
(40:17):
wasn't duplicated. In fact, is even I'm not confident to
judge their accuracy, But there are studies published in serious
pere reviewed biological journals arguing that even the complexity of
RNA is so improbable that it's very unlikely to have
(40:39):
found in any accessible part of the universe. Of course,
lots of the universe just isn't accessible, but the parts
that we can conceivably have contact with, or maybe that's true.
If so, there won't be any the answer to Family's paradoxes.
There aren't any. There are other possible answers. Actually we're
(41:01):
in the process of giving an answer. There's several aspects
to intelligence. One is the capacity to destroy. Human intelligence
has discovered the capacity developed the capacity to destroy everything.
The domesday clock of the atomic scientists measures that every
(41:22):
year now has the human species developed the moral capacity
to constrain its ability to do everything? Well, so far
the evidence on that is not very strong. Maybe it doesn't,
and it may turn out that one aspect of intelligence
is that the capacity to destroy simply exceeds the capacity
(41:45):
to constrain it. If so, there might have been any
number of human civilizations and they all destroyed themselves because
just natural law, that's the way it works. Could be
another answer to Fermi's parados. But the fact of them
utter is they're just not there, or at least we
can't find them. So given that it's doesn't attract a
(42:06):
great deal of interest to look into how to deal
with it, except just kind of thing we're talking about
amusing puzzle to think about, how could you proceed to say,
in my own opinion, and we proceed very much in
the way that humans proceeded with human science, which is
an alien world. The universe is an alien world, totally alien.
(42:27):
We have no grasp with it, but nevertheless we've been
able to learn a lot about it. Well. I think
it's a very intriguing question because it goes to the
heart of lots of fascinating topics about whether what we've
learned is universal. And of course we won't know anything
until we actually meet aliens, if that ever happened. But
you know, as a scientist, I see the depiction of
my field of science in popular literature all the time,
(42:49):
and sometimes it's very accurate and sometimes it's cringe inducing.
There are lots of fictional descriptions of how linguists might
communicate with alien intelligence. I wonder what your thoughts are
on various fictional depictions. Are there a particular fictional depiction
of linguist decoding alien language that you find plausible or
(43:09):
at least amusing. The only thing that I think is
clausible is what I just destroyed. It's like the problem
of finding out the inner nature of organic compound. We
don't have any intuition about that. It is what it is.
There was a period of human science, a flourishing, active,
(43:35):
vigorous period created modern science basically got Leo to Newton
in which there was such a picture. Turned out there
isn't any such picture, so we give up on that hope.
We now study everything from the outside, including our own
intelligence or intuitive belief of what it all will be.
(43:59):
Is an interesting comment about our cognitive nature, but it
tells us nothing about what we're studying. That was a
lesson of new Tony in physics, and I think, well,
I think the deep question that I'm curious about here
is whether the invisible truths that we're revealing, as you say,
we use the visible evidence to try to decode with
the invisible truths about the universe, are whether those really
(44:22):
are universal? And the way you're describing and it sounds
to me like you use the universe as fundamentally ununderstandable.
We are putting together sort of mathematical stories that we
tell ourselves as humans to make sense of it. But
doesn't that mean that it's very likely that, for example,
alien scientists are coming up with completely different stories that
(44:44):
makes sense to them, you know, even the human stories
have varied over the last few hundred years, or our
understanding for what might be going on inside. So is
there a chance if we ever met aliens that we
could talk science with them, that we shared some sort
of fundamental mental constructs about what's going on inside the universe? Well,
I can only repeat the only way we could find
(45:05):
out is by starting with common ground. No other way.
Common grounds might be arithmetic. Maybe it could be something
like the universals of human cognition, human language. Maybe if
it's a fact that that's the optimal way for nature
(45:29):
to construct any system of infinite generative capacity, then it's
likely that it will be universal in all forms of intelligence.
It's about as far as we can go after that.
It's just asking forgetting aliens. What might we discover about
the nature of elementary particles? Who knows? You know, discover
(45:54):
it when you discover it. Well, episode of sociological questioning
for you, which is, if aliens made themselves known and
arrived on Earth and were curious and peaceful and wanted
to communicate with death, you think that linguists and scientists
would be allowed contact. You think that the society and
(46:14):
politicians would allow sort of unfettered scientific communication with extra
refuels forward to know what humans will do. Take a
look at the United States, with the country we know best.
There's a couple of dozen states where the state legislatures
are passing laws. Let's say that parents can sue teachers
(46:38):
if they teach things that parents don't like. Okay, that's
the kind of creature we are installing. As Russia, you
could be sent to the gulag for it in states.
In the United States, you can be suited by parents
for it. Will going back to your question, will politicians
(46:58):
allow scientific communication? Many of them don't evelow human communication.
We speaking of communications, there is some history. We have
sent some messages out into space. There's you know, encodings
on the voyager. There's a message we've sent from aris Ebo.
Looking back on those messages, which we're designed with some
attempt to be founded in mathematics, do you think that
(47:21):
it's possible for alien intelligence to decode those you look,
you find those to be well constructed in general, or
do you think that they're sort just reflective of the
thinking at the moment. Well, we have to begin with
things like simple arithmetical truth. If you have two things
over here, three things over there, do you have five
(47:43):
things altogether? If you can get that for we can
go on from there. So it seems to me that
to summarize what I think is your view is that
it's likely that mathematics is at the core of all
intelligence and language. From that we might be able to
build up some grammar based on the most basic operations.
That fair summary. It's a fair summary tempted by platonism,
(48:07):
the idea that numbers are real, they're just there. We
discover them, we don't create them, contentious idea. It's not
very clear what it means, but something on that order
seems at least plausible. If so, they're going to be
there for every form of intelligence as far as language
and thought are concerned. That depends on the answer to
(48:31):
an open and significant scientific question. Is human language the
optimal solution for meeting the minimal external condition of expressing food,
having ways to express thought, agents, actions, events, and so on.
(48:56):
I think there's this work pointing in that direction. They're
steps towards the conclusion. It's a minority opinion. Most languists
don't pay any attention to this, but and those who
don't doesn't make any sense. But I think there is
a work tending strongly in that direction. If it turns
(49:16):
out to be true, well then we have another way
to deal with an intelligence if it is really optimal,
basically as a natural law should show up everywhere where
nature operates. Okay, that's a possible, whige possible based on
(49:37):
a lot of empirical assumptions. Well, let me ask you
a silly question then to end, which is all human
culture and all human languages seem to have a uniform
concept of what is a joke? You think that it's
likely the hact aliens. If they're intelligent and communicate in
some way that's intelligible to us, we'll be able to
make jokes. We'll get our jokes that we could understand
alien humor. Actually, I just read an interesting book about
(50:00):
that about humans. It's social history to study of early
modern conceptions, behavior, and so on, including what we're jokes.
So it turns out that one of the great jokes
in uh, I guess the eighteenth century was massacreing cats.
The book is called The Great Cat Massacre. It's a
(50:23):
very interesting book. That's a study of the ways in
which people looked at things. It's not mostly about cuts,
just one example, the way they looked at things, and
the early modern period not that far from us eighteenth century,
and a lot of things that look like jokes. Jokes
does all right? Well, I'm I hope when the aliens
(50:49):
arrived they leave our cats alone. Thanks very much, Really
appreciate your humoring me for these silly but I think
are fascinating questions that probe not just the needs of
our language, but the nature of our thoughts and to
be the nature of our understanding of the universe. So
thanks again very much for coming on the podcast. Well,
thank you very much for joining us for this conversation
with Professor Chomsky. His reactions gave me a lot to
(51:11):
think about, especially on the topic of whether or not
some of the ideas the stories we tell about elementary
particles are fundamentally true, universal to alien physicists as well,
or just sort of mathematical stories that we tell ourselves
in our ongoing effort to understand is crazy bonkers universe
that's out there. To me, one of the deepest ways
(51:34):
to get a handle on this mystery will be to
talk to aliens physicists about it if it ever happens,
because they might reveal that the way we are looking
at the universe is very human centric, that we have
missed something obvious because we don't have one of the
senses that they have, where we have not developed a
branch of mathematics, or maybe even mathematics is holding us back,
but we won't know until we have a chance to
(51:55):
interview one of them on the podcast. So thanks very
much for joining us to an in next time. Thanks
for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The
Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. Or more
podcast from my heart Radio visit the I Heart Radio app,
(52:17):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Have you ever had trouble getting your message across to someone?
Maybe you've had an argument with a friend or a
disagreement with a coworker, and try to talk it through. Sometimes,
if you can get to a point of common understanding,
you can find a way out the other side. Other times, well,
it can feel like you're seeing the same facts in
a different light. Maybe where you grew up, it's not
(00:29):
rude to belch at the table, or maybe it's rude
do not belch at the table. When misunderstandings come from
deep cultural differences, it can be very hard to bridge
the divide and understand each other. Now consider this, what
are the chances we'll be able to make that kind
of connection with alien intelligence? Are we likely to accidentally
belch or not belch our way into planet wide extermination? Hi?
(01:09):
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I have so
many questions about how the universe works, from basic questions
like what's inside the electrons and quarks that make us up?
To deeper questions such as why these particles and not
other particles? To cosmic questions like is what we are
learning about the cosmos something that's true and universal? Or
(01:32):
hopelessly human centric and Welcome to the podcast. Daniel and
Jorge Explain the Universe, where we ask all of these
questions and much more and dive into what science does
and does not know about the answer. We don't shy
away from exploring the biggest and deepest of cosmic mysteries
because we think that everyone out there wants to know
(01:52):
the meaning and the context of our lives. How did
it all start, how does it all work? How will
it all end? And every one deserves to share in
our understanding, limited as it may be, and in our confusion,
extensive as it is. Because science is just people being
curious and methodically building knowledge about the universe, and we
(02:12):
are all curious creatures. You might be curious why we
call it. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe When today
is just Daniel, My friend and co host Jorge is
away today, so it's just me. But you are in
for a very special treat today. We have an interview
today with a guest who I am super excited to
talk to, Professor Noam Chomsky, world famous linguists and world
class intellectual. I invited Professor Chomsky on the show today
(02:35):
to talk about a question that I suspect nobody has
ever asked him before. As regular listeners of the show
are no doubt awhere. I am very keen to believe
in aliens, not that I'm hoping to be abducted and probed,
but that I am desperate to meet extraterrestrial intelligence. Desperate
because just meeting them would answer one of the biggest
and most important questions in modern science. Are we alone
(02:59):
in the universe? I suspect the answer is no, and
that the galaxy is teeming with intelligent beings, but we
can't know until we actually know, so I'd like to believe,
but as a scientist, I'm also a skeptic. We did
a fun program recently on those Navy UFO videos where
Mick West gave us some pretty convincing non alien interpretations
of those videos. I know that some of you out
(03:20):
there are not fans of his and his relentless debunking,
but I have respect for the skeptical approach as long
as you stay open minded enough to be persuadable given
enough evidence. But today's episode is not about whether there
are aliens or whether they have visited Earth. That's very
well trodden territory today's episode is about what happens next.
(03:41):
Say that aliens do exist and do visit the Earth,
and don't fry us from space with the planet wide
death ray. Here's what really excites me about that alien visit.
Beyond knowing that we're not alone, what excites me is
that we might be able to ask them science questions.
If they have traveled tween stars to get here, assuming
(04:02):
they are octopied from seas under Europa, then they must
know more about the universe than we do. At the
very least, they probably know different things about the universe,
and so we could compare notes and learn rather than
just struggling for decades or centuries to unravel the puzzles
of the universe ourselves. We could get the answers straight
away from our new alien friends, or could we could
(04:25):
we manage to set up a communication system that would
allow us to talk to the aliens, to communicate with
them deeply enough that we can get past the welcome
to Earth, please don't kill us all the way to
what's inside an electron? Or what happened before the Big Bang?
Or even just how does your warp drive work? Is
that actually possible? So on today's episode, we'll be asking
(04:46):
the question will we be able to learn science from aliens?
To help me explore this topic, I'm very pleased to
introduce Professor G. Noam Chomsky, pleased to be with. Well,
let me get it started with something of a less
serious question. One thing you're famous for is answering all
of your emails, and that's something that I try to
(05:08):
do as well, though I'm sure I don't receive nearly
as many as you do, and I'll admit to having
been inspired by your approach here, but it's very much
counter to what most of our colleagues in academia do,
who treat email from the public as a nuisance. So
what motivates you to be so accessible and so responsive? Well,
first of all, I I don't answer all of it.
(05:30):
Anything that's within the realm of sanity, moderate seriousness witches
a lot I try to answer. I just assume that
people ought to be taken seriously, well wonderful. I hope
that when aliens arrive and start talking to us, that
they also take us seriously. So the question we're diving
(05:51):
into today is first, how do we begin to talk
to aliens? And then I want to get deeper into
the question of whether we could actually learn things from them,
understand their mental model, also the universe. But let's start
with imagining what it might be like as a linguist
to work on this problem. How do you begin? Say
you receive a recording from CT and they ask you
(06:11):
if you think a series of pulses from spaces language,
if it has information? Is it possible to know whether
there's information in there without being able to decode it
first and actually translated. If there are any intelligent aliens,
which is an open question, and if they exist, we
could ever get in contact with them, which is an
(06:32):
even more open question, then the question would arise. It's
a pretty remote question, and the only way to proceed,
as usual would be to try to find some common ground.
Begin with that. So what's the likely common ground? Well,
there's some closable openings. There's an interesting article by Marvin Minsky,
(06:57):
you want, of the founders of artificial and diligence, maybe
thirty years ago, when he addressed this problem in an
interesting way. He pointed out that he and one of
his students had done a thought experiment with the touring
machines abstract computers and had it's known that you can
(07:20):
have a universal touring machine, one in which you can
put a program for any possible algorithm and it will
implement it, and it can be reduced to a small size.
I think the smallest is maybe two states and three
symbols or something like that. So they what they did
(07:41):
was pick the simplest possible touring machines, the ones with
the smallest intrinsic characteristic states and symbols, and just let
them run freely and see what they did. Most of
them either got into endless loops or crashed, but some
of them lived and what they produced basically was the
(08:04):
successor function. So Minski suggested that maybe if an intelligence
existed somewhere, they would at least have the successor function,
and that might be a way to establish contact with them,
says some linguistic interests, because you can show that if
(08:27):
you take the simplest possible human language, one which has
only one word in its vocabulary and uses the simplest
version of the computational principles that are used in human language,
if you do that, you basically get the successor function.
(08:49):
So maybe there's a point of contact these systems. Also
with a little bit of tweaking give you arithmetic. So
maybe that's a broader point of contact. You could established
that for you could try to spread the range of
intercommunication beyond. There's a lot of things you can do
(09:09):
with just a arithmetic, coding thoughts and expressions. For example,
she really get sophisticated about it. You can do girdle number,
and you get to the assumption there is that they
may have discovered similar mathematical principles which they would recognize
if we sort of expressed our version of them, they
(09:30):
might identify them and then recognize us as intelligent creatures
worthy of discussion. Well, there's a good chance that at
least a arithmetic maybe not mathematics, but at least the
arithmetic is universal and absolutely To really get fancy, there
are models of non standard models of arithmetic that don't
(09:50):
satisfy on those axioms, but we can put that aside.
Basic arithmetic is very possibly an absolute system, as the
rest of mathematics is. Import at least the human construction
can be done in different ways and still be consistent.
Some of the major results of modern mathematics have been
(10:12):
to demonstrate then, so it could be that if you
go off into broader demands, Like said theory, you might
find other ways of looking at things. Fair gus that
at least the arithmetic would be close enough to be absolute,
so that anything we might call intelligence, that we would
recognize as intelligence would at least hit on that. How
(10:32):
do we know the difference between what's absolute and what's
just human thinking? I mean, is it a question of
definition that these is the class of intelligence that we
can communicate with, and therefore we define intelligence to be
people who think with a mathematical basis, Or can we
actually make some argument that basic mathematics is inherent to
(10:54):
the universe rather than just a property of our thinking. Well,
you're reaching into a my debated and rather obscure area
of foundations of mathematics. That there are viewpoints like Kurt Kirtle,
for example, who argued, these are just the truths of mathematics,
(11:17):
or like the truths of physics, they're just part of
the world. You know, nothing to do with us. We
can grasp them the way we can grasp other phenomena.
The numbers are there in some ideal platonic world, and
we grasp them the with same way I can see
the sun in the sky. Just perception. There are others
(11:42):
who try to argue that these are human creations, the
characteristic of the mind that we construct these things. I
don't know of a really solid way of resolving this question.
There are many sophisticated debate about it. It strikes me
that in some sense we ask similar questions about the
(12:04):
nature of biological life, even putting aside aliens and intelligence,
we wonder what life might look like on other planets.
To make educated but ignorant guesses based on the diversity
or the lack of diversity here on Earth, So we
imagine common structures that are everywhere on Earth might be
universal to all life. Can we play the same game
(12:25):
and think about how alien languages might work based on
the diversity or the universality of elements of language here
on Earth. Are there common structures to human languages or
Earth languages that might be universal. You can make some
speculations based on what we know. What we know is
(12:46):
not enormous, but there's speaking of human language, there's fairly
solid evidence that it's an essential species property common to
human support severe pathology, and without any analog in other
(13:08):
organic systems. So it seems to be something unique to
humans and common to humans. No archaeological evidence is not
definitive by any means, but there is substantial archaeological evidence
that indicates fairly strongly that before Homo sapiens appeared, roughly
(13:32):
two to three hundred thousand years ago, there's no significant
sign of symbolic activity, maybe a scratch on a piece
of wood or something like that. Not long after modern
humans appear, means in evolutionary time, like maybe tens of
thousands of years, and not long after that you do
(13:54):
start to get rich symbolical evidence of extensive symbolic act
of it. Pretty soon you get really remarkable examples like
the cave drawings and so on. There's genomic evidence now
that humans began to separate at least a hundred and
(14:14):
fifty thousand years ago now, and evolutionary time that's not
long after humans appeared. So putting all this together to
plausible speculation that along with anatomically modern humans came some
rewiring of the brain which led to the basis for
(14:37):
human language, human symbolic activity, human thought, which doesn't exist
elsewhere and hasn't changed since it emerged, which is a
short period of time. If that's true, we can then
ask is there something about human language that makes it
possibly maybe as universal as arithmetic might be. So if
(14:59):
you think about the nature of evolution, what kind of
a process is evolution? Well, what happens is, first some
accident takes place. You have a functioning system, maybe bacteria,
around for millions of years. Then some accident takes place.
In this case, the accident apparently was one bacterium swallowing
(15:23):
another microorganism. By accident, Well, that broke structural barriers. Could
be a mutation, could be gene transposition. There are lots
of possible kinds of accidents that can happen. Could be
a shower of cosmic race, you know, volcanic eruption. But
(15:43):
some diseruption took takes place in this case back a
couple of billion years ago, it was apparently a bacterium
swallowing another microorganism. Well, then the second stage of evolution
is nature comes along and it tries to construct the
simplest way of handling the system that was disrupted. There's
(16:05):
a standard principle, sometimes called the Galilean principle, that nature
is simple and it's the responsibility of scientists to prove it.
Then it is an assumption, but it has been so
successful that it's not challenged really, so I think we
can take it to be a plausible assumption. So nature
steps in constructs the simplest answer to how to deal
(16:29):
with this disruption. Then comes the third stage of evolution,
which is winnowing basically, of the organisms that survived the
second stage, which ones are more reproductively successful, and then
it will turn out those proliferate. That's natural selection. Going
back to the case of language, what may very well
(16:51):
have happened is that some disruption took place which lead
to modern humans. They're different obviously and anyways, and we
can roughly time it on the order of two to
three thousand years ago. Then nature came along found the
simplest way of dealing with it. That's the basis for
(17:14):
human language and human thought. It was fixed. We have
some idea of what it might be. We're getting to
the point where you can begin to explain complex phenomenal
language on the basis of the assumption that nature picked
the simplest possible computational system. Then it never changed because
(17:36):
there everybody's gone it. So that's a possibility if you
count heads among linguists and people who study evolution almost
nobody accepted. But I think it's very likely correct, and
I think we're moving towards showing it well. I suppose
you could. Then we would have reason to believe that
(17:58):
if the kind of disruption that led to intelligence, life
ever occurred elsewhere in the universe could very well follow
the same course. It's essentially you're arguing that our language
might be some optimal solution to this problem and therefore
a common point in evolution even on other planets. Um
(18:18):
there is a thesis as a names called the strong
minimalist thesis, which sets as an ideal to see if
you can show the language is the simplest form of
a computational system that will meet an external criterion, And
the external criterion is that it constitutes thought. Means it
(18:41):
has to have semantically significant atoms which can combine. Has
to meet that condition. So the simplest way of conforming
to pro properties of computational efficiency could be language. Now,
we're very far from having demonstrated that their steps towards
Does that mean therefore, that we should be able to
(19:03):
decode every human language? And is that the case? Aren't
there examples of human languages that we've had a great
difficulty decoding, for example, Egyptian hieroglyphics. Would we have unraveled
their mysteries without the Rosetta stone. In the past several
decades serve been thousands of human languages of every typological
(19:26):
variety that have been studied in some depth, and when
you first look at them, they seem very diverse. The
same is true if you look at anything you don't understand,
it looks wildly diverse. Or if you go back in biology,
well for their fifty years, it was assumed that organisms
(19:49):
are so radically diverse that each one has to be
studied on its own terms, can't throw any conclusions from
one to others. But now that's them to be radically false.
It turns out that organisms are sharply restricted in the
forms that they can too, and the nature of the
(20:10):
way they're can constituted. It's so extreme that it's even
been suggested tentatively that there might be a universal genome,
just basically one organism and then minor variations on it.
It's not considered an impossible assumption, applausible, though not demonstrated.
(20:32):
Some well, the same has happened in the case of language.
You go back to the days when I was a
student nineteen forties, the virtually universal assumption was languages can
vary in every possible way, and each one has to
be studied on its own, and you can't draw any
conclusions from one about other. Kind of a foundation of
(20:57):
philosophy of language liquids sticks and and still pretty widely held.
I think we're moving in the same direction as biology.
It's as you study would appear to be radically diverse languages,
seems that it's a deeper level you do find uniformities,
(21:18):
and it's even becoming increasingly possible to see component of
language which basically creates thoughts, is close to uniform or
maybe even uniform on humans. And that the very the
locus of variation is in the superficial aspect of how
(21:41):
you externalize it. Like as if you had to take
an analogy, it's take your laptop computer which as a
program and another program doesn't care what printer you link
it up to. Language maybe something like that, there's an
internal program you can link it to one or another computer.
(22:01):
In fact, it doesn't even have to be sound, could
be signed, could even be touched any sufficiently rich sensory
motor system seems to be available as a means of
externalizing the internal thought system. This incidentally, is taking up
on a tradition of about several millennium which lasted into
(22:25):
the twenty century. There was a sharp break in the
twentieth century with the rise of behaviorism and the structuralism
and linguistics, both of which were kind of like operationalism
and physics. You should just look at the phenomenon the data,
no complicated theories, that was it. And the conception of
(22:51):
language changed in the twentieth century. Became viewed as basically
an instrument of communication, because that's what you can observe.
I think we're no learning lest the tradition was correct.
It's basically a form of constituting thought with communication and
ancillary property. Okay, very little of our use of languages communications.
(23:17):
It's almost all internal what we call thinking. Well, this
is super fascinating and I have a lot more questions,
but first let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back,
(23:39):
and we're talking to Professor Noam Chomsky about the possibility
of communicating with aliens, whether we could understand what's going
on inside an alien mind and whether we might actually
eventually be able to steal their physics ideas. So the
picture you're painting is of language is just a way
to get a thought from one brain to an other,
(24:00):
and that there is some sort of internal concept which
might be much more universal. And the details of whether
you're sending an email or using social media or using
semaphore flags don't matter as much as the information that's
being communicated. But how do we know that that information
could be universal? And doesn't there have to be some
sort of internal representation inside the brain of that information.
(24:24):
Doesn't that require some assumption of, you know, a basis
set of vectors to define the space of that information.
How could we ever know whether the aliens or or
any other species for that matter, I really do share
that universal sort of internal thought, or whether the differences
are just in the communication patterns. How could we unravel that?
(24:45):
Imagine you met the aliens, how would you go about
figuring that out? Experimentation start by trying to find common grounds,
maybe arithmetic, maybe even some aspect of what called universal
grammar core six properties of language. If you can really
(25:05):
show that these are the optimal solution to the problem
of restructuring and organizing a computable function, the cursor function
that generates intinto the many things. That's the basis of language.
So if language is a kind of an optimal solution
to that, you can explore whether that's shared. At some
(25:29):
point you may get the points that are not shared, okay,
and you try to discover what they are. It's not
fundamentally any different than trying to find out what are
the elementary particles, what's the chemical composition of water? We
don't perceive it, you know, it's a foreign universe or us.
(25:49):
We have found very extensive and successful ways to understand
a great deal about these totally alien systems, namely all science.
I mean, there's a very interesting history of this. I
don't know if you want to go into it, but
to go back to the early modern science, Galileo and Newton, Leibnantz,
(26:14):
you know, Wigan's the great figures who founded modern science.
Because they had a conception of what the world must be.
It must be what they called the mechanical universe, the
kind of thing that an artisan could construct out of
years and levers and so on. That was what the
(26:35):
world must be. That's the basis of modern science. Newton's
great discovery was to show that there are no machines.
There's nothing mechanical. Everything has what we're considered to be
ghostly property's interaction without contact, and repulsion without contact, and
(26:56):
so on. Newton thought this was completely observed. He wrote
that no one who has the slightest scientific understanding could
believe any of this, and in fact, if you look
at his great work Principia, it's mathematical principles, not physical principles. Course,
(27:17):
Newton felt along with his contemporaries, that he had not
found a physical basis for motion interaction, and so he
only had a mathematical theory of it. For the rest
of his life he tried to find some mechanical formulation
of this, of course, in vain. In later years, a
(27:41):
major change took place in the pursuit of science. Scientists
gave up the hope of finding an intelligible universe. All
they wanted was intelligible theories of the universe. Newton's theories
where intelligible. Leibniz could understand Newton's theories like Newton live,
(28:02):
that's considered them observed. Basically, the goals of science were lowered.
Let's just try to find theories that are intelligible and
explain things, even if the universe that it provides is
unintelligible to us, because it doesn't matter what's intelligible though.
That's a fact about our cognitive systems. So any child
(28:26):
will assume that the world is mechanical, Like when you
do experiments with young children and you have see two
lines that move in common, a child will automatically assume
there's an invisible bar connecting them. Let's just have to
have a mechanical universe. Well you don't. Unfortunately, it's not
(28:48):
a mechanical universe. So that's a case where cognitive capacities
just don't happen to inform to the nature of the universe.
So we have to proceed in other ways, like trying
to find intelligible theories that will explain things. And I
think it's the same growth as we deal with an
(29:08):
alien might be that they have a form of intelligence
that is inaccessible to us. It's fine. If so, we'll
try to discover explanatory theories which account for their form
of intelligence, maybe account for theirs and theirs A super
theory will show what kinds of intelligence there might be.
(29:30):
It's such a far off dream that you can barely
speculate about it. But I think that's the way, were
the only way I can imagine. We just to proceed,
in fact, using our own experience, with our own history
of science. It strikes me that you draw such a
sharp line between humans and every other species on the planet.
If I've understood correctly, you arguing that humans are the
(29:52):
only intelligent species on the planet and the only ones
with its capacity for symbolic thought and expression. What about
other species like dolphins, or whales or pigs, which are
known to be intelligent and have some examples of communication.
Can we exercise these principles on dolphins? Every organism ass communication,
Trees communicate, so communication is kind of the universal and
(30:16):
if you think that language is just an instrument of communication.
The modern behavior structuralist approach, which essentially rejects the conception
of inner structure, which is radically anti scientific. In my view,
(30:36):
all of science is talking about inner structures, not just
arrangement and organization of data. But structuralism and behaviorism as
chewed the search for inner structures not allowed to do that.
You can only look at the data and the organization
of the well that's a sure way of guaranteeing you'll
(30:56):
never find anything, And exactly pretty much that's what's happened. Well,
I think we've extricated ourselves from that period of human thought,
at least we should have, and we're now back to
what great physicists Jean Baptiste and his Nobel laure ed
address described the essential nature of science as finding the
(31:23):
hidden invisibles that makes sense of the complex visibles. I
think every scientist knows that behaviorism was a sharp departure
from it, but it's a pathology which I think has
to be overcome. When we overcome it, we see the communication. Though.
(31:43):
It's what we observe is the complex visibles. It's not
the hidden invisibles. The hidden invisibles turn out to be.
I think pretty much what the tradition assumed the construction
of thought. Now, what about in religience? That's too loose
a concept. So I happen to live in Arizona, not
(32:07):
far from the desert out in my backyard. There are
desert ants that have cognitive capacities that humans can't begin
to approach. I mean, they can navigate in ways which
are impossible for humans, knowing figuring out from where the
sun is, whether they're in the northern or southern hemisphere.
(32:29):
Using solar evidence solar asimus to carry out what's called
dead breckoning, you can wander around the desert and finally
something to eat when you go on a straight line
back to the Humans can't do that. We can do it.
We need complex technical instruments to be able to duplicate that.
(32:50):
Sailors on the ocean have to have complex instrumentation to
head back to port. They can't just do it the
way in AUNT. So are they more intelligent than we are?
Open some dimensions? Point is intelligence at least if it
means things like ability to solve problems as many dimensions.
(33:10):
Humans are very good at some of them, awful at others.
Other organs and them is different when you get the
whales and dolphins. They have big brains, big even relative
to bodies. It's complex pains. They do communicate over long
distances in the ocean for them, and they have complex behavior.
(33:34):
They cooperate, they've worked together as I've watched dolphins. I
used to sail when I was younger. You could sail
through areas where they were dolphins and you could see them.
If they caught a bunch of fish, they'd start circling
around the area the fish, driving them into a smaller
area and finally eating them all up. All right, that's
(33:57):
complex cooperative behavior. You woman's couldn't do it that easily.
We'd have to have a more complicated way of doing it. Well,
do they have anything like human language? The kind of
stranger if they did, but there's no evidence for it.
They have their capacities accommodating to their ecosystem. We have ers.
(34:23):
Something peculiar happened in the history of life on Earth.
Couple hundred thousand years ago, a very strange organism emerged accidentally.
You look at the history of the long evolution of humans,
it's a long series of accidents, and started with them,
(34:44):
as I said, the formation of complex sells back billions
of years ago. Then many other accidents, one of them
sixty five million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth,
wiped out about eight percententive species and at the age
of the dinosaurs that we're some small mammals around but
(35:07):
managed to survive. Okay, that's us pure accident. A million
other accidents along the way, and this series of accidents
ended up at a point where one last accident seems
to have provided a computational procedure or a human language
(35:28):
which is not found elsewhere in the organic world, and
then seems that nature just found the simplest way to
deal with it. Maybe that's what happened, We don't know,
but that's what it begins to look like. If so,
it's very unlikely that we're going to find anything like
human language in dolphins or whales. In fact, take our
(35:51):
closest relatives, chimpanzees. There have been extensive efforts, totally pointless
in my opinion, but very extensive effort to see if
you could, with massive training from infancy, see if you
could elicit any language like behavior from a chimpanzee or
(36:12):
total failures. A lot of my students were involved in this,
and very good psychologists. My own feeling is that it's
about us ridiculous as trying to teach humans to do
the waggle dance of bees. I mean, you could probably
train graduate students to do something that look kind of
like the waggle dance, but totally pointless endeavor. They're not
(36:36):
doing it the same way. It's a different organisms functioning
differently we're not at the peak of intelligence. There's no
great chain of being, you know, starting with bacteria ending
up with us. That's a long abandoned idea. There's many
different branches. Organisms do in many different ways, and they
have their own forms of what we might call intelligence.
(36:59):
We have or desert ants of theirs, dolphins of theirs.
It would be absolutely a biological miracle if we found
that chimpanzees could acquire a language. It would be like
saying that chimpanzees have this amazing ability with enormous survival value,
(37:19):
but they never thought of human using it until humans
came around. This is if someone were to come along
and show humans how you can fly. You can get
away from that lion that's chasing you, Why don't just fly?
And humans said, oh, I never thought of that, and
you go like that and you started flying. That's not
going to happen. That's not the way biology works. If
(37:41):
there's a capacity that's of survival value, you're going to
use it. So the message I'm getting is that you
don't consider there to be sufficient intelligence in other creatures
on the Earth to develop the kind of symbolic language
that we could decode. So it's not a fair proxy
for the question of could we understand and alien intelligence? Okay, well,
I have a lot more I want to ask you about,
(38:03):
but first let's take another break. Okay, we're back and
we're discussing with esteem Professor Chomsky. It's a possibility of
communicating with aliens and whether or not anybody in the
(38:25):
scientific community takes this prospect seriously. You mentioned something earlier,
you said that the possibility of trying to decode an
alien language is a remote possibility, and I'm wondering if
it's something that linguists as a field are excited about
or think about. You know, biologists, If you told a
biologist I have a sample of life from another planet,
(38:47):
they would be very excited. They would dive in immediately,
they would be salivating at the opportunity. Are linguists excited
about this as well? Or is this something that just
is so remote that nobody really takes seriously. Some linguists
are interested in it. Actually, I'm one of the very few.
We I'm a co author of a couple of articles
and what's called xeno linguistics. What could you do if
(39:10):
you found an alien intelligence? And what we suggested is
something along the ones of what it discussed. I don't
think it's a topic that interests many linguists because there's
nothing to say about it. First of all, we have
no idea whether an intelligence of anything we'd call intelligence
even exists. You're familiar, I'm sure with Fermi's paradox. Where
(39:33):
are they? You know? I mean, from a point of
view an astrophysicist, Fermi could show that there's huge numbers
of planets which have conditions for life pretty much like ours.
So there ought to be lots of life. It should
have evolved into higher intelligence. We've made massive efforts to
(39:56):
investigated searching for any signal of intelligent life. So far
total zero nothing. So where are they? Well, one possibility
is they're just not there, that the series of accidents
that led to humans was so totally improbable that just
(40:17):
wasn't duplicated. In fact, is even I'm not confident to
judge their accuracy, But there are studies published in serious
pere reviewed biological journals arguing that even the complexity of
RNA is so improbable that it's very unlikely to have
(40:39):
found in any accessible part of the universe. Of course,
lots of the universe just isn't accessible, but the parts
that we can conceivably have contact with, or maybe that's true.
If so, there won't be any the answer to Family's paradoxes.
There aren't any. There are other possible answers. Actually we're
(41:01):
in the process of giving an answer. There's several aspects
to intelligence. One is the capacity to destroy. Human intelligence
has discovered the capacity developed the capacity to destroy everything.
The domesday clock of the atomic scientists measures that every
(41:22):
year now has the human species developed the moral capacity
to constrain its ability to do everything? Well, so far
the evidence on that is not very strong. Maybe it doesn't,
and it may turn out that one aspect of intelligence
is that the capacity to destroy simply exceeds the capacity
(41:45):
to constrain it. If so, there might have been any
number of human civilizations and they all destroyed themselves because
just natural law, that's the way it works. Could be
another answer to Fermi's parados. But the fact of them
utter is they're just not there, or at least we
can't find them. So given that it's doesn't attract a
(42:06):
great deal of interest to look into how to deal
with it, except just kind of thing we're talking about
amusing puzzle to think about, how could you proceed to say,
in my own opinion, and we proceed very much in
the way that humans proceeded with human science, which is
an alien world. The universe is an alien world, totally alien.
(42:27):
We have no grasp with it, but nevertheless we've been
able to learn a lot about it. Well. I think
it's a very intriguing question because it goes to the
heart of lots of fascinating topics about whether what we've
learned is universal. And of course we won't know anything
until we actually meet aliens, if that ever happened. But
you know, as a scientist, I see the depiction of
my field of science in popular literature all the time,
(42:49):
and sometimes it's very accurate and sometimes it's cringe inducing.
There are lots of fictional descriptions of how linguists might
communicate with alien intelligence. I wonder what your thoughts are
on various fictional depictions. Are there a particular fictional depiction
of linguist decoding alien language that you find plausible or
(43:09):
at least amusing. The only thing that I think is
clausible is what I just destroyed. It's like the problem
of finding out the inner nature of organic compound. We
don't have any intuition about that. It is what it is.
There was a period of human science, a flourishing, active,
(43:35):
vigorous period created modern science basically got Leo to Newton
in which there was such a picture. Turned out there
isn't any such picture, so we give up on that hope.
We now study everything from the outside, including our own
intelligence or intuitive belief of what it all will be.
(43:59):
Is an interesting comment about our cognitive nature, but it
tells us nothing about what we're studying. That was a
lesson of new Tony in physics, and I think, well,
I think the deep question that I'm curious about here
is whether the invisible truths that we're revealing, as you say,
we use the visible evidence to try to decode with
the invisible truths about the universe, are whether those really
(44:22):
are universal? And the way you're describing and it sounds
to me like you use the universe as fundamentally ununderstandable.
We are putting together sort of mathematical stories that we
tell ourselves as humans to make sense of it. But
doesn't that mean that it's very likely that, for example,
alien scientists are coming up with completely different stories that
(44:44):
makes sense to them, you know, even the human stories
have varied over the last few hundred years, or our
understanding for what might be going on inside. So is
there a chance if we ever met aliens that we
could talk science with them, that we shared some sort
of fundamental mental constructs about what's going on inside the universe? Well,
I can only repeat the only way we could find
(45:05):
out is by starting with common ground. No other way.
Common grounds might be arithmetic. Maybe it could be something
like the universals of human cognition, human language. Maybe if
it's a fact that that's the optimal way for nature
(45:29):
to construct any system of infinite generative capacity, then it's
likely that it will be universal in all forms of intelligence.
It's about as far as we can go after that.
It's just asking forgetting aliens. What might we discover about
the nature of elementary particles? Who knows? You know, discover
(45:54):
it when you discover it. Well, episode of sociological questioning
for you, which is, if aliens made themselves known and
arrived on Earth and were curious and peaceful and wanted
to communicate with death, you think that linguists and scientists
would be allowed contact. You think that the society and
(46:14):
politicians would allow sort of unfettered scientific communication with extra
refuels forward to know what humans will do. Take a
look at the United States, with the country we know best.
There's a couple of dozen states where the state legislatures
are passing laws. Let's say that parents can sue teachers
(46:38):
if they teach things that parents don't like. Okay, that's
the kind of creature we are installing. As Russia, you
could be sent to the gulag for it in states.
In the United States, you can be suited by parents
for it. Will going back to your question, will politicians
(46:58):
allow scientific communication? Many of them don't evelow human communication.
We speaking of communications, there is some history. We have
sent some messages out into space. There's you know, encodings
on the voyager. There's a message we've sent from aris Ebo.
Looking back on those messages, which we're designed with some
attempt to be founded in mathematics, do you think that
(47:21):
it's possible for alien intelligence to decode those you look,
you find those to be well constructed in general, or
do you think that they're sort just reflective of the
thinking at the moment. Well, we have to begin with
things like simple arithmetical truth. If you have two things
over here, three things over there, do you have five
(47:43):
things altogether? If you can get that for we can
go on from there. So it seems to me that
to summarize what I think is your view is that
it's likely that mathematics is at the core of all
intelligence and language. From that we might be able to
build up some grammar based on the most basic operations.
That fair summary. It's a fair summary tempted by platonism,
(48:07):
the idea that numbers are real, they're just there. We
discover them, we don't create them, contentious idea. It's not
very clear what it means, but something on that order
seems at least plausible. If so, they're going to be
there for every form of intelligence as far as language
and thought are concerned. That depends on the answer to
(48:31):
an open and significant scientific question. Is human language the
optimal solution for meeting the minimal external condition of expressing food,
having ways to express thought, agents, actions, events, and so on.
(48:56):
I think there's this work pointing in that direction. They're
steps towards the conclusion. It's a minority opinion. Most languists
don't pay any attention to this, but and those who
don't doesn't make any sense. But I think there is
a work tending strongly in that direction. If it turns
(49:16):
out to be true, well then we have another way
to deal with an intelligence if it is really optimal,
basically as a natural law should show up everywhere where
nature operates. Okay, that's a possible, whige possible based on
(49:37):
a lot of empirical assumptions. Well, let me ask you
a silly question then to end, which is all human
culture and all human languages seem to have a uniform
concept of what is a joke? You think that it's
likely the hact aliens. If they're intelligent and communicate in
some way that's intelligible to us, we'll be able to
make jokes. We'll get our jokes that we could understand
alien humor. Actually, I just read an interesting book about
(50:00):
that about humans. It's social history to study of early
modern conceptions, behavior, and so on, including what we're jokes.
So it turns out that one of the great jokes
in uh, I guess the eighteenth century was massacreing cats.
The book is called The Great Cat Massacre. It's a
(50:23):
very interesting book. That's a study of the ways in
which people looked at things. It's not mostly about cuts,
just one example, the way they looked at things, and
the early modern period not that far from us eighteenth century,
and a lot of things that look like jokes. Jokes
does all right? Well, I'm I hope when the aliens
(50:49):
arrived they leave our cats alone. Thanks very much, Really
appreciate your humoring me for these silly but I think
are fascinating questions that probe not just the needs of
our language, but the nature of our thoughts and to
be the nature of our understanding of the universe. So
thanks again very much for coming on the podcast. Well,
thank you very much for joining us for this conversation
with Professor Chomsky. His reactions gave me a lot to
(51:11):
think about, especially on the topic of whether or not
some of the ideas the stories we tell about elementary
particles are fundamentally true, universal to alien physicists as well,
or just sort of mathematical stories that we tell ourselves
in our ongoing effort to understand is crazy bonkers universe
that's out there. To me, one of the deepest ways
(51:34):
to get a handle on this mystery will be to
talk to aliens physicists about it if it ever happens,
because they might reveal that the way we are looking
at the universe is very human centric, that we have
missed something obvious because we don't have one of the
senses that they have, where we have not developed a
branch of mathematics, or maybe even mathematics is holding us back,
but we won't know until we have a chance to
(51:55):
interview one of them on the podcast. So thanks very
much for joining us to an in next time. Thanks
for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explained. The
Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. Or more
podcast from my heart Radio visit the I Heart Radio app,
(52:17):
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