[mcprwklzpq]

Here is a later text version of this lecture: Noam Chomsky - Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding. https://chomsky.info/201401__/

I tried to edit for brevity and summarise the main point here, too:

Mechanical philosophy originated with Galileo and his contemporaries, held that the world is a machine (device with gears, levers, and other mechanical components, interacting through direct contact) and could in principle be constructed by a super-skilled artisan. The way they viewed these machines is similar to the way we view computers today (compare with "we live in a simulation").

Galileo insisted that theories are intelligible, only if we can “duplicate [their posits] by means of appropriate artificial devices.” The same conception, was developed by Descartes, Leibniz, Huygens, Newton, and others.

Descartes recognised “the creative aspect of language use” (and thought), a capacity unique to humans that cannot be duplicated by machines. The use of language is: 1) innovative without bounds, 2) appropriate to circumstances but not caused by them, 3) can engender thoughts in others that they recognize they could have expressed themselves.

Descartes invoked a new principle to accommodate these phenomena, a kind of creative principle (mind), res cogitans, which stood alongside of res extensa (body) (Cartesian dualism).

Newton showed that to account for the properties of matter (or res extensa or body) it is necessary to resort to interaction without contact, therefore matter is not a machine, and we do not have any definition of matter. The properties of the material world are “inconceivable to us,” but real nevertheless.

Since then in science we do not conceive of the world as a mechanism (the world is a machine that we explore and map) but we construct intelligible (the one that a machine can compute) theories about the world.

In summary: we can not know what the world is but we build theories about it that a machine can compute. The world is not a machine - our mind is a machine.

Also in there Chomsky subscribes to cognitive neuroscientists C.R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King critiques of neuroscience (mind is not computed by neural nets, but mabe by some chemical reaction inside cells, maybe by RNA, which may provide Turing complete set of operations).

[ngcc_hk]

Is the interaction without contact was later solved by the field theory? Both Newton and Einstein did not believe in this action in a spooky distance. (Qm one is different .)

[mcprwklzpq]

Einstein explained gravity without action at a distance with general relativity theory. I wonder what would Newton thought about that one since about his own theory he said "so great an Absurdity, that I believe no Man who has in philosophical matters a competent Faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.". So this action at a distance was solved but certainly not in the way that could revive mechanical philosophy.

Edit: There were a lot of mechanical explanations of gravity in 2 centuries between Newton and Einstein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_explanations_of_gra...

[typon]

Einstein did not "explain" action at a distance. He merely refined the model. The hard problem of explaining what it is still remains (as Chomsky has eloquently explained)

[slim]

thank you