[mkolodny]

Given that blind people can learn to speak, audio alone must be enough to learn language. And given that deaf people can learn sign language, video alone must also be enough to learn language. That’s assuming that touch and emotion aren’t crucial to language learning.

[qup]

Given Helen Keller's grasp of language, touch alone must be enough to learn language.

[Hugsun]

I've often wondered if there aren't some structures in the brain, that have been selected for since the advent of language, that are good at learning up languages.

[dmd]

This is one of the most discussed and argued ideas in all of linguistics and philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/innateness-language/

[Hugsun]

Indeed. I'm reminded of the time a childhood friend essentially discovered the inverted spectrum argument[1]. That is, we can't know if my qualia when perceiving the color red doesn't match yours of the color blue.

We were unfortunately young and in poor company, so the idea didn't receive the appropriate attention.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia#Inverted_spectrum_argum...

[Shorel]

I think Carl Sagan discusses this topic in "Broca's Brain".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca's_Brain

[fauigerzigerk]

I think what you're missing is deliberate action and feedback. We don't just listen or watch as if the world was a movie. We act and communicate intentionally and with purpose. The response to our deliberate actions is in my view what we mostly learn from.

Blind people surely compensate for the lack of visual information by deliberately eliciting audio and tactile feedback that others don't need.

Also, watching others interact with the world is never the same thing as interacting with the world ourselves, because there's a crucial piece of information missing.

When we decide to act, we know that we just made that decision. We know when we made the decision, why we made it and what we wanted to achieve. We can never know that for sure when we observe others.

We can guess of course, but a lot of that guessing is only possible because we know how we would act and react ourselves. A machine that has never intervened and deliberately elicited feedback cannot even guess properly. It will need incredible amounts of data to learn from correlations alone.

[TeMPOraL]

Different kinds of experiences, but highly correlated.

[chumanak]

Emotion it’s crucial for sure