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Chapter 15: Is the Whole Mind a Generative Grammar?

We have been showing how the molecules of language get built using as much magnification as we can muster. It forced us to be awash in linguistic detail, with just handwaving at deeper issues about human nature. Hovering in the background are the larger implications which we can only address with uncertainty but which we must address to be true to our quest to appreciate the implications of our views. Let’s take an actual peek at where philosophers and linguists connect. Much of modern philosophy has arrived at a similar image of human nature to ours.

Is grammar actually a model for how a good part of the mind works? That is the proposition we advocate, but still quite speculatively. It is not only a question of advocacy. It would be derelict not to acknowledge these implications, even if we cannot reason as carefully as we would like about them. Even as a speculation, it is important to discuss this. The implication that grammar is equivalent to mind emerges automatically if we do not state how adequate or inadequate it is.

We suggested that our capacity to generate unique emotions may be no different from a capacity to generate unique sentences. Physical coordination requires the same kind of creativity. Each time you catch a baseball, it arrives at a slightly different spot, so a hundred muscles must be organized in a slightly different way to catch it. And each of us might catch it with a slightly different style (organization of muscle instructions), so micro-creativity is ever-present.

We have seen how grammatical structures (syntactic trees) work. They look like this, with all sorts of odd things hanging from them, categories (noun, verb, action), functions (subject is agent of action), reference (pronouns refer to other nouns), recursion (an identical structure inside itself):

X = Features and Categories: Sentence, Noun, Verb

/ \

Y = Noun => Agent or

/ \ Pronoun = Coreference

Z = Verb => state or action

/ \

X-again - (in a recursive structure)

The nodes (X,Y,Z)—labels on the branches--bear systematic connections to nodes below them--and to much more that we have not investigated or do not yet understand. Much of it must be innate, though it may not be inevitable or obvious, just like the arrangement of our faces (eyes over nose over mouth) does not derive from some necessary relation among their functions.

At the bottom of the trees come words in specific spots at the roots. The words carry amalgams of meaning that draw from every part of mental life. On top of these trees, via intonation, we project our personalities onto what we say. It all happens in milliseconds. In a rough sense we can think of the tops and bottoms of language trees as connecting to other dimensions of mind that we have not built into the picture. While the broad notion of a hierarchy (the tree) is common to many cognitive domains, the specific links across modules to categories and words, often found universally across grammars, is what requires an innate map.

Such things are the “motors” of thought and they look just as strange as motors always do. If you lift the hood on a car, it seems amazing that such an odd collection of wires, screws, and pipes should make any kind of sense, much less organize energy sufficient to move a ton. The fact that we can co-ordinate arms, legs, words, music and a host of emotions when we dance means that we have cross-modular powers organized by the formulas in our brains.

The same strange images arise if we look at neurological pictures of the mind using modern MRI machines. (nn1) So it should be no surprise that our cognitive maps—like a syntactic tree for a sentence--looks odd, or even like a total hodge-podge. It all follows our speculation: rapid thought requires formulas that connect different modules.

The RepresentationalBrain

Our views are not isolated. In his 2003 presidential address to the American Philosophical Society, Paul Churchland articulated a similar domain for cognitive representations, quite common now among philosophers:

Suppose also the internal character of each of the representational spaces is not fixed by some prior decree, either divine or genetic, but is slowly shaped or sculpted by …extended experience…. So we begin by expanding the number of representational spaces, into the hundreds and thousands… And we reach out to include motor cognition and practical skills, along with perceptual apprehensions and theoretical judgment, as equal partners in our account of human knowledge (nn2).

Physical actions require a cognitive map. While experience fills in many flexible spots in our cognitive map of the body, the motor systems (arms and legs) are genetic and not acquired by experience. Grammar, though abstract and remote, is just like the arms and legs whose uses we refine by experience.

In a similar vein, Steven Weinberg, the physicist, expressed the view that mentally guided behavior will submit to mathematical representations:

I do think that we will have an understanding of behavior….in the path laid out by Galileo and Newton: the discovery of increasingly comprehensive mathematical laws. (nn3)

The heterogeneity of information involved in the construction of action—the fact that we draw from different facets (modules) of mind—-is both noteworthy and normal. Physical formulas like: “Force equals Mass times acceleration” also mix different types of concepts.

Identity and Instant Thought

Social scientists have developed the same concept. Claude Steele claims that stereotype-anxiety affects people's problem-solving abilities at a very subconscious level when taking tests. (nn4) He showed, for instance, that Asian women did better on tests when they identified themselves as Asians (on a question beforehand) than they did when the same people identified themselves as women on a similar test. The stereotype of Asians is that they are good at math and the stereotype of women is that they are poor at math. Whichever stereotype is dominant (as primed by a question) affects how one performs at an instantaneous microscopic level of which we cannot be conscious. His claim is that subtle shifts in one's unconscious identity affected just how students make rapid, unconscious choices in solving mathematical problems. This conclusion fits our general view that somehow we integrate every aspect of ourselves into every act. Among the things we integrate are new and old ideas, good and bad, half-baked notions and centuries old wisdom all marinating together.

The Instant, Unconscious Impact of Ideas

Others are instantly affected by every idea that we give voice to. We and our children are affected by ideas built into the style of speech. The parent who says to a visiting black child, “My YOU are very good at math” can get a whiff of prejudice in the contrastive intonation. (Why should it be surprising that he is good at math?)

When relativity was proposed by Einstein, its impact on realms beyond science was inevitable. If physical interaction itself was in some sense “relative,” then obviously everything else could be as well. Its impact began instantly, even though its path through the academic world is still progressing. Einstein himself took the instant impact of ideas into account when he said that he rejected the Big Bang theory because it would support religion.

From the teen-ager who ritually says “you never know,” to “situation ethics,” to the claims of deconstructionists, our ideas all mingle. The notion that fundamental ideas can be unconscious motivates historians to argue, generations later, that an idea could dominate everyone, though people at the time could not see it. The reaction to Enlightenment ideas that revolutions are inevitable was a largely literary notion of “gradualism” that developed in the 19th century. It certainly influenced Darwinist thought about how evolution occurred, although he may not have clearly realized it if he was sure that all his notions were rooted in pure observation.

These views strike some people as implausible and strike others as obvious. Even among those who accept the impact of ideas, one often hears people assert that they are able to disregard ideas that they dislike by an act of will. It is seems far more likely that, though we can diminish the impact of questionable and false ideas, we cannot eliminate them. For instance, grades are, to this academic, inappropriate ways to measure academic performance.

Yet if someone tells me that a person is “a B student,” my image of that person is affected whether I want it to be or not.

Once we accept the notion that ideas can be unconscious--as Freud brought home to us--then we must accept the possibility that wrong ideas can affect us. From there it is a short step to the realization that we are all affected by all ideas at some level.

Our view has an immediate impact upon the contents of this book. How do we guarantee that ideas which we cannot define perfectly do not have an impact beyond where they should? We have argued that children may not grasp the hidden “variable” inside a question word like who. But we do not want to say that such children cannot form lists or possess the notion elsewhere in their minds. It is difficult to protect against such an unwarranted extension. We know of no other method to forestall its impact beyond being as explicit as we can about our view that the modularity of mind means precisely that we can apply a principle in one sphere, but not in another.

Infinite Dignity

We can put these claims in a little logical summary:

1. All rapid action or thought must be mechanical.

2. Any mechanism works by principles which can be captured in a mathematical formula (far from understood in any real detail).

3. Individuals have unique formulas for special activities.

4. Inner formulas that generate unique actions cannot be fully comprehended by another person.

Our deepest intuition about human nature is that we should respect each other’s dignity. Our sense of personal dignity is a reflection of our awareness of that formula and our uniqueness.

No two people are identical not just because their faces are not identical, their sentences are not identical, their meanings are not identical, but because some aspect of their essence is unique. Such a conclusion is a humanistic truism, but is it reflected in theories of the mind derived from mechanistic models and cognitive science? Can we see ourselves as software programs and still maintain self-respect?

If we each have an unfathomable inner formula, then it should confer a dignity upon each of us that, somehow, we all give credence to. We can condemn a murder while respecting the idea that the motives of a murderer remain partly mysterious. We see current actions, but because we are unable to see the formula behind them, we cannot for sure predict the future actions for others (nor even for ourselves).

Our view of children, every day, is affected by whether or not we accept or deny this mystery. It has always amazed me that parents speak with such confidence about what their children’s unconscious motives are. Such confidence can only come from a belief that a child’s unconscious realm is transparent. Is it really?

The Mystery of Slow Thought

One virtue of clear ideas--the beauty of lucidity--is that they give birth to their opposite. The clarity of the computer metaphor throws into stark relief what is special and unknown about the human mind. We have argued that all of our personal complexity is projected onto the tiny mental acts that compose and govern our actions.

Yet there is a stunning discontinuity between ourselves and computers. It is the mystery of what I call “slow thought.” If there is a domain of information with logical relations, then a computer can race through the computation. Our minds also work very fast most of the time. Yet we are aware that other thoughts smolder and need us to “sleep on it.” If we have all the information, then why should any thoughts take a long time? Computers have no operations that suddenly take 10,000 times longer to process than others. Even computer games like “Civilization Two,” built to evaluate heterogeneous information, do it by putting it all into a common computer language, and then crunching the output with the usual computer speed. Nothing takes weeks, months, or years.

There is no obvious reason why any thoughts that work on a computer model should take a long time. It is true that we sometimes need to dredge up obscure memories which pop into a mind a week after we need them. Yet often we know there is no new information, just a “new” way to see old information when we ruminate upon something. If all new thinking is just another computation, then it should be as quick as shifting programs on a computer.

We can speculate that the human process of “building formulas” is not done by the same kind of formula that we use in executing actions. Note that computers undertake “automatic programming” where they program themselves following another higher order program. But again, everything is fixed, there is no need for extended time.

The fact that some rumination is slow suggests that a different kind of thought is involved. Intuitively, slow thought involves changing assumptions, looking at things from another angle. We are somehow rebuilding the machine itself. Since the process is slow, it suggests that the mechanisms are different and we do not know how to conceive of them. They are true human mysteries. And, though some people value spontaneous responses above others, most of us feel that slow, deliberate thinking reflects who we are most distinctly. Although we have argued that rapid thought contains the ingredients of creativity and individuality, surely slow thought is really where our essence resides, mysterious though it is.

Very peculiar human notions, like maturity, signal a mental openness that time produces in the growth of children. And it is whatever King Lear spoke of when he said “Ripeness is all.” If we understood it, a real kind of mental quality is reflected in maturity, but we do not have the terms to think about it with precision. It is a bit like a banana ripening slowly where we see a few dark colors but not the real microscopic process that is occurring.

If I knew how to make these sparse observations into a counterweight to the thrust of this whole book, I would. There is a counterweight is in the ruminative style of humanistic study which, therefore, deserves to be respected in its own terms by everyone, despite the fact that the computer model is a common assumption in the sciences.

Free Will: Necessary Assumption or Genuine Reality?

Now we will leap into the humanistic realm and leave the empirical domain behind. What are the human implications that “objectivity” excludes, which most scientific intellectuals strenuously avoid? We must ask about them if we adhere to our commitment to see where implications for life as we experience it can be found in our extrapolations from grammar.

If personal dignity arises from our sense that we have an unknowable infinite potential that is our own responsibility, then a decent science of the mind should honor the proposition that our sense of each other's dignity refers to something real.

Our mechanical system has just several features that are what we as human beings link to personal freedom: Creativity, uniqueness, endless possibilities. If our grammatical machine has them, do we as human beings fail to have them? The question goes to the heart of modern science: does determinism rule or is Free Will a possibility? The intuition that we have free will, although routinely denied, can be seen as another bedrock of our sense of dignity. We are the authors of our actions and bear responsibility for them.

Is all the systematic creativity inside our grammar really ruled by the iron will of determinism? Our commitment to our children is to ask: what are the moral consequences if we assume either determinism or free will? Are we really contemplating alternatives and weighing evidence when we think we are doing so, or are we marionettes manipulated by unseen physical forces? Many doubters seem satisfied with the “as if” approach: we act as if we had free will, though we do not. Does “as if” really work: Can we still have a sense of integrity if we believe that free will is an illusion?

The Legitimacy of Free Will

Though Free Will is an unpopular claim among scientists, it seems to me to that we cannot fully accept responsibility for our actions if we do not believe we have free will. If a great deal of science depends upon determinism, which says that if physics follows fixed rules, and we are physical objects, then what we do is ultimately determined not by some vague "self" but by inevitable physical laws. There is an assumption therein: that properties of mind will resolve into familiar physical interactions. Yet physics has not really addressed properties of mind.

Now we have a paradox: current physical laws are deterministic and the mind seems to have free will as a potential. Science derives energy and focus from paradoxes. It is recognition of the legitimacy of both sides that leads to insight. The dominance of physical sciences have given claims derived from rigorous work on mental products a second-class status. If we take the accomplishments of linguistics seriously, then the best move is to assert both that free will is necessarily true and that it is impossible. A resolution of that paradox will leave the essence of each view intact.