Thinker Speaker

All humans of normal intelligence can learn any language, provided they start at a young age.  After the age of five or six, a child can almost never become perfectly fluent in a language, and the ability to learn it can completely disappear soon after that.  After puberty, it is almost impossible to perfect the pronunciation of a second language.” Gene, Peoples, and Languages, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.

Do we speak because we think, or do we think because we speak?  How does our thinking depend on our language?  Did we become smart because we can talk, or can we talk because we are smart?

To Noam Chomsky, we speak because we think, and we think . . . linguistically . . .not because it helps us speak, but because it helps us think.  Life is about characters and  events, situated in the past, present, and future, and so is our thinking.  We function in social groups, with goals of survival, children, cooperation, and deception.  We live stories, and so we think stories.  Our minds are literary.  We are playwrights, and we are one of our characters.  Language is always and everywhere structured for stories.

For Chomsky, speech came later, an output of thinking, like a printer is to a computer.  Unlike for thinking, there are physical constraints on  speech delivery, so speech is less than thinking.  By speaking our minds with others, we expand our knowledge.  Speaking empowered thinking. Thinking and speaking feedback to enlarge our intelligence and our scope of  collective action.  The rest is history.  We vanquished the bigger and stronger Neanderthal, and everything else.  We have taken over the planet.

Noam Chomsky started linguistics in the 1950’s, when the human mind was considered a blank slate, to be filled up with culture and learning.  He noted, however, how easily and fast children acquire language without specific instruction.  They acquire the skills of language fare faster than it can be taught.  He wrote a ground-breaking work, Syntactic Structures, in 1957, in which he posited an innate language ability with  a ‘language acquisition device’ in the human mind – a universal, innate and hard-wired brain system that unfolds a language ability – in a child, as it is activated, not learned by  exposure to speech in the early years of childhood.

This was at last a theory of nature and nurture in human development, not one or the other.  Chomsky’s theory up-ended the blank slate foundational theory of social science, and launched the field of modern brain science.  He is, today, the sixth most cited person in scientific literature . . . of all time . . . just behind William Shakespeare.

People vary in their ability to convert thought into speech.  Chomsky, himself, is master thinker/speaker.  No one can speak more clearly, more comprehensively, or more spontaneously,    or enunciate streams of information as they support reasoned conclusions and opinions about very complex ideas, than Noam Chomsky.  He can drive people crazy.

Politics is a different matter.

This great linguist theorist of biological human language is a . . .  radical socialist anarchist. Famous for repudiating behaviorism, the blank slate theory of social science, he strangely applies behaviorist rationality to human political nature.  Seemingly blind to the biology of tribalism and political behavior of non-linguistic human nature,  he forever condemns illogical politics as immoral. . . .

Math and Truth

How is it possible that mathematics, a product of human thought that is independent of experience, fits so excellently the objects of physical reality?”  Albert Einstein.

In 1939, at Cambridge University, Ludwig Wittgenstein was lecturing on the Philosophy of Mathematics.  By this time, with messianic certainty, he was adamant that mathematics was just a lot of linguistic convention, a bunch of tautologies based on definitions and word play.  He thought that seeking mathematical proofs, along with the quest to develop a mathematics without inconsistencieswas pointless.  He essentially taught against mathematics.

At the same time, Alan Turing, soon to be one of the great mathematicians of all time, was also at Cambridge, teaching a course in mathematical logic. He was also a student in Wittgenstein’s class.  He had proven certain mathematical truths that would eventually be very important for code breaking during the coming war, and for the future of computer programming. He could not agree that mathematical inconsistency didn’t matter.

The real harm of a system that contains a contradiction, will not come in unless there is an application, in which case a bridge may fall down or something of the sort.

Turing and Wittgenstein debated each and every class.  The other students  were bystanders. Wittgenstein would cancel class if Turing wasn’t going to show up.  Turing gradually realized that Wittgenstein considered debate. .  itself. . . as meaningless. He eventually stopped going.

The Vienna circle philosopher, Moritz Schlick, told his friend Albert Einstein of his allegiance to Wittgenstein’s thinking, finding all philosophy ‘superfluous’ and all metaphysical thinking meaningless.  Schlick was the dean of the Vienna school of ‘logical positivists’, philosophers who tried to believe that only observations, verified by experiment, could be considered real or true.  Theory and philosophy can never lead to knowledge.

Einstein, like Turing, could not agree.  He found the philosophers such as Kant and Mach very helpful.  He defended the role of both experiment and theory in scientific advancement.  It was not one or the other.  All living creatures used thinking in some way!  Concepts, as well as observations, theory as well as data, are necessary.

Physics is an attempt to construct, conceptually, a model of the Real World, as well as its law-governed structure.  You will be surprised by Einstein the metaphysician, but in this sense every 4 and 2 legged animal is, de facto, a metaphysician.”

Turing’s legacy is computers, Einstein’s is space travel.

Computers that have logically inconsistent programming will crash.

Space ships, with inaccurate calculations of fuel and trajectory, traveling millions of miles to encircle and land on asteroids,  will crash.

The SpaceX robot-guided Falcon 9 rockets ride into sun-synchronous orbit, deliver satellites to geo-synchronous orbit, at the speed of a bullet, and then return, decelerating from 120,000 feet per second to zero feet per second, in a matter of minutes, rotating elegantly from head-first to feet-first, and landing, intact, on a platform 60 square yards in size, floating at sea.

Mathematics, a product independent of human experience, is the pilot.

Tc(t)=Kpe(t)+Ki∫t∘e(t)dr +Kde(t)

Time and NOW

What then is time?  If no one asks me, I know what it is.  If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”  St. Augustine of Hippo.

Everywhere in archeology, in the pyramids of Giza, the stones of  Stonehenge, the observatory of Chichen Itza, or the temples of Angkor Was, humans have worshiped the heavens. But. . .  not the sun or the moon or the stars themselves.  No, humans have been worshiping their . . . predictability.  Humans express reverence for this mysterious truth of nature . . . the past informs the future.  And for their gift of memory, humans give gratitude to the . . . gods.

Rocks smash or get smashed.  Life can get out of the way.

Brains are predictive devices, and exploit the fact that recurrence is a fundamental property of the world around us.  Experience and memory allow the recall of similar situations and the deployment of previously effective actions.”  Nature, Vol 497, May 30, 2013.

Memory recall can be unconscious, but with consciousness, memories can more powerfully be re-lived.  This may be what consciousness is for.  Consciousness sorts the past, present and future, and with it comes a sense of a continuous, uniform, forward-flowing time.  Isaac Newton declared that this time was an absolute.  For Einstein, time only existed as a part of SpaceTime, not as an independent entity, and only a local one.

Only ghosts can hear the sounds of an eternally, uniformly occurring tick-tock.  Ask an intelligent man who is not a scholar what time is and you will see that he takes time to be this ghostly tick-tock  There is no audible tick-tock everywhere in the world that could be considered as time.”  Albert Einstein

For Nicholas Humphrey, the sensation of time is a tool of the mind for organizing memory and experience.

Suppose indeed that human beings travel through life as in a “time ship” that like a spaceship has a prow and a stern and room inside for us to move around“.  A History of the Mind,  2008.

And for artists too:

Thus, what happens in the thick moment of conscious sensation, Monet seems to be suggesting, is not that we blend past, present, and future but rather that we take a single moment and hold on to it just as it is – so that each moment is experienced as it happens for longer than it happens.  Seeing Red, 2006.

One physicist, Richard A. Muller, suggests that time very much does exist, and moves forward in the ongoing expansion of SpaceTime that has been happening since the Big Bang.

 “Just as space is being generated by the Hubble expansion, so time is being created.  The coninuous and ongoing creation of new time sets both thearrow of time and its pace. Every moment, the universe gets a little bigger, and there is a little more time, and it is this leading edge of time that we refer to as Now.”  Now, The Physics of Time, 2017.

NOW may be what rides the crest of this wave of new SpaceTime continually being created  by our ever expanding Universe, and we, with our conscious awareness, as unique riders on this surf.

Laureate

There is singing, and then there is singing. Bob Dylan does singing.  Listen to  ‘House of the rising Sun’, on his very first album.

Malcolm Gladwell speaks of innovators, people who are always different.  They wear odd clothes, and in ways that others don’t and wouldn’t.  They start fads, but they don’t follow them.  They never follow anything.  Whatever it is that makes most people want to be like others, and join in with others, they don’t have.  It is a life strategy.  Think about it.  Always being different avoids comparison.  You can win when only you are playing.

What others think about me, or feel about me, that’s so irrelevant.  Anymore than it is for me, when I go see a movie, say Wuthering Heights or something, and have to wonder what Lawrence Olivier is really like.”

This is Nobel Laureate, Bob Dylan.  He insists on being him, whether you like it or not. With a born focus  on his own, inner experience, with his trained skills of melody and lyric, he expresses what he finds there.  He wants no contrivance, no preconceived, or planned song. And he doesn’t want us to understand him.  He doesn’t think we should try to understand him.

“It’s all in the songs.”  Be open to what a song does for you, not what you are told to think it means, or what you think it is supposed to mean. Rather than think the song. . .feel it.

If a song moves, you, that’s all that’s important.  I don’t have to know what a song means.  I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs.  And I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means.”

Hey Mr. Tambourine man/ Play a song for me/Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship/My senses have been stripped/My hands can’t feel to grip/My toes too numb to step/wait only for my boot heels to be wandering/I’m ready to go anywhere/ I’m ready for to fade/Into my own parade/Cast your dancing spell my way/I promise to go under it.

I can write a song in a crowded room.  Inspiration can hit you anywhere.  It’s magic.  It really is beyond me.”

My songs are personal music, they’re not communal.  I wouldn’t want people singing along with me.  It would sound funny.  I’m not playing campfire meetings.”

My hearts in the highlands with the horses and hounds/Way up in the border country far from the towns/With the twang of the arrow and the snap of the bow/My heart’s in the highlands, can’t see any other way to go

“John Donne, the poet-priest who lived in the time of Shakespeare, wrote these words, ‘the Sestos and Abydos of her breasts.  Not of two lovers, but two loves, the nests’.  I don’t know what it means, either.  But it sounds good.  And you want your songs to sound good.”  Nobel Lecture, 2017.

“I’m no poet. Poets drown in lakes.”

The Texas School Book Depository

The evidence does cast enormous suspicion on Oswald. . . . leaves him looking guilty of something.  The evidence does not, on the other hand, put him behind a gun in the sixth-floor window.”   Anthony Summers

At 11:45 am, Oswald’s co-workers on the sixth floor took the elevator down for lunch and to see the motorcade, leaving Lee without an elevator. His last words to them are: “Guys how about an elevator?  Send one of them back up.”

At 11:45-11:50 am, Book Depository foreman Bill Shelley sees Oswald near a phone on the first floor.

At 11:50 am Charles Givens sees Oswald reading a newspaper in the first floor lunch room.

At 12:00 noon, Bonnie Ray Williams goes up to the sixth floor to eat his lunch, he stays there until 12:15 pm.  He sees no one else while he is there. The remains of his lunch – chicken bones and lunch bag – are found  after the assassination.

Between 12:00 and 12:15 pm, Junior Jarman and Harold Norman walk thru the second floor lunch room, and remember that there was “someone else in there”. During interrogation, in police custody, Oswald remembers two Negro employees walking thru the lunch room while he is there.

At 12:15 m, Arnold Rowland, standing outside across from the School Book Depository,  sees two men in the sixth floor windows, one holding a rifle across his chest.  Rowland points them out to his wife.

At 12:35 pm, on November 22, 1963, President Kennedy is assassinated. His motorcade is five minutes late.

I asked him what part of the building he was in at the time the President was shot, and he said he was having lunch about that time on the second floor”.

At 12:37 pm, Marion Baker, a motorcycle policeman riding just behind the President’s car, thinks the shots came from the roof of School Book Depository.  He races over and into the front door of the building, less than one and a half minutes after the shots are fired.  He tries to use the elevators, but they are both stopped on the fifth floor. he races up the stairs.  On the second floor, he encounters a man with a coke walking away from him.  He calls him to stop.  Mr. Truly, the building supervisor, catches up just then, he has been racing ahead of Baker to the top floors.  “That’s Lee Harvey Oswald, he works here”.  Oswald is calm, no sweat on his brow,  not short of breath.

At 12:40 pm, right away after watching the motorcade, and the shooting, Victoria Adams rushes down the back stairway of the Texas Book Depository,  “to see what was happening”.  She has been working that day on the fourth floor of the School Book Depository.  She does not see or hear anyone on those stairs, the stairs a sixth floor gunman would have had to use to escape.

Just at the time of the assassination shootings,  Photojournalist James Altgen takes a photograph of the motorcade, with the front door of the School Book Depository, in view, behind the oncoming motorcade.  There is a small man in the doorway, shirt half open, leaning to look out.

Is… that …man . . . Lee Harvey Oswald?

 

 

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