1978: Noam Chomsky on LINGUISTICS and KNOWLEDGE! | Men of Ideas | Classic Interviews | BBC Archive

Noam Chomsky speaks to Bryan Magee about whether our language-forming capacity is innate or learned and whether or not the study of linguistics is the key to expanding our understanding of all the human faculties.
Originally broadcast 30 March, 1978.
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[@djm1613]

He’s lived a long time he was 50 in the interview

[@fabiengerard8142]

Best teacher ever. 🙏🏻🙏🏽🙏

[@djtomoy]

I going to name my dog Chompsky after this bloke

[@vtorious9102]

That P right there lol

[@brianbrino4310]

Excellent video and great philosophy! Thank you soo much!

[@thecaveofthedead]

I wonder if Chomsky believes we may have made some small progress on how human actions are taken now with discoveries in neuroscience since the time of this interview. We certainly seem to know some important things that were not only unknown to the ancients but unknown in Freud's time - such as that conscious decision making is often an illusion where we are conscious of many decisions only after we've made them.

[@bethenawaltz4190]

if you're talking about the fmri studies which show brain activity lighting up a few increments of a second, or whatever the time frame was, before a person is consciously aware of their decision to pick something up (or press a button), he's addressed it informally and it can be found on youtube he says, "this has been interpreted to suggest that there's no freedom of the will. it has nothing to do with freedom of the will at all; all it says is that decisions are unconscious, so the question remains open," or something to that effect

[@bethenawaltz4190]

he's also addressed elsewhere in writing, informally if you google, i believe you can find them, i can't reproduce all of the sources immediately, but theyre out there if you look for them

[@thecaveofthedead]

@@bethenawaltz4190 I shouldn't have wondered. There are few topics of this nature that Chomsky hasn't continued to address - even if he's not always met with universal agreement.

[@parvdize3968]

I do not think Noam Chomsky is buying that whole neuroscience so called theory，（otherwise he will be liking AI models nowadays but instead he knows clearly that deep learning and neural network is not the answer）he probably is more like Penrose who believe there is actually matters that made of conscious ，it‘s different from brain and neuron ，our conscious is really come from somewhere else and there is lots of theoretical physicists working on that.

[@lw3646]

Isn't the first 5 minutes basically a summary of the point made by Immanuel Kant many hundreds of years earlier?

[@psychedalek]

It's a question of scale. The emergent knowledge of a beehive is impressive to humans in the same way that the emergent knowledge of humans is merely cute to an intelligence we can't comprehend. Or is it? I wonder how close we are to the sum of all knowledge, assuming some neat unifying theory of everything may be just around the corner ;)

[@tomobedlam297]

We see the wink. Yes, well done. That's an excellent example of the empty waffle the majority of "experts" on the matter stink up the air with. Top marks!👍😂

[@psychedalek]

@@tomobedlam297 The point of the wink is to suggest any unifying theory may be no such thing at all. We may merely reveal one layer of an onion. Thanks for you own patronising answer adding absolutely nothing to the conversation

[@tomobedlam297]

@@psychedalek lol, I genuinely thought you were "taking the piss" with your original vacuous comments! Oh dear. 🤣🤣🤣

[@psychedalek]

@@tomobedlam297 haha, i see that now, no worries!

[@eemoogee160]

존경하는 놈 중에 하나~^^

[@iaina3251]

I miss intelligent and intelictual discussions on the BBC that isn't politically based

[@ajs41]

I agree. The fact the interviewer was a Labour MP at the time didn't affect the interview.

[@alexcoleman589]

Chomsky looks like Stephen Colbert here

[@petergivenbless900]

... and he sounds like Sam Harris!

[@GnosticJ]

Maybe Chopski would like to tell us what it was He and Jeffrey Epstein were talking about at their dinners..?

[@georgenada6478]

A plethora of perversions, toddler shotgun parties and the introduction of Junior Viagra...most probably.