Language, Mind and Brain: Mirror Images?

2. Language, Mind and Brain: Mirror Images? Tatiana Chernigovskaya St. Petersburg State University

4. My points are ... • Why should there be a mirror for the Universe to look at? • Are things crying to be named? • How brains make up their minds?

5. My points are ... • Do we share recursion and even the faculty of language itself with other species? • FOXP2 : any chance to find a grammar gene?

6. Merab Mamardashvili

7. Merab Mamardashvili • Mind is a paradox you can not get accustomed to • Inevitability of thinking - Man is doomed to think: it is the ontological feature of humans • We are suspended in language

8. Merab Mamardashvili • Антропный принцип давно сформулирован в философии. Самая четкая формулировка его принадлежит Декарту, который подчеркивал наличие в сознании особых непосредственно данных знаний о целом, к которым мы могли бы прийти, лишь проделав бесконечно большое количество познавательных шагов.

9. Merab Mamardashvili • The Anthropic Principle has long ago been formulated by philosophers. The best wording of it belongs to Descartes, who stressed the point that mind has some inherent specific knowledge about the whole, which we could acquire only after infinitely great number of cognitive acts.

10. Stephen W. Hawking

11. Stephen W. Hawking: Does God play dice? • Anthropic Principle seems essential in quantum cosmology. Otherwise, why should we live in a four dimensional world, and not eleven, or some other number of dimensions.

12. Stephen W. Hawking: Does God play dice? • The anthropic answer is that two spatial dimensions are not enough for complicated structures, like intelligent beings.

13. Stephen W. Hawking: Does God play dice? • ...four or more spatial dimensions would mean that gravitational and electric forces would fall off faster than the inverse square law, planets would not have stable orbits around their star, nor electrons have stable orbits around the nucleus of an atom.

14. Stephen W. Hawking: Does God play dice? • Thus intelligent life, at least as we know it, could exist only in four dimensions.

15. Umberto Eco. Kant and Platypus. Essays on Language and Cognition (2000) • An immense power of language is that it shows us being so that the self-revelation of being is actuated within language • Not only can we name the objects...

16. Nomination is conventional

17. Umberto Eco. Kant and Platypus. Essays on Language and Cognition (2000) • .....but also, as a result of cognitive illusion, we get the impression that we can conceive them (impossible objects and pictures ‘breaking’ the laws of nature)

20. Yuri Lotman

21. Yuri Lotman • Humans are the only having the ability of reflection and self-reflection and thus creating the semiosphere of a specific character

22. Language is the only vehicle for humans to categorize and therefore organize the fuzzy and vague continuum of perceived sensations. Large parts of this sensory space even do not totally belong to specific sensory modality, therefore causing synaesthetic ( and aesthetic - to rhyme) sensations. Some are evolutionary so old and subconscious that even do not have specific nominations.

23. Visual (especially color) semiosphere is probably the most delicately elaborated by the majority of human languages, while olfactory is the less verbalized of all sensory modalities, probably due to its subconscious nature and cultural prohibitions. In fact, it has almost no vocabulary of its own and has to borrow labels from other domains.

24. Types of activity are associated with certain cerebral regions

25. We need primarily right brain to communicate with flora...

26. ... and fauna

27. ... to find the way in space

28. ... to understand jokes

29. ... to understand tastes, odours and smells

30. .... and all kinds of nonverbal semiosis

31. The right hemisphere is responsible for • Global/Gestalt recognition. • Revealing the relevant components of a situation (or a scene). • Relatively high speed of decision making • Classification of colours and odours • Orientation in space and time • Evaluation of gestures, face expressions and verbal prosody

35. Left brain subserves specific features of human language • ‘Digital’ and hierarchical structure (phonemes - morphemes - words -phrases - discourse) • Productivity governed by the linguistic rules • Differences in the superficial order of constituents

36. Left brain subserves specific features of human language • The use of null elements (e.g. ‘it’, ‘there’) • The use of sub-categorical argument structure for verbs • Mechanisms for expansion of utterances • Embedding

37. Nativists N.Chomsky’s nativism New synthesis (S.Pinker) Modularity of Mind (J. Fodor) Connectionists J.Bybee Network models Neuronal nets modelling (Rummelhart and McCleland, etc.) Emergenists (Ellman etc.) Important debates in Linguistics

38. Nativists: The reality of linguistic levels The reality of symbolic rules which is human specific Symbolic rules are not effected by linguistic probabilities Modularity and informational encapsulation causes lack or the absence of interconnectionsbetween the levels. Connectionists : Linguistic levels are conventional; lexicon and grammar are the aspects of one process, and morphological level does not exist There are no symbolic rules Probabilities are the basis of linguistic procedures The levels ARE interconnected They argue...

39. However, • Symbolic rules ARE used in complex operations, linguistic included • On the other hand only associative processes can be successfully simulated • There seems to be no memory in the net; then where is the information stored? • Associative nets do not need symbolic rules; how do symbolic rules function? • Cerebral mechanisms tend to prove network hypothesis; there seems to be no data on brain functions subserving symbolic rules and specific linguistic memory

40. Merab Mamardashvili • Я считаю, что пересечение гуманитарных и естественнонаучных исследований сознания носит серьезный, не внешний характер, напоминающий перекличку двух соседей. Но связь здесь пролегает в другом, более существенном измерении, а именно в измерении места сознания в космических процессах, во Вселенной..... мы не можем судить о том, какой Вселенная была в “чистом виде”, до сознания.

41. Merab Mamardashvili • I believe that the intersection of humanities and sciences is of fundamental not superficial nature; it’s not just an exchange of messages between neighbours. They are connected on a more important level,namely in the role played by mind in the Universe, in everything that happens in the cosmos... We can’t know anything about the Universe ‘as such’, before the mind came into existence.

42. M. D. Hauser, N. Chomsky, W.T. Fitch. The Faculty of Language: What Is it, Who has it, and How Did It Evolve? Science, vol. 298, 22 November 2002

43. The Faculty of Language..... • A distinction should be made between the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB) and in the narrow sense (FLN) • FLB includes a sensory-motor system, a conceptual-intentional system, and the internal computational mechanisms, providing the capacity to generate an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements. • Most of FLB is shared with other species

45. The Faculty of Language..... • FLN only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language... It is the abstract linguistic computational system alone and is a component of FLB(Colorless green ideas furiously sleep) • Such computational abilities are seen outside of the domain of communication (i.e. in navigation, social behavior,etc.)

46. The Faculty of Language..... • Human system of recursion operates with broader range of elements (..numbers, words) than in other animals where it is impenetrable within different functions while in humans it is, and it gives us the power to apply recursion to all cognitive tasks. • Genetic basis for this is evident, but The Grammar Gene is not