Noam Chomsky — One of the most cited scholars in history, a seminal figure in linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy, and political thought who spent over 60 years at MIT.
The gist
Lex Fridman talks with Noam Chomsky about the deep nature of human language as an internal, biologically endowed system rather than merely an external set of noises. Chomsky explains that language is primarily a mechanism for thought and reasoning, and argues that human cognition has both scope and limits rooted in our biology. He draws on the history of science, from Galileo and Newton to quantum mechanics, to argue that some aspects of the world may remain forever unintelligible to us. He is sharply critical of deep learning and neural networks, calling them useful engineering but scientifically empty for understanding language. The conversation closes on human nature, institutions, mortality, and the self-created meaning of life.
Big reveals
- Lex reveals the video recording of Chomsky was accidentally lost when the record button was pressed, leaving only audio.
- Chomsky cites Marvin Minsky's Turing machine experiment suggesting any higher alien intelligence would at least share arithmetic.
- Chomsky names 'structure dependence' as language's deepest, most puzzling property, where we ignore 100% of what we hear to compute on unheard structure.
- Chomsky says a Google parser tells you 'zero, nothing' about human language, calling deep learning totally remote from science.
- He argues deep learning would handle an impossible linear-proximity language even more easily than a real one, which is a scientific failure.
- Chomsky calls the common belief that human intelligence can answer any question 'a very strange belief' for biological organisms.
- Chomsky admits that as a 12-year-old he was terrified the universe would vanish if his consciousness disappeared.
Things worth remembering
- Newton was astonished and distressed to prove there are no machines, that interaction occurs without contact, calling it 'totally absurd.'
- Chomsky says science changed its goals after Newton, abandoning the search for an intelligible world and only seeking intelligible theories.
- Descartes noted an infant shown a triangle sees a perfect triangle, not the imperfect figure actually drawn.
- On a tachistoscope, people shown sequential lights perceive a single rigid object in motion rather than what is actually there.
- Chomsky compares a brain-computer interface like Neuralink to a book, an expansion of cognition known for thousands of years.
- Chomsky argues market systems are not part of human nature but 'a particular fact of a moment of modern history.'
- In the 1950s language was regarded almost entirely as an external object outside the mind.
- Chomsky says the significance of your life is something you create through your own activities, with no general answer.