Anil Seth: a new thinker about thinking; but is he actually new?

He's new to me, at least, but this Guardian interview, with discussion of his ideas and his new book, means I think I need to do more to rectify that.

He says Dan Dennett was the biggest influence on his current ideas, but yet that he's plenty willing to argue with him. From the interview, "subselves" and an evolutionary battle idea on how consciousness emerges from fights between these subselves seems to be the biggest influence.

Based on the famous permanent amnesia case of Clive Waring, he then says it seems that personhood is not totally tied to explicit memory and related issues. To some degree, this would tie with subselves and multiple drafts (but refined from what Dennett says).

As for Dennett's denial of a Cartesian theater? What if, going beyond Seth in this interview, there is such a thing, but it's not permanent or ingrained. What if, per Seth and other new thinkers, that's part of our "hallucinating" our sense of the world "out there" into existence?

As for Dennett's refusal to deny, or even discuss, the non-existence of a Cartesian free willer on parallel grounds, will Seth discuss that or not? Will he discuss how much Dennett ripped off from HIS mentor, Gilbert Ryle, then tried to palm Ryle's ideas off as his own?

In light of all of the above, he has a great new riff on Descartes:

“I predict myself, therefore I am.”

Well put, per Tevye!

The book is "Being You."

It sounds interesting ... but, if Seth is really that enthusiastic about Dennett, it also sounds like something that needs to be carefully eyeballed. His Ted Talk may have had more than 10 million hits, but other than the idea that consciousness is a controlled hallucination, there's really nothing new.

AND? If he is a fan of Dennett (and hopefully, cutting through the chase, Ryle), then who's controlling the hallucination? Oops.

In addition, if he appeared on Sam Harris' podcast to talk to him, per his bio page on his website, he needs to be read very carefully. (The podcast is 115, yes ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN, minutes long. Pass. And not linking, even with a no-follow, as it's on Harris' website.)

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Sidebar: On the subselves and struggle, the Guardian also interviewed David Eagleman a couple of months ago. Read it, too. (He's a bit too reductionist for my taste, and per an old piece on my main blog, too much a techie-enthusiast within neuroscience, but still.)

Skeptical about Houdini and his touters

The piece is more than 4 years old, but I saw it via Pocket.

Anyway, I know that Harry Houdini probably had an edge or two or three, but bribery? Makes you wonder about magicians today.

That said, Jackson Landers does NOT wonder about Penn and Teller, or Randi, or others, whether conflating political libertarianism with skepticism, or other problems with movement skepticism.

Noam Chomsky, linguistics genius? Not so fast

Is Noam Chomsky perhaps above my intellectual pay grade? Yes.

Genius? No.

 

Including and above all, not a genius on linguistics.

Neuroscience has shown the brain is NOT "massively modular," therefore undercutting theories of language of Chomsky, Steve Pinker and others. I first noted this point 15 years ago. I also noted, per Wiki's take on him, that he was too much of a rationalist on this issue in general. 

Indeed, Wiki's piece on generative grammar notes that no evidence for deep structures has been found, and that Chomsky has shrugged that off by a fallacious appeal to Galileo (who DID have evidence for his claims), showing that not only is Chomsky too rationalist, but also that, in additional to being anti-behavioralist, he's anti-empiricist.

Related? Back in 2010, per Doug Hofstadter and Gödel, Escher, Bach, I said the mind, including on language, was massively recursive, not massively modular. And, more and more new research, on linguistics in specific and human mental activity in general, is demonstrating this.

And, some researchers argue that Chomsky's version of a universal grammar violated Ockham's Razor even if it actually does explain things.

Next, per this review of Terence Deacon's "The Symbolic Species," even if a universal grammar does exist to some degree, it might not be the major factor in the origin of language.

Related to that, and also undercutting Pinker to a fair degree, neuroscience HAS shown the brain didn't have a massive explosion 60,000 or whatever years ago. In short, language ability evolved gradually and adaptationally, or even exadaptationally. And "one-tenth of a language" is of as much evolutionary value as a planarium's "one-tenth of an eye."

Chomsky also seems to miss the power and role of cultural evolution in this.

 

Even more, of course, he ignores the power and role of plain old neo-Darwinian evolution. It's clear that other upper-level sentient animals (other primates and cetaceans coming first to mind) communicate. Per teaching sign language to some primates, it's clear that they have at least rudimentary skills at symbol manipulation and recombination. And,  of course, from that, clear that language of some sort is not peculiarly or solely human.

 

Those facts all go directly against the claims of Chomsky, a straight humanities guy, that language IS specifically human. From there, to use Dan Dennett's "skyhooks" idea, he seems to have "pegged" without evidence the massively modular brain, etc.

 

Finally, the end of this Wiki piece on transformative grammar he got some massive signal-boosting on early claims to have invented a new world in linguistic study. Related? He got lucky to be attacking behavioralism with his linguistic ideas just as behavioralism was starting to collapse in general. He admits to getting lucky in being the "somebody" MIT needed to fill the faculty position he was hired for. Remember, Noam is purely a humanities guy.

And, even if Chomsky WERE right? What then? He hadn't shown HOW things like deep syntactical structure evolved, and we still don't know that today, whether the brain is massively modular or not.

To be honest, really, on the origins and development of our original use of language, we now little more today than we did 50 years ago.

And, this may remain permanently unknowable.

And, there ARE alternative, newer, scientifically informed takes on the development of language.

 

(Update: And, among them, more and more research shows not only that brains are not massively modular, but that the whole old functional diagram of brains, including the alleged primary function not only of the cerebral cortex's different surface areas, but also separate portions like the cerebellum and amydala, is so out of whack it's probably at Paul's Not.EvenWrong. stage. As part of this, just as we know that "one gene ≠ one phenotypic expression" in both that some expressions need multiple genes coding for them, but more to the case, one gene can be part of coding for several expressions in combo with other genes, so, those functional areas of the brain can express multiple mental workings. This Quanta piece has plenty more.) 

The Truth about Language: What It Is and Where It Came From by Michael C. Corballis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Excellent book from the preface on.

Many people know the name of Noam Chomsky, but they may not know that, while he dethroned B.F. Skinner’s behaviorist approach to linguistics, his own theory, which broadly falls into humanist linguistics, has itself become largely passé.

Two major newer schools, with a fair amount of overlap but with distinct emphases, are in the lead today: functionalist and Darwinist schools of linguistics. Michael Corballis comes from the later, though he’s conversant with the former. In the same broad train of thought as a Michael Tomasello, he talks in this book about the likely route for development of human language.

Corballis says straight up that he knew he would butt heads with Chomsky, Gould and others. He rejects Chomsky’s massive modularity of the brain (as does most modern neuroscience) and rejects Gould for saltationist ideas about the origin of language.

Corballis says that he sees normal, incremental neo-Darwinian evolution at work.

Early in part 1, chapter 1, he calls out Chomsky for ignoring most of the vast variation between languages in his attempt to posit a universal grammar. He even QUOTES Chomsky to that effect.

“I have not hesitated to propose a general principle of linguistic structure on the basis of observation of a single language.”

This is basically like the old “spontaneous emergence” idea of maggots in rotten meat, Galen’s claiming the human liver has seven lobes because monkey livers do, or similar.

Now, after refuting Chomsky, what ideas does Corballis offer up?

First is that language probably in part evolved from gestural issues. He notes that human babies point to things just to note them as an object of attention, vs chimps who point because they want.

Next, he notes humans’ ability to mentally time travel. Tis true, he notes, that corvids may not immediately revisit seed caches if they think another of their species has been spying on them, but that’s about it as far as looking to the future among animals. Elephants and primates seem to retain some memory of deceased loved ones, but of itself, that doesn’t reflect mental time travel backward, really. Only humans seem to have that in great degree. This, in turn is part of larger “displacement” in language, moving ourselves spatially as well as temporally. Related to that is that, in English at least, many prepositions can have both spatial and temporal functions.

Beyond that, he postulates that humans (and possibly earlier members of the genus Homo) having third-order theory of mind, vs primates (and presumably, cetaceans) having only second-order TOM, and a restricted and species-specific one at that, is probably a big factor in language development. Language recursiveness and nesting would seem to underscore this.

In all of this, though, Corballis notes that primates have some gesture usage, and that even dogs can recognize specific human words.

Next, it’s off to grammar. After a basic look at parts of speech, Corballis notes how and why, in English and other language, some things like “helping verbs” evolved … and then, in some successor languages, devolved again. As part of this, and the idea that languages in general started as noun-verb only items similar to modern pidgins, Corballis notes the role of cultural evolution.

Corballis ends with his “Crossing the Rubicon” of how he things language began. This starts by summarizing some of his differences with Chomsky on things like internal vs. external language and their function in language development, language as a means of expressing thought rather than thought itself and more.

With that, he notes that to the degree there was a great leap forward, speech, not language, was it. Abstraction was not inherent to speech. Related to that, he says it’s an open question as to whether all current languages evolved from one Ur-language, or if instead, they started evolving after modern Homo sapiens started splitting.

Corballis does admit that, without more evidence, he too is telling a “just-so story,” and it’s nice for him to end on a note of epistemic humility.

Side note: many of his “peregrinations” during the book are interesting, but I think he spends too much time, with repeated returns, to the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, when it’s but marginally connected to his main theme.

 

Beyond that? Carl Zimmer reports that new research indicates language evolved primarily for communication, and NOT for thinking. Fun sidebar? This is another overturning of Chomsky's claims about language. (I can't say "research," since Chomsky did basically none.) Also, this would tie in with people like Corballis stressing cultural evolution's role in the development of language.

View all my reviews

Chomsky is also wrong on some philosophical issues, such as claiming humans have universal standards of moral justice. On many issues, no we don't. Even what constitutes "murder" is not 100 percent universal. Per my cultural evolution link above, Chomsky's also surely missed its role and power in development of morals. And, speaking of morals, his actions in the Faurisson affair still raise questions.

Sidebar: Deacon's second book, Incomplete Nature, is way controversial. Here's an interesting review. It defends his invention of a number of new words and generally says "good try, but still not actually explained." Deacon was also charged with plagiarism ... charges that might just be true.

He IS right, very much, on media criticism. I'll give him that.

 

Also, Noam's attacks on AI, with claims like it's behavioralist below the elephants and turtles, are laughable, unscientific and anachronistic. They're unscientific because Chomsky admits that his theories of linguistics aren't scientifically founded. They're anachronistic because behavioralism has even fewer devotees than Freudianism. 

I hope that within 20 years Chomskyism on linguistics has as small a crowd of devotees.

LCMS university Concordia Portland shuts down, denomination faces suits

 Yes, this is a year old, but shades of my own old St. John's College 35 years ago, still interesting.

The reasons are partly similar. Massive debt, and declining enrollment even before the denouement, in what was in part at SJC, and probably at Portland, a vicious circle.

But not all the same. SJC, in Winfield, Kansas, 35 years ago, didn't have a Queer Straight Alliance student group and a Gender and Sexuality Resource Center. Nor "frank talk" about abortion or LGBQT etc. issues. Nor people including the campus pastor downplaying the religious background of a college owned by the main denomination of the conservative wing of American Lutheranism.

Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod President Matthew Harrison pushed to cut all this out in exchange for directors new loans for  campus construction work and other debt. And, the November 2019 Synod board of regents meeting said a permanent university president wouldn't be appointed until the sex stuff was eighty-sixed. At the same time, the board of directors, talking through Henson's ass, later claimed (as the scheiss was starting to hit the fan) that Oregon Public Broadcasting was wrong to make any assumptions like this.

A year later, last month? The LCMS Church Extension Fund, as primary lender, bought the campus for $3 million on foreclosure sale. (Indebtedness? Allegedly, $37 million.)

So, how did I come to this piece? A Slate piece, which mentioned ripoffs in master's degree programs, referenced Concordia by name and led to this piece from 2019. Scroll near the bottom for the Portland info. Portland had partnered with a privately owned online program management company, which, per Slate, usually takes a MASSIVE amount of the tuition payments. (Think of something like the old University of Phoenix in new drag.) 

Here's your nutgraf:

For a preview, take a look at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon, once a small, respected Lutheran teachers college. After creating an online master’s program with a Silicon Valley-based OPM called HotChalk, by 2015 Concordia had become the single biggest provider of education master’s degrees in the nation. (It’s currently the third-biggest provider.) An Oregonian investigation found that in five years, the number of graduate students went from 800 to 6,200, with HotChalk getting as much as 80 percent of tuition revenue.

But wait, that's not all. 

Then, the program was hit with very some familiar-sounding accusations. In 2013, a whistleblower lawsuit alleged that HotChalk ran a “classic boiler room” in which recruiters employed misleading practices to sign up students, including offering them “phony ‘scholarships.’” [7] The suit also alleges that recruiters’ caller IDs were masked with a Portland area code rather than that of the Arizona call center where they worked; that they were told never to mention HotChalk; and that they were paid bonuses based on enrollment and could be terminated for failing to meet quotas.Federal prosecutors also investigated whether Concordia had violated the rule prohibiting schools from outsourcing more than 50 percent of academic operations—the same rule Diane Auer Jones is bent on eliminating. According to the government, HotChalk “recruited, hired, employed, supervised and managed all or substantially all” of the online instructors who were ostensibly working for Concordia. Without admitting wrongdoing, the college settled with the government for $1 million—but, as the Oregonian reported, it was HotChalk that paid the bill.

But wait, THAT's not all!

At the second link, about the foreclosure sale? HotChalk claims it's owed THREE HUNDRED MILLION. I'm sure that's fake, but is still an issue; per that 2019 link and the second pull quote, there's probably some shadiness behind this. (OTOH, Harrison openly admitted the possibility of a "$400 million crater" early this year.

Per the last link, there's more items of interest as well. Portland had looked at leaving the LCMS. This idea was years too late. And, after whoring itself out to HotChalk, probably not realistic.

But, as the nation's top offerer of master's in education, and surely a major BA in Education school, being anti-gay, or perceived as such, would have meant no student teaching internships in Portland. And probably not in Eugene either.

Now, here's yet more questions. questions of ethics.

Matt Harrison can hate teh gay, but where were he and Synod's board of directors over this lawsuit? Where was the Concordia University System board of regents over this lawsuit? Portland's regents, if it has a separate board from the CU system?

For that matter, did neither Synod's board nor CU's board raise any eyebrows over the MASSIVE jump in graduate school enrollments? And, has either board taken any steps to keep the remaining universities from doing something similar?

We've got some HUGE LCMS mismanagement issues here, and Matt Harrison should be looking in the mirror. Per the foreclosure story, why the hell did Portland have a separate law school campus in Boise, Idaho?

The closure was announced one day after the cutoff date to seek tuition refunds. Had the closure been planned before that? (Per this piece, HotChalk claims that before the closure was announced, Portland transferred "valuable assets" to the Synod.)

And, Matt, through all of this, you've got more problems.

Per this piece about the CEF purchase, HotChalk has sued and a jury trial is set for November.

Per the presumable deception of students, there's a class-action lawsuit, also noted there.

And, per this, the Oregon Department of Justice is investigating, including the university-HotChalk issue.

"Discovery is a bitch," goes the old legal saying, and Harrison and the LCMS will soon find that out, especially on the ex-students' class-action lawsuit. (That's with the assist, and any others, from HotChalk listed above, if they pan out.) 

As far as the divisions within the LCMS between the firm conservatives and the true wingnuts? It's interesting that, per Harrison's Wiki page, he never has broken the 60 percent mark on a presidential election. It's also interesting, but not surprising, that he graduated Concordia The Logical Seminary in Fort Wayne.

He's up for re-election next year. Having served since 2010, will he be dethroned? He's still under 60; can't picture him stepping down on his own. But, if he is dethroned, will it be by the non-wingnuts, or by the wingnuts who think he's sacrificed ethical standards?

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Sidebar: Bronxville, also reported to be on thin ice by the first OPB piece, has also closed. 

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Various updates, March 2022: First, a judge has struck down a lis pendens that HotChalk had against the campus. Well, he HAD. In a later ruling, the same judge reinstituted it, claiming HotChalk's lawsuit gave it a legit claim to the property itself. Bigger point? The judge looked at HotChalk's discovery request for LCMS documents. He neither approved it nor denied it, but told the synod to give him some random documents related to the issue to inform a pending decision. And, proof that the lis pendens wouldn't hurt its sale? The University of Oregon has announced plans to buy the site. I see no updates on the student lawsuit. And, for April, the U has closed, for $60 million. Gee, that leaves Matty just $240 million short of what Hot Chalk wants, and I still don't know what students want.

August 2022: The U has finalized purchase of the site. Side note: The law school had received full ABA accreditation just a year before the closure. Re the HotChalk lawsuit, the only new thing is to see it will likely not start until next year. Nothing new on the students' suit. Wonder if HotChalk will approach Judge Eric Dahlin about any "freeze" on the UofO purchase money?

Side note two: Will Concordia Wisconsin (Mequon), per a prof locked out of his classes and reported on by wingnuts at the Federalist, be the next Concordia system university to face the ire of Harrison or people even further to his right? (It, like Portland, has a majority non-Lutheran, and likely large majority non-LCMS, student body.) That plot gets thicker, too! The locked-out prof was on the shortlist of "suggested" candidates Matt and the boys gave the university from which to select its president. The board of regents (which means, presumably, that Portland had its own board, and there wasn't a system-wide board) chucked that list. And, shock me that much of this has played out in the unofficial house organ of LCMS wingnuts, Christian News. Still nothing new on either the HtoChalk suit or the one by former students.

April 2023: According to this site, both university and Synod insiders sandbagged against the process of Portland going independent by blocking the process for a permanent new president in 2018. And, per this LCMS insiderish website, there are other hypocrisy angles. (The site seems to be tilted toward what passes for "moderate conservatives" in today's LCMS.) I don't have much else right now. Neither the Oregonian nor Oregon Public Broadcasting has anything new on the suits.)

June 2023: Of course, Matty has his hands full elsewhere, too, namely, fighting — or pretending to fight — fascism in the LCMS.

June 2023, part two: Of COURSE wingnut groups like Becket Law are grifting on this case.

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra goes backward under Fabio Luisi

 Yeah, I "get" that the loss of revenue from a mostly live-attendance-free 2020-21 season may tempt the DSO to play yet more warhorses this year to bring back the blue-haired ladies.

But, ye gads, this is dreck.

A new work by Kevin Puts, former composer in residence at Cowtown, is the one close to new thing on the agenda. He's nice, but broadly tonal and within that, not "stimulating."

Joan Tower? An older, more recognized Kevin Puts.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is new to the DSO, but not new music or even close. (And, there's a reason his violin concerto is overlooked, and no, he's NOT the "Black Mahler.") Bland late Romantic warhorses for the return of Andrew Litton sounds about right.

Seriously. 

Still no serial music. No second-generation serial music. No non-serial atonal music of modern times. You know, like the original Second Vienna Trio on the first. An Ernst Krenek or serial-era Stravinsky on the second. A Penderecki or Schnittke on the third.

Instead, a bunch of dreck. 

And, I've already said that on the old masters, Luisi doesn't really impress me.

Update, April 4, 2024: Yet more reason to take a pass on Luisi? Per this great New Yorker piece about a sad recent trend in the classical world, he's spread too thin:

Fabio Luisi is spread across three continents, maintaining roles at the Dallas Symphony, the Danish National Symphony, and the NHK Symphony, in Japan.

Per the piece, it's not quite as bad as its focal point, Klaus Mäkelä, who not only currently runs the Concertgebouw but is tapped to help Chicago in 2027 — while (at least until he says he's leaving) staying in Amsterdam as well. And, while neither Dallas nor the NHK (dunno about the Danish National) are top-tier, they're both solidly enough in the second tier that they shouldn't be sharing a music director. A Luisi could do one or the other of the two, plus the Danish. And, even be principal guest conductor at a third, smaller orchestra if the ego or tightening corporate symphonic sponsorships demanded. But, that's it.

That said, there's more.

That is snarkily topped by this:

American orchestra subscribers have become resigned to a phony civic ritual: a foreign-accented maestro flies in a few times a season for two or three weeks, stays in a hotel or a furnished apartment, attends a flurry of donor dinners, and dons the appropriate cap when the local baseball team makes the playoffs.

Oof. When Jaap van Zweden was in Dallas, he seemed reasonably involved. But, it was the only orchestra where he was the music director. Speaking of, the piece notes that he and the NY Phil have parted ways. For the Seoul Philharmonic and the French Radio Philharmonic, to style it in English? Wow, what a tumble.

Wiki's page on Luisi adds this, which fits perfectly with the New Yorker snark:

Outside of music, his hobbies include the production of his line of perfumes.

Oy.