Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution is Ray Jackendoff’s new book which tries to build a bridge between traditional linguistics, neuroscience, and evolution.

But after slogging through more than 400 pages, I was dismayed to find in his Concluding Remarks that all he himself claims have accomplished in the book was to “sharpen some questions.” I read the book to get answers to the questions—about, for example, how syntactic categories are instantiated in the nervous system—not to get them “sharpened.”

One particular annoying thing about the book is Jackendoff’s use of the prefix “f-”, as in f-knowledge or f-mind, to refer to some magic stratum between body and the regular non-f-mind. He integrates the body and mind, in other words, by inventing an imaginary layer where they are integrated.

There are gems of insight in this book. The overall insistence that language is not purely syntax-driven is extremely welcome; Jackendoff calls this the “parallel architecture”, where the parallel components in question are phonology, syntax, and semantics. This makes a great deal of sense. There are also some tantalizing hints of coming closer to how evolution could have built up our language facility—but unfortunately, they remain mere hints.

Other problems with this book include that it spends too much time on the academic politics of linguistics. Sorry, if you have real insights you don’t need to spend all your time talking about fights you and other people had. He fails the self-citation criterion, referring to his own works (including future ones) hundreds of times. His prose desperately needed an editor. And he can’t escape the linguists’ disease of trotting out example after example, without ever really figuring out what they mean.

The question of how evolution could have resulted in brain structures that support our linguistic ability is an absolutely critical one. It’s just too bad that this book doesn’t answer it.

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve placed “Bobby and the A-Bomb Factory,” my childhood memoir, under a Creative Commons license, making it available for anyone to read on-line.

It’s available here.

(View the original announcement.)

“Bobby and the A-Bomb Factory” is my childhood memoir. It’s now available from Amazon.

According to the jacket blurb:

This deeply personal memoir of the 1950s weaves a connection between the the men who built the A-bomb, their wives and children and ancestors, and the Native Americans on whose lands they lived.

This book defines a new genre, one that I will call historical autobiography. The emphasis is less on the nominal subject of the autobiography himself, and more on that subject as an accidental axis around which swirl historical and culture currents—in my case, America’s atomic program, as the title indicates, but also 1950s politics, Indian culture, and American religions.

Here’s one early reader review:

…fascinating…very well-written and flows and fits together and is funny and reflects you. Just great!

The subtitle of the book is “Growing up on the Banks of the Columbia.” Future volumes will involve the other rivers in my life: the Hudson, the Limmat, the Charles, the Sumida.

Gregory Raybassa is a literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese into English who I have never heard of. But I was struck by an a recent interview with him in the New York Times where he quoted Walter Benjamin, the German literary critic, as saying:

No translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original.

In What is Thought, Eric B. Baum claims that thinking is like a computer program running. Or, that humans are like computer programs. Or something like that, or maybe not, since it’s impossible to tell what he is really saying, or what he thinks “thought” is to start with.

One real good argument Baum has is that many computer scientists think the mind is like a computer. Well, I have a gardener who thinks that the mind is like a garden. Actually, sometimes he thinks it’s like a rake, he tells me.

Baum starts off saying that Turing’s model of computing was intended to capture the essence of thought, so that proves that humans are like computers, since Turing is God. Except that even Baum later admits that Turing was at best trying to model human theorem-proving behavior; certainly “thought” is more than just that.

I’m going to come back to some specific topical comments I have about this book, but first of all I just wanted to mention that reading this book I was seriously scared that my brain was going to rot away. That’s why I actually didn’t read the whole book. I worried that if I did the damage might have been too much to undo. For instance, take the following sentence, right in the first section where he’s laying out his basic ideas: “The execution of a computer program is always equivalent to pure syntax.” This isn’t merely stupid—-it goes beyond that to just being completely meaningless. “Mind typically produces a computer program capable of behaving.” Huh??? Is mind producing the program, or is it the program, or what? “The mind exploits its understanding of the world in order to reason.” Except, apparently, in the writing of this book. “Mind is essentially inherent in the DNA, in some sense.” Yes, in a sense that we will never understand from this gibberish.

Baum’s writing gives new meaning to the word “circular”. He asserts that the mind has “subroutines”, and then that proves that it’s like a computer program. I guess he’s a few decades behind in his computer science, or else he would have said the mind is “object-oriented.” “Awareness is awareness of meaningful quantities.”

In a book like this, the author of course could not omit a discussion of neural networks. Baum thinks that neural networks are a “model of brain circuits”, which by the way is wrong—-they’re a computing model vaguely inspired by brain physiology. He’s right when he says the collection of weights generated by training a neural network is in general completely opaque—humans cannot figure out how the neural network works. Nothing in a trained neural network corresponds to a “human” understanding of the problem the net has learned to solve. So if the brain is a neural network, how does this correspond to the “semantics” he talks about? If the mind is composed of subroutines, and evolution is a neural network training process, how does a neural network generate subroutines? More critically, a neural network has its initial topology defined by a human; is he saying that evolution can also evolve the appropriate network structure? He says “it is impossible to…evolve…code unless it is modular.” But trained neural networks are precisely not modular.

“Neural circuitry is akin to an executable. The DNA is more like the source code.” A cute analogy, which might work real well in the term paper the sophomore at MIT who took philosophy for his one required humanities course had to write. But what does this mean? Is the DNA what is being created by evolution? In that case, what is the equivalent of the compiler?

Baum doesn’t do much better with basic philosophy. He asks the big question: What are objects? Are they just in your mind or is there an outside physical reality to them? He then imagines he is somehow addressing this question by jumping to the question of how we know a cup is something to hold by its handle and then drink a liquid from. Sorry, Eric, saying that “the mind is an evolved program” (using a subroutine for the cup problem, of course) does not answer any questions about the nature of reality.

Baum goes on to talk about the process of individual humans learning as being the acquisition of new subroutines. This is weird. We have some built-in subroutines coming from our DNA or something and then we learn new subroutines? Are these subroutines we learn encoded in the same “language” as the ones coming from our DNA? How do they interface with them?

Now we take a big jump, to an agent-based model. There are lots of little agents running around each with their own agendas and utility functions. This model is sort of proved to be right by the fact that it’s also a model which can describe market economies. Taking a sudden right-wing detour, Baum posits that the agents work so well because they have “property rights” and try to conserve money. The agents compete and cooperate. But who set up the system within which these agents (which are also subroutines, I suppose) operate?

“Evolution has learned to search in semantically meaningful directions.” So now we have not only a learning process embodied within evolution, but a meta-learning process governing the process of evolution itself. Evolution evolves!

I’m a go player, and well-versed in the issues facing computer go. So I was particularly interested in Baum’s thoughts on this topic. I found them to be shallow, poorly informed, and lacking insight. Besides getting basic information, such as who developed what program, wrong, always a bad sign, he offers tautologies such as “Go masters play remarkably strong Go.” First, he says that we have a pre-evolved “program” for “causal” analysis. Then, he says we have a large number of “computational modules…that may very well be directly coded into the human genome”, including topological concepts like “connected”, “surrounding”, and “inside”. Besides the problem that these supposed pre-programmed modules have no connection with “causality”, the fundamental point that these modules being wired deep into our DNA, compared to computer programs which have to calculate the same concepts in a “computationally expensive way”, accounts for human strength at Go is, frankly, absurd. If Baum cannot come to a more sophisticated understanding of the complexity of go, he should not write about it at all.

I’m having a very hard time understanding why people who should know better, like Nathan Myhrvold the former Microsoft executive, would put their names on the back of this book.

Of course, we also need a theory of language. Baum has the answers here as well. Language is just “attaching labels to computational modules”. I see! He sums up his insights succinctly: “All that is needed is to attach a label to a computational module, and the particular module indicated will often be quite salient, because we share inherited inductive biases in the form of modular structure.”

“Evolution thus designed the mind for the purpose of making decisions leading to propagation of the DNA.” “I suggest that this picture will…qualitatively explain everything about our consciousness and our experience of living.” Thank God, I was afraid no-one was ever going to figure that out.

And a last bit of good news: Baum has also solved the age-old paradox concerning whether or not humans have free will. The answer is simple: DNA has evolved a mind which has free-will subroutines!

Cory Doctorow gave a speech at an O’Reilly conference on Emerging Technologies called Ebooks: Neither E, nor Books.

But I don’t think he’s got it figured out quite yet. He says, “The distinctive value of ebooks…revolves around the mix-ability and send-ability of electronic text.” But that’s not the disinctive value. The distinctive value is that the experience of reading them on the computer can be richer, more engaging, more educational, more impactful, and more fun. Assuming you have the right technology to do so, such as Infowalker.

Trevor F. Smith has put up a speed reader version of Cory Doctorow’s new on-line novel Eastern Standard Tribe. This is an ultra-cool technology based on some Xerox PARC research, which flashes the book, one word at a time, in large type, up on the screen. I just wish there was a pause button…

I picked up “Against Love: A Polemic”, by Laura Kipnis, thinking that it was about my favorite topic of the moment: the artificiality and meaninglessness of the concept of “love” as our society defines it. Instead, it’s a vapid, repetitive, overblown, overwritten critique of monogamy and marriage—a worthy topic, but not one I needed to read 250 pages of her hyperthyroidal prose about.

Kipnis can’t even figure out where she wants to come down on the whole issue. On one page, she seems to think it’s real funny that people horse around and destroy their marriages; then on the next, she suddenly switches over to criticizing the stupid things people do to make marriage fail. Which is it, Laura?

I’ve finished Hillary’s book. All accusations of blandness are certainly well founded. “Then I had the privelege of meeting Queen Sofia, whom I found fascinating and committed.” Whatever.

Still, this book is a highly valuable distillation of the key political events of the last decade by one of the major players in those events. And it’s a personal, and in its own way, intimate self-portrait by this girl from Chicago who ended up spending eight years in the White House, and is doubtless the leading candidate to be the first female President of the US.

We all know about the “vast right-wing conspiracy”, and have been programmed to chuckle internally when we hear the phrase. But one thing this book brings out in stark relief is the utter mean-spiritedness and take-no-prisoners tactics of destruction practiced by that group of people who, for what reason is hard to fathom, apparently devoted the entirety of their political and personal energies to the utter ruination of the boy from Hope, Arkansas, and his activist wife.

Chief among them is Newt Gingrich. And, of course, Kenneth Starr. After having read this book it’s hard to doubt the total banality and malevolence of their motives.

I was interested in something else, though, which Hillary really didn’t go into. What, exactly, accounts for the fact that this middle-class suburban girl from Chicago ended up as an activist at Wellesley, a lawyer, a child-rights advocate? Certainly a large part of her career depended on marrying one certain guy, but clearly even without doing that Hillary would have been a community leader, politician, or activist. Reading the book, it all seems to have evolved so naturally. But there must have been seeds planted somewhere which grew into this woman. What were they?

Personally, I can’t think of a better President of the US than Hillary. How about 2004?

Finished “Under the Banner of Heaven”. I was glad to see that Krakauer pointed out that the teachings of the Mormon faith are in some ways responsible for the way the Elizabeth Smart abduction unfolded. Any normal kid would have screamed and run away.

The Mormon teaching that there are old guys with white beards who are prophets (or worse yet, Gods) is the only reason Elizabeth would have connected to the crazy ideas that “Emmanuel” aka Brian David Mitchell fed her. That’s the precise point that I made in various discussions I had with people before she was found.

Having said that, this book is disappointing. I would have hoped for a fuller accounting of the psychological reasons for, or at least hypothesis as to why a major religion such as Mormonism would have adopted polygamy. The book covers a lot of gritty detail of polygamous life in the fundamental communities, but fails to discuss how polygamy worked in the mainstream Mormon culture of the mid-to-late-1800’s. He also wastes time discussing the Meadows Mountain Massacre and other minor events that relate to the polygamy issue only indirectly. And where is the discussion of other polygamous societies? I think that Krakauer did a lot of reporting and writing, but not enough thinking.