Language, Consciousness and Intelligence?
Edge: A TALK WITH REUBEN HERSH [page 5]: "A good math teacher starts with examples. He first asks the question and then gives the answer, instead of giving the answer without mentioning what the question was. He is alert to the body language and eye movements of the class. If they start rolling their eyes or leaning back, he will stop his proof or his calculation and force them somehow to respond, even to say 'I don't get it.' No math class is totally bad if the students are speaking up. And no math lecture is really good, no matter how beautiful, if it lets the audience become simply passive. Some of this applies to any kind of teaching, but math unfortunately is conducive to bad teaching. "
"Order out of confusion; simplicity out of complexity; understanding out of misunderstanding; that's mathematical beauty. "
Edge: PINKER VS. ROSE-A DEBATE (PART I) [page 4]: "the issues that we have to discuss this evening run far deeper than modern science, they go right the way back through centuries of debate, beyond Darwin, back through, certainly, a good chunk of the Judeo-Christian tradition; they are, as Susan said at the beginning, about determinism and free will, and how one understands the living world that there is around us"
The Reality Club: The Evolution of Culture: "Are memes a rhetorical technique, a metaphor, a theory, or some other device? Depending on who you talk to, they can be so wispy as to be almost nothing. As applied by Dennett in his lecture, they make no predictions and cannot be falsified. They are no more than a perspective. "
Applications of Machine Learning methods (ie. ML success stories): "Symbolic machine learning methods were used to learn to control a (simulated) airplane. The conditions of the airplane, the information on the control panel and the actions were recorded of pilots who were flying an airplane in single flight plan. These were divided into situation-action pairs."
i.e. machine learning is human mimickry
Feral Children (McCrone): "Whichever nature Victor might turn out to have, one thing the philosophers were not expecting was that he might be mute. It had always been assumed that speech came to man as naturally as breathing. Even a person growing up in isolation like Victor was expected to have the power of speech. "
Fascinating stuff:
Language depends on a 'linguistic' community AND language depends on a 'linguistic' biology.
Whence a 'linguistic' community?
A community with a 'linguistic' biology is insufficient, and even the evolution of such a thing is problematic (as the biological 'linguisticism' confers no selective advantage to the species until it becomes communal 'linguisticism').
