"[ Notes play ]" "[ Mid-tempo music plays ] [ Squeaking ]" "[ French accent ] I discovered Noam Chomsky by" "picking up a couple of DVDs at a video store in New York a few years ago: "Manufacturing consent" and "a rebel without a pause." I remember the sequence where a few kids from a school radio station are interviewing" "Professor Chomsky at their little station." "Noam was giving them his full attention, as he does to everyone who requests it." "Film and video are both, by their nature, manipulative." "The editor or director proposes an assembly of carefully selected segments that he/she has in mind." "In other words, the context becomes more important than the content, and, as a result, the voice that appears to come from the subject is actually coming from the filmmaker." "That is why I find the process manipulative." "The human brain forgets the cuts -- a faculty specifically human that, I will learn, Noam calls "psychic continuity."" "The brain absorbs a constructed continuity as a reality and, consequently, gets convinced to witness a fair representation of the subject." "On the other hand, animation that I decided to use for this film is clearly the interpretation of its author." "If messages, or even propaganda, can be delivered, the audience is constantly reminded that they are not watching reality, so it's up to them to decide if they are convinced or not." "Also, I have been looking for a project that would add up a long process to a hopefully coherent result, a way to focus my often shattered creativity and maybe contribute to expose values I share." "Of course, the egotistic side of me also felt empowered about the prospect of spending some time with "the most important thinker"" ""alive," as he is described in a paragraph which, coincidentally, ends by asking why Chomsky is an "American-hater," a misconception only possible if you consider that the same people who run a country also constitute it!" "But what the hell?" "Professor Chomsky is not getting any younger, and I better hurry up." "After all, I just did a film about my aunty for similar reasons -- not animated, though." "Then again, she is less controversial, or is she?" "We're gonna have a conversation, and, um, sometimes it's gonna" "run, or sometimes, not so." "Hopefully, it's not gonna be too distracting." "No,itisn'tbad ." "Okay." "'Cause it's a bit noisy, so..." "It's like that." "[ Camera whirring ]" "It's a old-fashioned sound." "Yeah,it'sgood." "So I wanted you to be prepared." "[ Laughs ] Hearken back to your youth." "Doesn't it wreck the audio?" "Alittlebit,but --wewill hear the camera, but as long as we understand the words, I don't mind." "Yeah." "So, I prepared my question a little bit, but I..." "Uh..." "Sorry, I'm a little bit nervous." "I-I, uh..." "You are nervous?" "Heis." "After all your experience in the public eye?" "No, not..." "It depends on the person I'm meeting more than me." "So, I wanted to start with asking you if you could record the very first memory of your life?" "[ Camera rattles ]" "First memory of my life?" "Yeah." "Yeah, I suppose." "[ Camera clicks, whirs ]" "There are memories that I can date because I know where they were." "Mm." "So, I can date memories from about a year and a half, when I was sitting on a " " I know where it was, so it had to be a year and a half -- where I was sitting on a counter in my, uh..." "My aunt, who -- my parents had jobs..." "[ Camera clicks off ] ...which was unusual." "This was the 1930s." "So, there was a stream of aunts and cousins and others who came through, and there were several aunts who spent time with us." "[ Indistinct conversations] One of them was trying to get me to eat oatmeal, which I didn't want to eat..." "[ Chuckles ] ...So I just put it in my cheek and refused to swallow it." "And she tried to figure out how to get me to swallow that oatmeal, but I must have sat there for a long time." "I was a stubborn kid." "[ Chuckles ] Iwasnotgoingtoeatthat oatmeal." "[ Chuckles ]" "I remember that very well, and that had to be at about... 16 months or 17 months, and I remember other things from that time." "I was in a nursery school." "I remember sort of standing there looking around, wondering what all these kids were up to, and why, and so..." "Mm-hmm." "Do you think it's -- it's connected with the development of language, the formation of memories?" "Does it correspond to where the brain starts to grasp..." "Alotis beinglearnedabout language acquisition." "The more intensively the topic is studied..." "[ Camera rattling ] ...the more sophisticated the research techniques, the more we learn that children know quite a lot of language, much more than you would expect, before they can exhibit any of that knowledge." "Mm-hmm." "The direct evidence about this -- and there's also indirect evidence." "So, just to mention some of the indirect evidence, there is a..." "[ Camera clicks on, whirs ] ...technique of teaching language to the deaf-blind." "Actually, my wife did a lot of the work on this." "It's called the Tadoma method." "Yes,withthehand!" "Well, what they do is teach the person to put their hand on someone's face..." "[ Camera clicks off ] ...and using the motions of the face and the vocal chords, to interpret what you're saying." "Extremely little -- very little information comes through, but people get a very satisfactory knowledge of language from that." "I mean, so much so that you have to do pretty complex tests to see what they don't know." "However, they have never succeeded in using this method..." "[ Camera rattling ] ...for people who lost sight and hearing before about 18 months old." "What seems to be the case is that during the early exposure, where the child is not manifesting very much knowledge, maybe producing a word or two-word sentences, they're acquiring the basic character of the language -- quite a lot of knowledge, which" "they can then build on when they -- it's unconscious, of course." "[ Camera clicks on, whirs ]" "But they can build on it when they get, at least later, instruction which has very little evidence." "And they can, in fact, live in a society where people are talking..." "[ Camera clicks off ] ...and they can understand what they're saying if they can put their hand on your face." "In fact, I should say that, you know, one of the most striking things about language, which has really not been studied..." "Just consider an infant, you know, a 1-day-old infant." "Now, there's all kinds of things going on in the world." "How does the infant figure out what part of what's going on in the world has to do with language?" "It's an incredible feat!" "Now, their -- well,youknowwhat?" "When I grew up, we used to believe in reincarnation." "What?" "Reincarnation?" "Oh, that's Plato." "It's a fairy tale, but I think it makes me look to a new being as a fully completed person." "That's Plato." "That's Plato's theory of remembrance." "Uh-huh." "He was puzzled by the question of how you know so much, and he said, "well, you must remember it from an earlier"" "life." You're as smart as Plato." "[ Laughs ] So, I wanted to ask you, quickly, the type of education you received from your parents and, quickly, at school." "ItwasaDeweyiteprogressive school, which was very successful." "And it was -- for me, at least, it was perfect." "[ Camera rattling ] It was not unstructured, but it did emphasize initiative, creativity, and working with others." "There was no grading, you know, but you -- you were encouraged to pursue your own interests..." "Mm-hmm." "...And- -butwithina structure that was established." "So, you went, you did, you know, [ camera clicks on, whirs ] Learned the things you had to learn, but you were all pursuing your own interests and often working with others." "In fact, I didn't " " I wasn't even aware that I was a good student until I went to high school." "I went from this relatively free, creative, exciting environment to a pretty regimented academic high school where everyone was ranked and did exactly what they were supposed to do and everyone's trying to get into college and so on." "[ Camera clicks off ] And then I discovered I was a good student." "I mean, I knew I had skipped a grade, and everyone else knew I'd skipped a grade, but nobody else..." "The only thing anyone noticed was I was the smallest kid in the class, but it didn't mean anything, aside from that." "And I can remember the school years very well." "I barely remember high school." "It's kind of like a black hole." "Anddothinkcompetitionis counter-stimulating?" "Itshouldn'tbe th-- what's the point of being better than someone else?" "And where was this school?" "Rightoutsidethecitylimits of Philadelphia." "It was in kind of an open countryside, so, you know, by the time I was old enough to, my best friend and I would spend Saturday riding our bikes all over the countryside." "Did you keep friends from this age all during your life?" "Uh, we sort of separated by high school, you know, went our separate ways." "Uh-huh." "You spent a lot of time on your own?" "With my father, by the time I was 10 or 11 or so, every Friday night, for example, we would read Hebrew classics, you know, 19th-century literature..." "[ Camera rattling ] ...essays." "And that was just part of the routine of incorporating the..." "[ Camera clicks on, whirs ] ...the emerging reviving Hebrew culture, that was all their lives." "I mean, that's what they were devoted to -- the revival of -- of the language, the culture, and the palestinian community." "This hebraic revival that -- [ Camera clicks off ]" "Did you say "palestinian community"?" "Well, you know, it's pre-Israel, so it's a Jewish community in palestine." "Okay." "Yeah." "I suppose, by now, my father would be called an anti-zionist." "He was then a deeply committed zionist, but for him, it was a cultural revival, basically." "Mm-hmm." "Notparticularlyinterested in a Jewish state." "Mm-hmm." "Do you remember if you had an ambition for your future, as a child?" "Alotof crazyambitions." "I remember once telling my mother that I had decided that when I grew up, I wanted to be a taxidermist." "A taxidermist?" "Don'taskme why." "[ Chuckles ] I guess I liked the word." "I was about 8 years old." "So,sinceI'mignorant,Igot  the luck to discover descartes." "I mean, I knew who descartes was, but I read him after I read you." "And I noticed it gives you the tools to doubt what he's saying." "It's like the opposite of dogmatism." "I mean, that, you know, ought to be the ideal of teaching, anyway, whether it's children or graduate students." "They should be taught to challenge and to question." "Images that come from the enlightenment about this say that teaching should not be like pouring water into a vessel." "It should be like laying out a string along which the student travels in his or her own way, and maybe even questioning whether the string's in the right place." "And, you know, after all, that's how modern science started." "For thousands of years, it was accepted by scientists that objects move to their natural place." "So, a ball goes to the ground, and steam goes to the sky." "And these things are kind of like common sense, and they were taken for granted for literally thousands of years..." "Mm-hmm." "...FromAristotle." "And it wasn't until Galileo and the modern scientific revolution that scientists decided to be puzzled by these obvious things, and as soon as you start to question things, you see nothing like that makes any sense." "And every stage of science, or, you know, even just learning -- serious learning -- comes from asking, "why do things work like that?"" "Why not some other way?" All right?" "You find that the world is a very puzzling place, and if you're willing to be puzzled, you can learn." "If you're not willing to be puzzled, and just copy down what you're told or behave the way you're taught, you just become a replica of someone else's mind." "I mean, some of the technical work I'm doing now is initiated by my suddenly realizing that assumptions that have been standard throughout modern history of generative grammar -- but, in fact, throughout the traditional study of language " "just have no basis." "And when we ask, "okay, then", why do we assume them?" You have to look for a basis, and lots of avenues open up." "And that happens constantly." "And do you remember when you start to build your own voice or your own philosophy, in a way?" "And could you describe how this process happened?" "It's a constant process, and it probably starts with my not wanting to eat my oatmeal, you know?" ""Why?" You know?" "Uh-huh." "And in any kind of scientific inquiry, any kind of rational inquiry -- it's striking in science -- you have a conception of how things ought to work." "If you look at the empirical data, they're, usually, at least partially recalcitrant." "Things don't fall into place." "So, you, typically, are working with a conflict between a conception of the way things ought to work, in terms of, you know, like, in simplicity, naturalness, and a look at the messy way in which things do" "seem to work." "The galilean revolution, which was a real revolution in the way of looking at the world, for one thing, because of the willingness to be puzzled about what seemed to be simple things, it's a hard move to make." "In the case I mentioned, it was 2,000 years, you know -- smart people." "Yeah." "They said that nature is simple..." "[ Camera clicks on, whirs ] ...And it's the task of the scientist to show that it's simple, and if we've not been able to do that, we've failed as scientists." "So, if you find irreducible complexity, you just haven't understood." "Well, that's a pretty good guideline, and it does turn out to be a very effective driving element in inquiry." "Because -- there's good reasons where I think it ought to turn out to be simple, you know?" "[ Camera stops ] I mean, for Galileo and the whole of early modern science right through Newton -- great scientists, you know, huygens, others, bernoulli, up through" "Newton, you know, this is that kind of classic period of modern science -- there was a very clear concept of intelligibility." "The goal of science was to show that the world is intelligible, and "intelligible" meant something." "It meant something that an artisan could create, like gears and levers, and something like a model was these, let's say, medieval clocks, you know, which did all sorts of amazing things." "Now, that goes right through" "Newton." "It's called the mechanical philosophy." ""Philosophy" just meant science." "So, it's mechanical science, and that's the goal." "And then Galileo, at the end of his life, was kind of distraught because he was not able to construct mechanical models of the tides and the motion of the planets and so on, so he felt his life -- scientific life had failed." "Mm-hmm." "Butthenit wenton." "Finally, you get to Newton, and Newton demonstrated that, to his dismay, that the world doesn't work like a machine, that there are what his scientific colleagues called occult forces, namely attraction and repulsion, which don't operate by contact." "So, you can attract things at a distance, which was just unintelligible." "Newton himself thought that this was, what he called an absurdity, which no person with any scientific understanding could ever believe." "Uh-huh." "Therearejustinherent mysteries which are beyond our cognitive capacities." "Well, that was correct, and that was a real shocking discovery." "It has now been absorbed." "So, to talk about the current stage is misleading, if you're thinking about..." "[ Camera whirs ] ...Emerging fields, like cognitive science, because we're not in that stage." "Mm-hmm." "Wehaven'tgottothe galilean stage, yet." "Me,I worklikeamachine." "I know this sequence is quite a struggle, and believe me, it's taking me forever to animate it." "So, I'll take a break." "Noam kept coming back to Galileo, Newton, the enlightenment, and I tried very hard to keep it short, but it seems endless." "However, this is a very important part, in fact, and I must get through it." "I think that Noam is telling me what it takes to do true science..." "Something to do with ideas, creativity, and rigorous observation of nature and the willingness to be proven wrong and start the experiment again all over at any time." "Richard feynman, the great physicist, often talked about science integrity and said you should always publish the results of your experiment, especially when they prove you wrong." "He also had a funny story about a good scientist that was ignored." "In 1937, young, he was called, was trying to teach a rat to count three doors to get some food." "So, he would place the food each time in a maze, three doors away from the right, to get it to count three doors." "He would place the rat in a different place each time, with the cheese three doors away." "But the rat never counted the doors." "He always went right through the door where the food was placed the time before." "No matter where young placed the rat and the food, the result was the same." "He thought the rat must recognize a detail on the door, so he repainted them all identically." "Still, the same result." "He then thought the rat could still smell the food from where it was the previous time, so he put some chemical to wipe any possible remaining smell." "Still, the rat went to the exact same door." "Maybe the rat could notice some light from the lab and use them as a guide, so he covered the maze." "Still, the same result." "He eventually found out that the rat could tell by the way the floor sounded when he was running down the corridor, so he put the whole maze on sand." "The rat couldn't tell anymore and had to learn to count the doors." "Feynman called this experiment an a-class experiment because young had to go through all the possible steps before he could affirm it was conclusive -- a rigor that he felt was, unfortunately, uncommon in the science the way it was" "conducted at this time." "Now I am just adding stuff that is not even from Noam." "But I've put a loop under it, so it is not so much work." "The truth is that I am frantically going through this animation, and it has been two years since I started, so Noam is now 84." "I neglect my appearance, and I should be focusing on the film I am preparing, "I'écume Des jours," but I won't stop." "I must finish the film and show it to Noam before..." "Well, before he's dead." "My room is a pile of animation paper, my mother is at the hospital, but I only care about Noam's health, only to show him the finished film." "This is childish and unscientific, but true." "A few sessions we did before, we talked about evolution." "You're very skeptical, and I thought..." "Not skeptical about evolution." "There's a common confusion, outside of serious biology." "Now, I mean, natural selection's a factor in evolution -- no serious biologist doubts that -- but it's one of many factors." "Yeah, yeah, yeah." "Forexample,mutation'sa factor." "Yeah." "I mean, there are many other factors." "For example, if you just take a look at our, you know, our own genetic endowment, a lot of it comes from transposition." "When you -- when you talk about the "andormant"..." "The... "Enduremount"?" "How " " I'm sorry -- how do you say "undoment"?" "Whenyou'rebornwithwhat ..." "What?" "Like, uh..." "Innate." "Yeah." "But do you use the word" ""andoumant"?" "Howdoyouspellit?" "Write it on the blackboard." "[Chuckles]" "I don't know what he's saying." ""An-dou-ment"?" "Endowment!" "Oh, endowment!" "Justhadto writeitdown ." "Sorry." "I just couldn't hear." "So,youthinkthatwehavea  way to comprehend the world within our self..." "Yeah." "...Andwecanonlycomprehend the world up to this limit?" "Well,that'sjusthume-- that's Newton and hume." "So, you try to discover, "what"" "is this cognitive endowment that we have?" "That it is a fixed cognitive endowment is not really arguable, unless you think we're angels." "Yeah." "Butifwe 'repartofthe organic world, we have fixed capacities, just like I can't fly, you know?" "These capacities have a certain scope, and they have certain limits." "That's the nature of organic capacities." "Then comes the question, "okay, what are they?"" "In fact, one of the striking things is what I just mentioned." "We -- our cognitive endowment sort of compels us to regard the world in mechanical terms." "We know that's wrong..." "Yeah." "...Butwecan'thelpseeing the world like that." "If you look at the moon rising in the early evening, at the horizon, it's big." "Yeah." "Yeah." "Andthenit getssmallerand smaller." "It's called the moon illusion." "We know it's not true, but you can't help seeing it." "Yeah." "Well, I thought of it a lot, and" "I know its one of the paradox, but I think our brain zooms." "It's like if you see the world through a window which is at a far distance and you will see a bridge in the distance and the window delimits your attention, then you would feel the bridge is much bigger than what it is." "Butnowyou'retryingtogive an explanation, and there's been a lot of work on what the explanation is." "Yeah." "But whatever -- and it's not so trivial -- but whatever the explanation is, we can't help seeing it, okay?" "We just see it, just like we can't help thinking that the world works by physical interaction, contact." "Some other part of our brain tells us it's not true, well, because of theories that have been developed and say it can't work like that." "Yeah." "But that can't change our perception and interpretation because that's just fixed." "Okay,tryto visualize--or" "I guess it's not visualizable, but this endowment." "So, we see a tree, and we understand it's a tree." "Does it mean that our brain is equipped with a fixed capacity that tells us, "this is a tree"?" "Here'sanotherquestionwhere it's good to be puzzled." ""How do we identify something as a tree?" It's not so simple." "So, for example, you plant a tree, say a willow tree, which is a good example." "It grows." "At some point, you cut a branch off it, and you put that branch in the ground." "Now, suppose it grows and it becomes exactly identical to the original tree." "Now, suppose the original tree is cut down." "Is that new one the same willow tree?" "Why not?" "It's genetically identical." "It has all the same properties." "But we know it's not the same tree." "Well, why not?" "I mean, and if you go further, it turns out our concept of" ""tree" or "rock" or "person" or anything is extremely intricate." "And furthermore -- see, here's what I think -- it's just a classic error that runs right through philosophy and psychology and linguistics, right up to the moment..." "[ Camera clicks on, whirs ] ...That's the -- the idea that words, say, meaning-bearing elements like, say, "tree" or" ""person" or, you know, "John Smith" or anything -- pick out something in the extramental world, something that a physicist could identify, so that if I have a word, say," ""cow," it refers to something in a, you know, a scientist, knowing nothing about my brain, could figure out what counts as a cow." "That's just not true." "That's why you have classic books with names like" ""words  object" -- "word  object," quine's major book, or "words and things," Roger brown's major book." "That referentialist assumption is simply false about humans." "Mm-hmm." "Andit'struewith animals." "Like, as far as we know, in animal communication, yeah, that's actually true, but for humans, it's simply untrue." "And furthermore, every infant knows it." "And that poses a huge evolutionary problem." "Where did that come from?" "It imposes an acquisition problem, a descriptive problem, an evolutionary problem." "It's never been looked at because everyone assumes, "ah, well, there's just a relationship." That's like assuming things move to their natural place." "We're never going to have a real understanding of semantics unless those illusions are thrown out." "[ Door creaks, slams ]" "Well, something that always struck me since I was young is, like, you get the representation of the world by symbols first." "Like, logically, you would see a dog, and then you would see a drawing of a dog and make the connection." "But in your life, you get exposed to the representation of a dog in a very, actually simplified way." "And then you go to the -- or let's say you go outside and you see a real dog." "Thetroubleis ,that'snot  the way it works." "Yeah, that's very commonsensical, just false." "No,I 'mnot" "I'm saying it's how it's exposed, like -- it makes sense, and every work on philosophy or linguistics says exactly that." "This just happens to be false." "And furthermore, every infant knows it." "Now, fairy stories are based on the fact that it's false." "Like, take a fairy story that any child understands." "No, I'm not saying the child believes it's a real dog." "What I'm saying is -- that'snotthepoint." "We do not identify dogs in terms of their physical characteristics." "Hmm." "As you can see, I felt a bit stupid here." "Let me explain." "I think I couldn't get my point through to Noam." "Misuse of words and heavy accent aggraved " " I mean, aggravated my attempt." "I was simply expressing that, in life, we first encounter images of certain things, such as animals, then, later, we would see the real thing." "For instance, I saw many pictures of a tiger before I saw a real one in a zoo." "There is nothing to argue about that, but Noam kept saying it was false because of my use of the word "representation."" "I'm pretty sure that he understood it as "mental"" ""representation," as I was just talking of an image in a book." "Nevertheless, it gave him the opportunity to deepen his argument, which is hard to understand." "So, I kept the whole thing, even though I look stupid." "Meanwhile, I decided to recycle some of my drawings since he was making the same point again." "Wedonotidentifydogs in terms of their physical characteristics." "Hmm." "Weidentifydogs,for  example, in terms of a property of psychic continuity." "Like, if a witch turns a dog into a camel, and then some fairy princess kisses the camel and it turns back to a dog, it's been a dog all along, even when it looked like a camel." "I mean, that's the basis of fairy tales." "Yeah, I was not saying that it's -- but psychic continuity is not a physical property." "Mm-hmm." "It'sa propertythatwe impose on things." "So, therefore, there is no hope for finding a way of identifying the things that are related to symbols by looking at their physical properties." "They're individuated." "They're identified in terms of our mental constructions, so they're basically mental objects." "Mm-hmm." "And that means the whole referentialist concept has to be thrown out..." "And you have to look at the relation of language to the world in some different fashion." "So, and do you say we constructed the world in mirroring this image we had in our mind, then?" "We do it, but we don't do it the way philosophers and linguists think we do it." "We certainly do it." "So, for example, sure, we see the world in terms of trees and dogs and rivers and so on, but then the question is, "well", what are those concepts?" Now, the standard assumption is" "those concepts are linked to physical -- identifiable, physical things in the extramental world, and that assumption is just false." "Mm-hmm." "And unless we rid ourselves of that assumption, we won't be able to understand the way thought and language relates to the world." "But that's a topic that's just taboo in philosophy and psychology, so they're stuck." "They're like mechanics, pre-Galileo, where everything went to its natural place." "Well, as long as you keep to that for thousands of years, you're never going to understand the mechanics of the world." "That's why " " I think these are the kinds of reasons why it makes very good sense to think back to the earliest stages of the scientific revolution." "Not Einstein -- that's too sophisticated." "Let's go to the earliest stages, where people had that incredible intellectual breakthrough, and they said, "let's be puzzled"" "about what seems obvious." "So, why should we take it to be" ""obvious that, if I let go of a ball, it goes down and not up?"" "Uh-huh." ""Imean,it 'ssortof"" "obvious, but why?" Well, as soon as you're willing to ask that question, you get the beginnings of modern science." "If you're -- if you're not willing to ask that question, you say, "well, it goes down"" "'cause it belongs on the ground."" "No science develops." "Onceagain,Ihad posedmy question the wrong way." "I was trying to ask if the way humans built things such as cities, art, cars, and so on, was reflective of a sort of a blueprint we would carry within our endowment..." "Like bees constructing their hives, for instance." "So, next time I met Noam, I showed him this animation, hoping it would help to make sense." "And it did make sense." "At the beginning of the second interview, I showed the work in progress to Noam, who was quite pleased, it seems." "And I noticed in the second interview that he was more receptive to my ideas." "So I asked my question again, but using bees and the hive as an example made it more confusing." "I suppose there is an..." "Interaction." "So, if you watch children..." "Building, trying to build a house with cards, you know, you stack them up and you put something on top and..." "They must have some initial conception in mind of what they're planning to do, but it's certainly altered by the process." "You see, "well, this is not going to stand, so I have"" "to rearrange it and do something in a different way."" "I mean, take the building we're in -- one of its striking characteristics, when you're sitting in my office, is that there aren't any right angles in many of the buildings, so..." "Everything's a little skewed." "The " " I don't know what was in" "Frank Gehry's mind, but one architect who came through, working on the -- looking at the structure of the building, suggested to me that it has, in some respects, the character of a three-dimensional version of a mondrian painting." "Yes, so, I wanted to know if you have any thinking of the mechanism of inspiration." "It'sa mystery." "It's something common to humans." "You see it in young children." "You see it in scientists." "You see it in carpenters trying to solve a complex problem of how to build a house." "But..." "It's just something that happens, in all kinds of conditions -- strange conditions." "So, for example, I was watching a couple of carpenters working on a summer cottage, and they had a kind of an idea in mind, but were kind of going along to see how it would work." "They reached a problem that looked insoluble, you know, and they -- so they took off for a while, and then they came back, and then they immediately did it." "And I asked, "how'd you do that?"" "And they said, "well, we went out and smoked some pot, and it"" "just kind of came to us." "[ Laughs ]" "Who knows?" "That's inspiration." "Iwantedto getout this sequence." "For a short time period, I had an episode myself where I indulged into this habit -- very shortly, in fact." "And, looking back, it didn't do me very good at all." "Now that I've said it, I can keep this sequence." "That's interesting." "For instance, in my case, I use a lot of my misunderstanding as a source of inspiration, and I realize that lately, like, because my English is not good, many times, when people talk to" "me, I understand something different." "I remember I was talking to my friend, and she told me she had made a model of a boat in a forest, and I understood the forest was in the boat, so I imagined a sort of vegetable ark" "of Noah " " Noah's ark." "[Laughing]Right." "I think something jarring takes place, and that can happen in a class, for example." "You're lecturing." "A student raises a question." "Suddenly, you recognize that something you thought was obviously true has a problem with it." "And for a while, it may seem insoluble, but you may take a walk, or maybe overnight there's something -- when you're sleeping, something comes to you, and all of a sudden, you just see ways of looking at" "the -- at the issue and the world a little bit differently." "I think that's how, from childhood on to..." "People do creative work." "That's somehow the way it happens." "Actually what's going on, nobody understands." "InthelittleclipI'll show  you, you're talking a lot about how we try to interpret the world and how we ought to throw away what's believed in linguistics or philosophy." "You say, "why do we recognize"" "that this is a different tree when it's been cut and it grows, and it's identical?" And since then, I've read about genetics, and that's a clone." "Basically, when you reproduce, it's asexual reproduction, so it's a clone, so it's potentially identical." "But my only -- the only answer I could give was that I know it's a different tree because I saw somebody come and cut it, and then grow again." "Mm-hmm." "SoI wasthinking,it's probably less trivial than that." "Well,actually,Ithink there's a real point there." "Part of our concept of a tree has to do with a certain, pretty abstract, notion of continuity." "So, the original tree has a continuous existence, which we impose on it because, genetically speaking, the branch that was cut off is the same object..." "Yeah?" "...Butwhenit becomesa tree, it doesn't have the kind of continuity that we interpret as continuity, and a different intelligence could interpret continuity quite differently and say that the new one is the real tree." "That's our conception of continuity..." "Yeah." "...and it's a very complex one." "So, for example, there's a children's story which my grandchildren like -- liked when they were little." "It's a story about a donkey named Sylvester." "And something happens, and it turns Sylvester into a rock." "And the rest of the story is the rock, Sylvester, trying to explain to his parents -- parent donkeys -- that it's really their baby Sylvester." "And since children's stories have happy endings, something else happens, and it turns him back to Sylvester and everybody's happy." "Well, the children understand that the rock, though it has none of the properties of a donkey -- physical properties -- and has all the properties of a rock, is really Sylvester." "And, for example, if he was turned into a camel later or if something would be a jar -- he's got to come back and be what he is " " Sylvester." "Mm-hmm." "All right." "What that tells you is that, without any instruction, of course, an infant understands a certain special kind of continuity." "It's a very specific kind, even more -- much more abstract, even, than the case of the tree." "But there's a kind of psychic continuity that we impose." "It's part of the interpretation we impose on the world..." "That..." "Identifies the objects that are around us, whether it's persons or rivers or rocks or trees or anything else." "IthinkIhaveanexample that, maybe, make me understand the concept." "When I meet a friend that I didn't see for 20 years, only the appearance is completely different, first I feel I'm meeting a different person, and then, in the course of the conversation -- it's generally 20 minutes, 30 minutes -- this" "person become my friend, and the old image of my friend, like his picture, becomes younger than he is, so I readjust, and I was wondering if this is a phenomenon that everybody perceive..." "Alltimetime." "I mean, we -- butisthisthe same phenomenon that we apply to objects?" "Yeah." "It's the same as with objects, like the tree or a river or -- let's say, take the" "Charles river over there, the river going past the building." "What makes it the Charles river?" "You can have substantial physical changes, and it would still be the Charles river." "So, for example, you can reverse the direction -- it would still be the Charles river." "You can break it up into tributaries that end up somewhere else, and it would still be the Charles river." "You can change the content -- so, maybe you build a manufacturing plant upstream and the content is mostly arsenic, let's say." "Well, it's still the" "Charles river." "On the other hand, there are very small changes that you can make, in which case it won't be the Charles river at all." "So, suppose you put panels along the side, so it goes in a straight path, and you start using it to ship freight up and down." "It's not the river anymore -- it's a canal." "Oh, yes." "Andnow,supposeyou make some minimal physical change, an almost-undetectable change, which hardens it." "It's called a phase change -- undetectable, but it makes it glass, basically, and you paint a line down the middle, and people start to using it to commute to Boston, it's a highway." "It's not a river." "Now, somehow, we -- and we can go on and on like this -- but we understand all these things without instruction, without experience." "They have to do with very complex notions of continuity of entities a physicist cannot detect because they're not part of " " I mean, of course the physical world is part of them, but it's only one part." "A major part of how we identify anything in the world, no matter how elementary, is the mental conceptions that we impose on interpreting very fragmentary experience." "And our experience is, indeed, very fragmentary, so visual experience is just, you know, stimulations of the retina, but we impose an extremely rich interpretation of it, including things like, let's say," "continuity." "Actually, a lot of science fiction is based on this." "So, if you, you know, if somebody is in a spaceship, and they get " " I forgot what the word is used -- they transposed, or something." "Teleportation?" "Yes,tele--tele-- what is it?" "Teleportation." "Yeah, okay." "And they go somewhere else and they reappear." "Well, I've watched my kids watching these things." "They understand immediately that it's the same person who appeared over there, though there's no continuity." "On the other hand, I ask them sometimes, "well, suppose that they had this teleportation", or whatever it's called, and he appears over there, and suppose" ""he's still here." "Which one is the person?"" "And at that point, you get confused." "Yeah." "Youdon'tknow,becauseour conceptions don't give an answer to that." "Actually, there are classical philosophical problems that are based on this." "One famous one that's called" ""the ship of theseus" -- goes back to the greeks -- suppose that theseus has a ship and he's on the ocean and one of the boards falls off, so he throws it into the sea, and they put" "another board there." "It's still the ship of theseus." "Now, suppose this keeps happening until every board has been replaced." "Still the ship of theseus." "Suppose someone on the shore has been collecting all these boards and reconstructs what, in fact, was the actual original ship." "That's not the ship of theseus." "It's the one that theseus is on, even though it's the other one that's physically identical to it -- this one isn't." "So, there's no point trying to solve the philosophical problem." "The problem is an epistemological one." "It's only about the nature of our cognitive systems." "And, so, it appears that, as far as it's understood, non-human animals have a direct connection between symbolic representations in their minds and identifiable physical events in the world." "So, you take a vervet monkey, which has alarm calls, and, apparently, those alarm calls are triggered automatically by a certain, you know, movement of leaves in a tree, which -- they give a predator call, you know," "and, apparently, it's reflexive." "WhileI wasdoingthese interviews, I was editing "the green hornet."" "One day, I walk into the edit room, and I realized that some of the object had a different kind of entity than the other, the one I had interacted with." "It's like if they jumped to tell me the story we shared." "The sofa " " I was so tired after the shooting that I asked for something more comfortable to rest on." "They treated me with a sofa." "But I had to move the chair to the side to make room." "The coffee table " " I dragged it closer to the sofa so I could check my e-mails while watching the editing on a giant screen that was specially installed for me." "And my editor, of course, but he's a person, so it's not surprising to have a relation with this." "Do you remember the first exposition you had to science?" "ShouldI tellyouan embarrassing experience, which I've felt guilty about all my life?" "Okay." "In third grade, I decided I wanted to do a science project on astronomy, so the teacher said, you know, "fine."" "And I went and looked." "What I finally did was, took the encyclopedia britannica, and I copied out a section on astronomy, and I handed it in, knowing that that's not the right way to do it." "And nobody ever -- there was no " " I mean, the teacher could obviously tell, you know." "[ Laughs ] But there was no censure or anything and, but, it's what -- I must have been -- third grade, so I was 8 years old, so that's about 75 years of guilt." "[ Laughs ]  [ Laughs ]" "I had the same experience than you at school, much later." "The first essay I wrote, my best friend wrote it for me, and I got the best notation for the class, so I had to read it in front of everyone." "[Chuckles]" "And have you felt guilty all your life?" "Oh, so horrible!" "[Laughing]Okay." "But and the funny part is I..." "We'repartners." "[ Laughs ] Butthefunnypartis,I got  good grades after that." "Yeah." "You know, like a lot of kids, I had a chemistry set down in the basement, and..." "Producing horrible smells that drove my parents crazy, and they were hoping I wouldn't blow the place up, and that sort of thing." "Electrical circuits, chemistry -- things like that." "Now, with one -- my closest friend, since nursery school, right through high school was -- we would go every Saturday afternoon -- by the time we got old enough to take the subway, you know, 10, 11, we'd go to" "the Franklin institute." "That's a science institute in downtown Philadelphia, which had lectures, exhibits." "And we'd spend most of the afternoon in the -- either in the Franklin institute or the museum of natural history, which was right next door." "That was our Saturday afternoon." "Noam spent also hours at the library, devouring 19th-century" "French and Russian literature." "I had just finished reading "fathers and sons" by Ivan turgenev, and I pointed out to Noam that constant feeling of generalized deterioration of the world that each generation blames the next one for." ""When I was young, life was better."" "Things were much simpler." "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." I was wondering if there were a biological explanation for this phenomenon." "When I was young, life was better." "Things were much simpler." "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." "ButNoamtookthe  conversation to a different place." "It could well be a property of urban, industrialized societies." "I'm not sure it's true of peasant societies -- a farming society where you learn the skills and you apply the skills and you transmit them to your children, and so on." "I mean, for example, one thing that has been discovered -- surprised a lot of anthropologists and agricultural scientists -- is that when a people -- when -- there have been development programs in which, say, you know, in, say, Liberia, there" "happened to be one, where scientific agriculture was introduced -- you know, peasants were taught the most sophisticated techniques of agriculture and so on." "And they determined that yield dropped." "And when it was investigated, it -- eel dropped?" "Yield,theproduction." "Oh, yeah, yeah." "So,theywereproducingless  with scientific agriculture than with traditional peasant agriculture." "At first, nobody knew why, but when it was investigated, it turned out that agriculture had, in fact, become a science, known only to women." "So, women had extensive, detailed lore about planting -- you know, "you plant this seed, under this rock, at this hour of"" ""the day," and so on and so forth." "And it was transmitted from mother to daughter for maybe thousands of years." "And it got more and more sophisticated, and it got to give very high yields in not very productive soil." "And the men in the community didn't even know about it -- nor, of course, did the outsiders who came in." "Well, you know, that's a case where people kind of reproduce, improve." "I doubt that, say, those little girls would have had the -- the feelings that you were describing." "You're getting something from your mother, which is a repository of, you know, endless tradition, and maybe you find ways of adapting it or slightly improving it, but -- but you're essentially reproducing what you grew up with." "And, so, how do you balance this knowledge that's come from the ages to the improvement of science?" "Like, now science and the technology has advanced, you would feel that previous knowledge would be obsolete, but yet, there is an instinct -- or I don't know if it's correct to call it an instinct, but people know there is a science of" "knowing what plant to use." "It'slore,notinstinct." "Yeah, how do you call that -- "lo"?" ""Lore," just accumulated, unarticulated knowledge." "It's like you know how to behave." "I mean, you know, you're taught, or you learn in childhood, how to behave in social situations." "You can't articulate it..." "Yeah." "You'renotconsciousofit." "So if you find a child who has, let's say, Asperger's syndrome," "I mean, they just don't pick up social cues." "Yeah." "Theydon'tunderstandwhen you're supposed to talk to someone and when you're not supposed to talk to them and how you're supposed to act towards them." "I mean, these are children who will have a lot of problems from nursery school on." "I once asked a mental-health specialist what it was " " I didn't know what Asperger's syndrome was, 'cause I've heard about it." "And she laughed, and she told me, "walk down the halls of M.I.T., and half the people you"" "see have Asperger's syndrome."" "How do you deal with somebody, coming to you and talking about astrology?" "Astrology?" "Yeah, because a lot of women, for instance, and it's terrible to generalize " " Michèle here, she's going to kill me -- but my girlfriend, for instance -- she gets mad at me if I dismiss her belief in astrology." "And I want to maintain my relationship." "Idon'tdismissthe person's interest in it." "Uh-huh." "I mean, people have all sorts of irrational beliefs -- me too, you know." "I may think they're irrational, but to them, they're meaningful." "And, after all, some pretty smart people were interested in astrology, like Isaac Newton, for example." "Uh-huh?" "So, it's not -- it's not imbecility." "I mean, humans have a -- kind of like an automatic -- in this case, instinctive -- drive to find causal relations, to explain things that are happening in terms of causes." "When you can't see the causes, you postulate hidden causes " " I mean, infants do this." "You can -- you do experiments with infants in which, you know, something is moving along and then something starts moving this way." "They'll make up in their minds that there's some hidden contact there that you can't see, you know." "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." "Andwejustdothis  instinctively." "I mean, if things are happening around us, we try to find some agent behind it..." "Yeah." "...Oftenanagent,you know, like an active intelligence that's doing it, sometimes something mechanical." "So it pretty naturally leads to beliefs like astrology, especially because you find " " I mean, life is full of coincidences." "So you try to make a connection between the coincidences, and you find a pattern in the stars, or it's a full moon, so this is going to happen, and so on and so forth." "'Cause I notice in what you're saying, like, you're not a believer -- if I do some research on you, you're not going to come up as atheist, and I think because the religion is" "really for a lot of people, and you don't want hurt that." "Well, I think one or another kind of religious belief is a -- it's a real cultural universal." "I don't think any group has ever been discovered that doesn't have some sort of belief in something, you know, beyond their conscious experience that's directing things, or that's somewhere in the background and giving their lives meaning." "I mean, they may not believe in a divinity, but some sort of a spirit in the world that we can't grasp that's making sense of things, that's giving meaning to life." "Throughout history and throughout every society we know, people are just not satisfied to think, "look, I go"" "from dust to dust, and there's no meaning to my life."" "Well, what's your personal feeling on that?" "[ Chuckling ] I think you go from dust to dust, and there's no meaning in your life." "But that's hard for a lot " " I can easily understand why plenty of people wouldn't be happy to accept this." "I mean, you can easily understand if -- let's suppose a mother has a dying child..." "Yeah." "...Andwantsto believethat she's going to see him again in heaven." "Okay, that's an understandable belief, and I certainly don't ridicule it or try to teach her that -- give her a lecture in epistemology or something." "Youdon'twanttohurt  people." "It'ssomethingthatIdon't personally have, and I don't listen to rock music, either." "Yeah." "Butitdoesn'tmeanthat  other people shouldn't do it." "Yeah,yeah." "And, furthermore, the fact of the matter is that religious beliefs do create communities." "They weld communities together." "And we're a tribal society." "You know, people form families and clans and groups, social groups, professional groups." "So you want to be part of something..." "Yeah, yeah." "...Andreligionhappensto be, in fact -- again, cross-culturally -- one of the ways in which the group coheres and gets something more out of life than just my individual existence." "Yeah." "Soit'sunderstandablethat there should be one or another form of religious belief." "I think we should change the camera." "I think it's time for the -- for the break." "Lunch break?" "Oh,I see,okay." "So we get another camera next time?" "Yeah, I'm gonna use this one, because I " " I'm..." "[ Laughing ] Okay." "Thediscussionis so good,I don't want to lose a drop." "In fact, I eventually decided to stick to my plan and continue to shoot the rest of the interview with my old mechanical bolex." "This way, I could only film short fragments of Noam, and I was committed to what moments he would appear in the final version." "I was also committed to have to animate 98% of the whole film and hear the sound of my cranky camera each time Noam would appear so I would have to illustrate its sound every single time." "[ Camera whirring ]" "Do you remember what was your first thinking of linguistics?" "There's background, like when I was a child." "My father worked on history of the semitic languages, so I read work of his -- like, I read his doctoral dissertation when I was " " I don't know -- 10, 12 years old." "Uh-huh." "Itwason amedieval grammarian -- medieval Hebrew grammarian -- so I kind of knew, had some acquaintance with the field." "Later, I sort of got into it by accident." "And when I got into it, yeah, I found it intriguing, but -- and did things that we were taught to do, and, at some point, I realized, "this doesn't make any sense," you know, the way" "we're taught to do things was descriptivist." "So, the -- the way you..." "Linguistics at that time -- and, to a large extent, still -- is a matter of organizing data." "So, a typical assignment when I was an undergraduate, let's say, would be to take data from some American Indian language and put it into an organized form." "You didn't ask the question, "well, why is the data this way and not some other way?" That wasn't a question that was asked." "In fact, I remember, dramatically, the first talk I gave when I was a graduate student invited to a major university to give a talk on work that I was doing -- you know, the normal thing -- the" "leading figure in the department, one of the famous linguists, met me at the airport." "And you know, we drove to the college." "And on the way, we talked, and I asked him what he was working on." "And he said he's not doing any work now -- what he's doing is just collecting data and storing it." "And he had a good reason, which is implicit in the linguistics of that day in Europe and the United States." "Computers were coming along, so pretty soon, you'd be able to analyze huge masses of data." "It was assumed that the procedure, the methods of analysis that had been reached in the structuralist traditions, that they were the right way to understand everything about language." "Well, you know, if you sharpened up those procedures, you could program them for a computer, then you feed the data in, and you're done." "How old were you when you -- thatwas1953." "Okay." "So,I mean,Ikindof half-believed it, because that's the way I was trained, but the other half of my brain was telling me this makes absolutely no sense." "Canyoutellmethe transition, and, also, the inspiration that started your theory?" "Well,itwaspretty straightforward." "When I was an undergraduate, I had to get an honors thesis." "You'd do a piece of work that's your honors thesis." "And the faculty member who I was working with -- very famous and very significant person, very influential -- rightly, he suggested to me that I do a structural analysis of modern Hebrew." "Well, I knew some Hebrew, so it made sense, and I did what we were supposed to do." "What you're supposed to do is get an informant and then carry out field-work procedures." "So, there's a set of routines you go through to take the data from the informant, you know, find the phonology, find the morphology, you know, a few comments about the syntactic structure, comments about the semantics, and that's your" "thesis." "So, I started going through the routine with him." "And after about a month, I realized this is totally ridiculous." "I mean, I know the answers to these questions." "Why am I asking him?" "And the questions that I don't know the answers to, like the phonetics, I don't care about." "But the parts that I care about, I already basically know the answers, so why do I care?" "Why do I have to get it from him?" "So, we " " I stopped the informant work, and I just started doing what seemed like the obvious thing to do -- write a generative grammar." "And that's what I did, but it was kind of a hobby." "I don't think anyone even looked at it -- you know, the fact that, finally, it was published about 30 years later, I think." "Can you tell me, like, in a simple way -- like, this first approach of generative grammar?" "It'salmostatruism." "I mean, if you think about what a language is -- say, what you and I know -- we have, somehow, in our heads, a procedure for constructing an infinite array of structured expressions, each" "of which is assigned a sound and assigned a semantic interpretation." "That's like a truism." "Furthermore, these structured expressions have the property of what's called "digital infinity."" "They're like the numbers -- the natural numbers -- you know, there's 5 and 6, but nothing in between." "That's not natural numbers anymore." "And the same with language." "There's a 5-word sentence, a 6-word sentence, there's no 51/2-word sentence." "They're very much unlike the communication system of bees or any other system, you know." "Now, that's very rare in the natural world -- digital infinity." "And by that time -- say, late '40s -- the mathematics of it were well understood." "The theory of computation had been developed, the theory of recursive functions -- so these were familiar concepts within contemporary mathematics." "And, you know, I studied them when I studied advanced logic and mathematics." "And it just sort of fell together." "The -- you have -- you have this system of digital infinity and its procedure of some sort that generates an infinity of structured expressions." "Well, that's a generative grammar -- in fact, that's all it is." "Mm-hmm." "So that ought to be the core of the study." "And then comes the question -- well, okay, what is it?" "Then, you run into the problem I mentioned before -- as soon as you try to do it, you find that, in order to deal with the data available, it has to be extremely complex and intricate." "But that doesn't make any sense, either, because every child masters it in no time." "So, somehow it can't be rich and complex." "And then comes the field." "The field is to try to show that what appears to be rich and complex is, at the core, just very simple." "Actually, there's -- you know, when you think about it, as we started to do from the '50s -- there's an evolutionary basis for this, too." "Language is a very curious phenomenon." "I mean, one question we ought to be puzzled with -- well, two questions -- is, why are there any languages at all, and another one is, why are there so many?" "If you go back, say, 50,000 years, both of those questions were answered, because that's when our ancestors left Africa." "And there's been no relevant cognitive change since, so children everywhere in the world have the same capacity for language acquisition." "So, the questions were finished by about 50,000 years ago." "And if you go back very shortly before that, maybe 100,000 years ago, the questions were answered 'cause there weren't any languages." "From an evolutionary point of view, that's the flick of an eye." "Howdoyouhavethis record?" "Well, that comes from paleoanthropology." "Ah, yeah, the tombs the Americans -- well, we know the fossil record." "We know the record of the, you know, creation of artifacts, and so on." "Yeah." "And it's pretty well recognized that there was a sudden explosion -- sometimes called "the great leap forward"" "roughly in that period, you know, maybe 75,000 years ago." "You can argue tens of thousands of years -- it doesn't matter much." "From an evolutionary point of view, it's an instant." "So, somewhere in that instant, some small hunter-gatherer group -- you know, it could have been a couple of thousand of people -- you suddenly find a burst of creative activity, complex tools..." "Recording natural phenomena..." "More complex family structures..." "Symbolic representation, you know -- art, and so on." "From an evolutionary point of view, it's an instant." "Now, it's generally assumed that -- and it's hard to think of an alternative -- that that instant must be the time when language suddenly appeared, 'cause language is required for all these things." "Before, there could have been, you know, primitive communication systems, like every animal has." "But human language, with the property I just mentioned -- the capacity for thought constructing in your head -- when you walk around, you're talking to yourself." "Yeah." "Youcan'tstop." "I mean, it takes a real act of will not to talk to yourself." "And what you're doing is thinking, basically, recollecting, or, you know, whatever it is." "Yeah." "Butyou'remakinguse of,  constantly, of this capacity to construct an unbounded array of structured expressions, which have a meaning and a sound." "Now, that's the core of our ability to create, to invent, you know, plan, interpret..." "Yeah." "...and so on." "Well, that must have happened right about that time." "But if it happened suddenly, it has to be simple." "There's no time." "In evolutionary time, that's nothing, remember?" "Yeah." "Whichmeansthatsomesmall thing must have happened -- some small mutation, probably." "And one -- and a mutation is in one person." "It's not in a group." "Suddenly, it gave that person the capacity to -- this capacity." "Well, that person was unique in the animal world -- it could plan, it could think, it could interpret, and so on." "But if that happened -- and there's no pressures on that system -- no selection nor other pressures." "Yeah." "Itjustappeared." "Well, if it just appeared, it's gonna be perfect." "It's going to be like a snowflake." "Uh-huh." "Anditjustfollowsfrom  natural law -- that's what appears, like a snowflake is what it is." "You know, it doesn't evolve." "Well, you know, that capacity would have been, in fact, transmitted to offspring, partially." "And after some time, maybe a couple of generations, this capacity might have dispersed through the group." "And at that point, there becomes a reason to externalize it -- to find a way to take what's going on in your head and turn in into sound or gesture or something." "Yeah." "Butdoesthiscapacity give an advantage to this person or this group?" "It does give an advantage to the person because, look, if you have the capacity to plan and interpret and so on, yeah, you have advantages over others." "It's not such a trivial matter for advantageous traits to proliferate." "They often just die off." "So, for all we know, this might have happened many times in the preceding couple 100,000 years, but once it took -- we know that it took 'cause we're here, you know?" "So, at one point, this took." "A number of people had it." "Some point, you start getting externalization." "Then, you can get communication." "But what that means is that, contrary to thousands of years of speculation, and what's almost universally assumed now, communication couldn't have been a significant factor in evolution." "It's a secondary process." "Today, during the lunch pause, Noam went to see his doctor and get some test results." "[ Elevator bell dings ] Are you worried about your health?" "[ Heart beating ]" "Mm." "I'm not." "Doctors are, but I'm not." "[ Chuckles ] So,youdon'thaveanxiety?" "I figure, three score and 10 -- that's what we're supposed to have -- 70 years, according to the Bible." "Anything else comes free." "When I was about 10 years old, I used to get frantic about dying." "You know, what happens when that spark of consciousness disappears?" "I had nightmares about it, but by the time I was a teenager, I figured it's ridiculous, you know." "My model is David hume." "When he died, he had his friends with him, like Adam Smith, and he was very placid, you know." "He said, "you know, this is the"" "way existence works, and goodbye, no afterlife -- nothing." DoyoumindifI askyou about your feeling when your wife passed away?" "[ Breathes deeply ] I'd just as soon not talk about that." "It'stoosoon." "I can't get over it, you know." "Yeah, I know." "I'm sorry." "Yeah." "I'm so sorry." "[ Instrumental music plays ]" "♪ I gave you my home ♪ I gave you my hope" "♪ the walls..." "Itseemsthatyou had the  perfect relationship from the outside point of view." "It wasn't -- you know, nothing's perfect, but it was very intimate, yeah." "Ithinkalot ofhumanbeings spend a lot of their life trying to solve problems of a relationship or find a relationship, and..." "Well, we pretty much solved it when we were children." "[ Chuckles ] We were children when we got married." "Yeah." "Carol was 19, and I was 20." "♪herein my kitchen" "♪ soup is on ♪ lover" "♪ lover ♪ come on over [ instrumental solo ]" "And do you think it helped you in your work?" "It's hard to say " " I mean, Carol was kind of a social butterfly." "You know, she was -- as a teenager, you know, went to all kind of parties, dating, this and that." "I was very solitary." "But -- and for a couple of years, we more or less lived her style of life." "But, you know, I'd sit in a corner at the parties." "But after a while, we just drifted into a very private life, you know, saw a couple friends." "We -- we weren't hermits -- like, you know, children, grandchildren, friends, and so on, but, mostly, we lived -- we preferred to be alone, you know." "So..." "♪comeon over and we started to talk about your education with -- last time, but more about the school." "Can you tell me a bit more about the relationship you had with your parents?" "Things were quite different in those days." "I mean, the relationship was fine, you know, but not very close, really." "So, for example, there were things happening in my childhood that I never would have dreamt of talking to them about." "We were the only Jewish family in a neighborhood that was largely Irish and German catholic." "This is in the '30s, and very anti-semitic, and pretty pro-Nazi, in fact -- the Irish 'cause they hated the British and the Germans 'cause they were Germans." "It's not like today." "A boy in the streets wasn't gonna get shot, you know." "But it was unpleasant, you know." "There was a lot of anti-semitism." "And the streets -- there were streets I couldn't walk through because the Irish kids lived there, and I'd go somewhere else." "And -- but I never talked to my parents about it." "I don't think they knew, till their deaths." "You know, by the time the second world war came, everything changed -- superficially." "So, in December 7, 1941, the people who had been still having beer parties at the fall of" "Paris, which I remember, were walking around with tin hats, telling everyone to pull down their shades, because the luftwaffe was going to bomb the city and so on -- a very striking transition, which taught me something." "But then, during the war, for reasons I don't understand, there were race riots all over the place." "In fact, there was a teenage curfew for a couple of years." "At 7:00 -- inPhiladelphia?" "Yeah, if we wanted to go out after 7:00, we had to have parental permission." "And I went to a Hebrew school, and, actually, we had police protection from the subway stop to the school and back, unless we were on the subway -- you were kind of on your own." "But I don't know why, but there was some kind of phenomenon that took place during the war." "And when did you hear about the camps the first time?" "Well, rumors were coming through by '42, '43, but nobody really knew the scale." "And it was downplayed, strikingly downplayed." "The most dramatic as, actually, as I'm sure you know, there were international conferences to try to do something about the people who wanted to flee the continent, but nobody was willing to do anything." "Roosevelt, in fact, turned back a ship at St. Louis, which came with, I think, 1,000 refugees from Europe." "And they went to Cuba -- sort of wandered around the region, but the U.S. just turned it back." "They were sent back to Europe." "Most of them ended up in, you know, in gas chambers." "The most striking thing was, after the war, in 1945, there was -- by then, everybody knew -- there was no longer any pretext for not saving the survivors." "And there were a fair number of survivors." "And they were living in concentration camps, but the camps were not very different from the Nazi camps except that, you know, the gas chambers weren't -- no -- no extermination, but living under horrible conditions." "And they came back with a very grim picture of what was life was like in the camps." "Youmeanthesamecamp in" "Poland?" "Samecamps." "You know, maybe another detention camp, but the circumstances were not very different." "But they were like, not in detention -- they were..." "Well, you know, they weren't extermination camps -- no gas chambers, you know, no killing, no slave labor -- but the conditions were horrible." "You should read the Harrison commission." "Howdoyoucallthat ?" "Harrison?" "Harrison- -h-a-r-r-i-s-o-n." "I suppose it's obtainable." "It's a pretty grim picture of life in the camps." ""Generallyspeaking,three"" "months after victory of Europe day and even longer after the liberation of individual groups, many Jewish displaced persons and other possibly non-repatriables are living under guard behind barbed-wire fences, in camps of several descriptions -- built by the Germans for slave-laborers and" "Jews -- including some of the most notorious of the concentration camps, amidst crowded, frequently unsanitary and generally grim conditions, in complete idleness, with no opportunity, except surreptitiously have managed, in spite of the many obvious difficulties, to" "find clothing of one kind or another for their charges, many of the Jewish displaced persons, late in July, had no clothing other than their concentration camp garb, a rather hideous striped pajama effect, while others, to their chagrin, were" "obliged to wear German S.S. Uniforms." ""It is questionable which clothing they hate the more."" "Actually, you know, this is pretty normal." "I mean, treatment of holocaust victims is grotesque." "But right now, take France -- the Roma were -- you know, they were treated pretty much like the Jews." "France is expelling them to miserable poverty." "They're expelling basically holocaust survivors and their descendants, and it's particularly dramatic in France because there's so much posturing there about holocaust denial." "I mean, you can't have a more extreme case of holocaust denial than taking survivors and punishing them." "And as far as I can see in" "France, there's almost no discussion of this." "In fact, when the European union protested, Sarkozy condemned them, you know, for their anti-French extremism and so on." "I mean, you know, the cynicism about all of this is pretty remarkable." "Um..." "CanIcomeback to maybe more happy matters?" "[Chuckles]" "Pick at random, and the world won't be very happy." "[ Both chuckle ] Iknow,butwe'regoingto come back -- go more inside your memories and..." "Okay." "Iwantedto knowifthe- - the education you gave to your children was influenced by what you believe in language acquisition or what's going on with the brain." "Well,I mean,theeducation at home, yes." "So, you know, we read to the kids and encouraged the kids to read and encouraged them to follow their own interests." "The three kids were quite different." "My -- my son, from a very early age, was mostly interested in science and mathematics, so, you know, by the time he was" "10 years old, we were reading together popular books on relativity theory and things like that." "But we just let the kids go where they wanted and encouraged them." "You know, they went in different directions -- it was fine with us -- and, you know, tried to just encourage them to do what they wanted." "The school was conventional." "We wanted them to go to the public schools, and it worked reasonably well." "And one child was not making out in public school -- we moved her to a quaker school, which was better." "They..." "Essentially picked their own paths." "They left home -- they went off to become political activists." "My older daughter spent a couple of months at college, couldn't stand it, and went off and joined the united farm workers and, ever since then, has been very involved in political activity." "My young -- her younger sister went to Nicaragua in 1980 and stayed." "And my son went off in a different direction." "But my children grew up in an atmosphere of extreme political tension." "I don't know how much they felt." "For example, I was in and out of jail, and I was facing a long jail sentence, enough so that my wife went back to college after" "17 years to try to get a degree -- an advanced degree -- because we assumed she'd have to take care of the children." "She'd need a job." "And the kids kind of grew up in this atmosphere, but I don't think they felt any particular tension." "My wife told me once that my, probably 8-, 10-year-old daughter, I guess, told her when she came home from school -- she asked, "what'd you do in"" "show-and-tell?" She said, "well I described " " I told them how my father was in jail."" "What makes you happy?" "[ Camera whirring ]  Happy?" "Children, grandchildren, friends, you know." "I don't really think about it much." "I don't spend much -- any time in self-indulgence, especially since my wife died." "I do almost nothing -- don't go to the movies, don't go to the theater, don't eat out." "I do what I have to do." "Mm." "[ Whirring ] But, I mean, there are a lot of things that are very gratifying." "So, for example, especially seeing victims -- like, I just came back from Turkey, where I was " " I've been there several times." "And this -- it's always issues related to the repression of the" "Kurds, which I was there one -- the first time I was there, it was to take part in a trial and be a co-defendant." "But, this time, it was for a conference on repression and freedom of expression." "You see people who are really dedicated, courageous, struggling all the time, standing up against repression." "It's quite inspiring." "A couple of months before that, I was in Southern Colombia." "And Colombia has the worst human-rights record in the hemisphere, and, of course, the most U.S. military aid in the hemisphere -- they correlate." "These places I was visiting -- quite remote endangered villages -- and the people were just inspiring." "Actually, it was a very moving experience, personally." "I was there in part because they were dedicating a forest to the memory of my wife." "And it's the kind of compassion and kindness that you just don't see in the world we live in." "And it was just kind of natural -- no pretentiousness about the ceremony." "And you -- you see things like that all over -- all over the world here, too..." "Mm-hmm." "...not much in the circles in which we live -- you know, elite, intellectual circles." "Yeah." "...much more abstract, even, than the case of the tree." "There was a sudden explosion." "The answers to, like, the phonetics, I don't care about." "My father worked on history of the semitic languages." "During the early exposure, where the child is not..." "We learn that children know quite a lot..." "It's a story about a donkey named Sylvester." "[ Water rushing ] [ Pulsating ]" "In one of your books from the '70s, you give this example of a" "sentence -- "the man who is tall is in the room," and how the child naturally can postulate the question." "And I was wondering if you could explain, just quickly because I could do a very nice animation from that." "This is a simple question." "And it's interesting that it never bothered anyone." "It's a little bit like, for 2,000 years, scientists were satisfied with simple explanation for an obvious fact." "[ Camera whirring ]" "If you take an apple and you detach it from a tree, it's gonna go down." "If you take steam, it's gonna go up." "Yeah." "So, 2,000 years -- the answer was, well, they're going to their natural place -- end of discussion." "As soon as people started getting puzzled about that, like" "Galileo and Newton, then you have modern science." "But can you -- thisisthesame." "Take the sentence that you gave me -- "the man"" ""who is tall is happy," or whatever it is." "If you want to form a question from that, you take the word" ""is," and you put it in the front." "So, "is the man who is tall happy?"" "All right?" "That's the question." "You don't take the first occurrence of "is."" "You don't take the closest one to the front and say, "is the man who tall is happy?"" "That's gibberish." "And how does it -- why?" "I mean, why doesn't the child do the simple thing -- take the first occurrence of "is" and put it in the front?" "That's, computationally, that's much easier than finding the main occurrence, which requires knowing the phrases and so on." "But it's an unconceivable error." "No child has ever made that error." "And it's the same in all -- you know, with minor variations -- it's the same principle that's in all languages, so why?" "Well, you know, there are some interesting explanations for why, but this is a good example of the brute-force approach in computational cognitive science, where they, as a matter of principle, want to believe that the mind is essentially empty." "The man who is tall is happy." "The man who is tall is happy." "The man who is tall is happy." "Then, Noam took my pen and wrote the following sentence." "Look,thereareserious questions about it, like, take, "the man who is tall is happy."" "This is a predicate, this is the subject, okay, and this is sort of the main element -- you know, that's the main element of the whole sentence." "And that's the one that, structurally, is closest to the middle -- to the beginning." "This one is more remote from the beginning, structurally, because you have to work through this whole business, okay?" "So, structurally speaking, this is the closest to the front." "Uh-huh." "Linearly,thisis theclosest to the front." "Right." "Now, the question is, why do you use structural proximity and not linear proximity?" "And it's not just this case -- it's everything -- every language, every construction." "Is that the evidence of this generative grammar?" "Well, that's the data, and there is a principle " " I mean, the principle is, keep to minimal structural distance." "Okay, now where does that come from?" "This part is probably just a law of nature." "Computation tries to do things in the simplest way, but the structural distance part is a fact about language." "I mean, you could have minimal computation if you did it this way." "In that case, what we would say -- "is the man who tall is happy?"" "The child picks structural closeness because that's a property of language, probably genetically determined." "Yeah, but that's -- that's about all there is to it." "The man who is tall is happy." "Yes,themanwho istall is very happy." "Isthemantallandhe's happy?" "Is the man who is tall happy?" "Is the man who is tall happy?" "Is the man who tall is happy?" "Is the man who is tall happy?" "Is the man who tall is happy?" "Okay, I guess we're being..." "[ Cuckoo clock chimes]" "Okay." "Yeah,I gotto rushhim over." "He's gonna miss the thing." "Okay." "Good to see you again." "Yeah." "I'm glad you're doing well." "[ Dog barking ]" "We got to get you out of here." "Your bag." "[ Mid-tempo music plays ]"