All Episodes
Previous Next
March 12, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:02:32
Human Nature: Justice versus Power - Noam Chomsky debates with Michel Foucault - Debate Analysis
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
All right.
This is a little project I've had on my plate for a while.
I've got a little bit of time today.
I thought I would do it.
So this is a famous debate from the 1970s between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault.
And human nature, justice versus power.
This is a debate.
And these are two people who take money from the government.
In many ways, Michel a little bit more than Noam.
And they take taxpayer money.
They take...
State privileges and, of course, in return for this, you would think that they would feel a certain obligation to provide value in return, to help society in this issue.
So, I have not listened to this.
I have not read it.
I'm going in blind.
Because I'm going in from the point of view of the mindset of a general-purpose layman, an intelligent layman who is looking to get value out of these heavily coddled and protected and coercively subsidized intellectuals.
Are you providing value to society as a whole?
So, to frame it, Fons Elders, the moderator, It says, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the third debate of the International Philosophers Project.
Tonight's debaters are Michel Foucault of the Collège de France and Mr. Noam Chansky of the MIT. Both philosophers have points in common and points of difference.
Ooh, big brain stuff.
He says, perhaps the best way to compare both philosophers would be to see them as tunnelists through a mountain working at opposite sides of the same mountain with different tools, without even knowing if they are working in each other's direction.
Um, I don't know what the hell that means.
Perhaps the best way to compare both philosophers.
But both are doing their jobs with quite new ideas, digging as profoundly as possible with an equal commitment in philosophy as in politics.
Enough reasons, it seems to me, for us to expect a fascinating debate about philosophy and about politics.
I intend, therefore, not to lose any time and to start off with a central perennial question, the question of human nature.
All studies of man, from history to linguistics and psychology, are faced with the question of whether, in the last instance, we are the product of all kinds of external factors, Or if, in spite of our differences, we have something we could call a common human nature by which we can recognize each other as human beings.
Okay, so that's interesting, obviously.
Now, the first thing that I would do, and in fact, the first thing that I have done when faced with these kinds of questions, if we say, okay, what is common in human nature?
Well, it would be...
To look at nature versus nurture.
To look at twin studies.
There have been millions of twins studied to figure out shared environment, which is just siblings.
There are, of course, fraternal twins.
There are identical twins.
And there are twins raised in the same environment.
There are twins raised in complementary, i.e.
similar environments.
And then there are twins raised in completely different or opposite environments.
And so we do have a lot of information, and this has been around for a long time.
So when you're talking about nature versus nurture, what is innate to humanity and what is environmental, the first thing you would do is look at twin studies, and of course you would look at IQ studies.
IQ studies are very powerful when it comes to the role of genetics in intelligence, which is enormous, overwhelming.
And then the role of intelligence in life success as a whole, which is enormous and overwhelming, right?
So genetics is by far the biggest single factor in determining intelligence, and intelligence is about the most significant factor in determining life success and so on, right?
So these would be twin studies, tease out or do their best to tease out the best we can do.
Nature versus nurture, so we would start with that.
All right.
So, he says, the moderator says, so my first question to you, Mr. Chomsky, because you often employ the concept of human nature, in which connection you even use terms like innate ideas and innate structures?
Which argument can you derive from linguistics to give such a central position to this concept of human nature?
All right.
Noam Chomsky, well, let me begin in a slightly technical way.
A person who is interested in studying languages is faced with a very definite empirical problem.
He's faced with an organism, a mature, let's say, adult speaker, who has somehow acquired an amazing range of abilities which enable him, in particular, to say what he means, to understand what people say to him, to do this in a fashion that I think is proper to call highly creative.
That is, much of what a person says in his normal intercourse with others is novel.
Much of what you hear is new.
It doesn't bear any close resemblance to anything in your experience.
It's not random novel behavior.
Clearly, it's behavior.
Which is in some sense, which is very hard to characterize, appropriate situations.
And in fact, it has many of the characteristics of what I think might very well be called creativity.
Okay, so one of the problems that highly intelligent people, and of course both these men are highly intelligent, one of the problems that highly intelligent people have, particularly if they come from highly intelligent Families or, you know,
middle class, upper middle class, and so on, is that the people who are surrounding them tend to be verbally acute and often creative and great communicators and so on, whereas if you've spent time around the lower classes, the less intelligent and so on, generally what they come up with is kind of blindingly predictable and so on, right?
And so, if you've been around a lot of creative people, because you come from a very creative family or environment, and you've spent your life among intellectuals and so on, then you don't have a wide view of human nature.
It's kind of like the Algonquin Round Table with sort of a very famous group of writers in the, I think, 20s and 30s would get together for these incredible dinners, or Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie and other people doing these amazing conversations.
He said, wow, people are just so spontaneous and creative.
But this is like a bunch of comedians hanging out together saying, well, human beings just have this innate capacity to generate hilarious jokes on the fly.
And it's like, but no, that's your...
You know, like if you were born to a highly musical family and you spend your time around highly musical people, say, well, people have this innate ability to be musical.
And it's like, well, no, that's...
That's your environment!
That's not...
Anyway, so, when he says, much of what a person says in his normal intercourse with others is novel.
It's very creative.
But that's just not true for people as a whole.
I mean, honestly, if you think this is true, fly out to Australia and hang out with the Aborigines, right?
With their communication skills.
You know, go to some dive bar and chat with people and see how much novel and creative and intellectually sparkling stuff comes out.
So, this is a selection problem based upon proximity bias to creative people.
All right.
So, and Noam Chomsky went on to say, now the person who has acquired this intricate and highly articulated and organized collection of abilities, the collection of abilities that we call knowing a language, has been exposed to a certain experience.
He's been presented in the course of his lifetime.
Now, this is a little confusing, and this is not to say that our good friend Mr. Chomsky, who I've actually read a number of books of his, and I have retained virtually nothing of anything that he's written.
He did a whole column on politics, analysis of Middle East, and so on, and I remember virtually nothing.
Now, this is...
I just think because there aren't any particular valuable or useful general principles that come out of it, but I have retained virtually nothing of any of his speeches or any of the probably half-dozen books or so.
He's an interesting writer.
He's a good writer, enjoyable to listen to, but I get nothing out of it in the long run.
And I'm not saying that's the fault of his.
I'm just saying that's my particular experience.
All right.
So, when he says, a collection of abilities, We call knowing a language.
He's been exposed to a certain experience, presented in the course of his lifetime with a certain amount of data, of direct experience with a language.
Okay, so is exposed to a certain experience, is that exposed to the teaching of language, or is that exposed to things in the world?
When he says he's presented in the course of his lifetime with a certain amount of data, of direct experience with a language, so is he saying That the information and data and empiricism that he's talking about, which has to come in through the senses, right?
Experiences, senses.
Presented with data, that means coming in from the outside.
So, I'm not sure if Noam Chomsky is talking about we're exposed to language and that's the data and experience, or we're exposed to the real world which language describes and there's a correlation between the two that is important.
And again, this is not a limitation of his.
I just, I would prefer that be defined up front.
All right.
So, Noam goes on to say, we can investigate the data that's available to this person.
Having done so, in principle, we're faced with a reasonably clear and well-delineated scientific problem, namely, that of accounting for the gap between the really quite small quantity of data, small and rather degenerate in quality, that's presented to the child, and the very highly articulated, highly systematic, profoundly organized resulting knowledge that he has somehow derives from these data.
So, I don't know what that means.
He has...
So, is he saying that there's a magical alchemy or furnace within the brain that creates brilliant articulation out of a very limited exposure to language, right?
In other words, let's say that you were raised by some fairly dunder-headed single mom.
And there have been studies that, like, single moms expose their kids to, like, 600 words a day, whereas in more middle-class and upper-middle-class families, it's thousands and thousands.
So, let's say that you just get very little exposure to language, but you end up with this dazzling array of abilities.
Is that what he's saying?
Well, that might be the case, of course, if you are exposed to not a lot of verbal language, but you read a huge amount, because you are born, perhaps, to less intelligent.
If parents, but you yourself, are highly intelligent, then you're going to be able to extract a lot more out of the limited data you're given, and then you'll go and pursue more because you'll be really into reading or, you know, maybe in the past, really, there wasn't an option to listen to speeches.
You just basically had to read them.
But now you could pursue great speeches online or something like that.
So when he's saying, well, there's a small quantity of data, small and rather degenerate in quality, That's presented to the child.
Now, I assume he's not talking about sense data in terms of, like, I see a tree, but he's talking about language instruction and the very highly articulated blah, blah, blah that he somehow derives from these data.
Now, again, this is a bias.
This is Noam Chomsky's around really brilliant people.
I mean, he's a Jewish intellectual.
I assume that he's around really brilliant people growing up and so on.
And so, yeah, he's around...
Scintillating minds, high verbal IQ, probably in the 130-plus range.
And so, is this people in general, or is it just the brilliant people that he grew up with?
All right.
Furthermore, we notice that varying individuals, he says, with very varied experience in a particular language nevertheless arrive at systems which are very much congruent to one another.
The systems that two speakers of English arrive at on the basis of their very different experiences are congruent in the sense that, over an overwhelming range, what one of them says, The other can understand.
That's interesting insofar as if I pointed a tree, another English speaker is going to recognize that as a tree.
Okay.
Yay.
It's not the most important aspect of language.
It's not unimportant, but when people say equality, nobody knows what the other person is talking about often, right?
Because is it equality of opportunity or is it equality of outcome?
When people talk about wealth, Are they talking about material wealth or spiritual wealth?
When people talk about violence, are they talking about the general initiation of the use of force?
Or are they talking about only private criminal violence?
And so on.
Well, it's hard to say.
When people are talking about freedom, are they talking about freedom from the consequences of bad decisions, or are they talking about freedom from coercion?
So, I think that, I mean, when people talk about Trump, you know, the perceptions, I mean, this is a Scott Adams reference, right?
The same movie, different screens, right?
Or same screen, different movies, right?
Same screen, different movies.
So, And what's interesting is that he's not defining his terms here.
And he's not saying whether the data that you're getting is material reality or verbal instruction on language, right?
Okay.
So, at an overwhelming range, what one of them says, the other can understand.
That is true in general when we're talking about sense data, but it's not true in general when we're talking about concepts.
The concept of salvation to a Christian is very powerful.
The concept of salvation to an atheist is not.
Even the word God can mean things.
Arguments about the printed word, you know, spare the rod, spoil the child, is taken by some Christians to mean you should beat your children, and to other Christians it says you should instruct your children, right?
In terms of morals and essentials, there is massively wide divergence.
To a communist, a free market trade is exploitation.
To a free marketer, coercive control of the means of production is violence and theft.
So, it's pretty hard.
For some people, discipline means self-discipline.
To other people, discipline means hitting children.
So, he goes on, he says, furthermore, even more remarkable be noticed in a wide variety of languages the fact that all have been studied seriously.
In fact, all that have been studied seriously.
There are remarkable limitations on the kinds of systems that emerge from very different kinds of experience to which people are exposed.
So what does this mean?
Even more remarkable be noticed that in a wide variety of languages, in fact, all that have been studied seriously.
There are remarkable limitations on the kind of systems that emerge from the very different kinds of experiences to which people are exposed.
Again, I don't know.
Noam, are you talking about sense data of the material world or are you talking about sense data of language instruction?
I mean, these two are widely different, right?
I mean, most languages, the word for mama starts with an M because that's the first phoneme that most babies can articulate, so it's quite common, right?
There are remarkable limitations on the kind of systems that emerge, so I don't really know what this means, and maybe he's assuming familiarity with his work on linguistics, which is what he's sort of famous for, but which I don't think has sustained itself very well with the empirical data over time.
So, he says, there is only one possible explanation which I have to give in a rather schematic fashion for this remarkable phenomenon, namely the assumption that the individual himself contributes a good deal, an overwhelming part, in fact, Of the general schematic structure and perhaps even of the specific content of the knowledge that he ultimately derives from this very scattered and limited experience.
Okay, so it's been a...
He's been...
He's had a page.
He's had a page.
And what is he talking about?
And so the reason this bothers me is because society pours millions of dollars into these intellectuals and they come back with undefined, vague baffle gab that speaks only to the other intellectuals who studied their work.
And I think this is pillaging.
I think this is a form of exploitation of the workers.
The workers, because these guys are often lefties, right?
And the workers are people who slave away with manual labor often in order to provide all of the money pillaged by the intellectuals.
So maybe, just maybe, provide some freaking benefit back to the people you're taking money from.
And it's hard to even know.
And I understand language pretty well.
And I've done shows on the philosophy of language and the development of language.
And I don't know what he's talking about.
All right, so let's go on.
Noam says, a person who knows a language has acquired that knowledge because he approached the learning experience with a very explicit and detailed schematism that tells him what kind of language it is that he is being exposed to.
A person who knows a language has acquired that knowledge because he approached the learning experience with a very explicit and detailed schematism that tells him what kind of language it is that he's being exposed to.
Okay, so is he saying that a person knows language because he has a schema in his mind, but, I mean, you learn a language because you are taught a language by others.
All right.
He says that is, to put it rather loosely, the child must begin with the knowledge, certainly not with the knowledge that he's hearing English or Dutch or French or something else, but he does start with the knowledge that he's hearing a human language of a very narrow and explicit type that permits a very small range of variation.
Well, but he starts with the knowledge, children start with imitative knowledge, right?
They just imitate the sounds that their parents make, right?
And it is because he begins with that highly organized and very restrictive schematism that he is able to make the huge leap from scattered and degenerate data to highly organized knowledge.
And furthermore, I should add that we can go a certain distance, I think a rather long distance, towards presenting the properties of this system of knowledge that I would call innate language or instinctive knowledge that the child brings to language learning.
And also we can go a long way towards describing the system that is mentally represented when he has acquired this knowledge.
Yeah, human beings have an instinct for language.
Yeah, I mean, it's well known that if you miss the language window, which is sort of, I don't know, 18 months or two to like eight or nine or something like that, like kids raised by wolves, if you miss that language window, it's very hard for you to learn language.
And also we know that subtleties of particular kinds of language are lost Often are non-native speakers, right?
So the sort of the famous inability of some Asian-speaking people to not be able to say the word L, right?
That they speak R, right?
Well, that's important, right?
It's hard to hear particular different tones in Mandarin or Japanese.
You don't hear the difference from the outside, but you understand the difference from the inside.
And it seems to be the case that everybody who grows up speaking those kinds of languages can hear those differences, and people who don't have to work very, very hard to hear those differences.
And one of the things that I think is obviously true, well, maybe it's not obviously true, but one of the things that is true is that, for instance, what is considered to be Romantic in a particular language is that which is used to woo women,
and therefore those who are sensitive to that particular form of language, they tend to reproduce the mental structures most compatible with that kind of language.
So, I mean, I had somebody I knew many years ago who visited from England, and he was talking about how he would go to pubs.
And just go up to women and say, well, that's it, you're pulled, which means come and have sex with me.
And he would say nine times out of 10, or maybe 19 times out of 20, he would get a no or a slap or ew.
But then one time he would get a woman who would go with him, right?
I assume the victim of child abuse, it was all pretty vile and gross.
So let's just say that that was a very common thing.
So then the most reproduction would occur with those who were the most forward and non-romantic.
As possible, right?
Like when I came to Canada, I was in grade 8 for a while, then I was put in grade 6 when we moved to Toronto, and in grade 6, the Canadian boys chased the girls around and punched them in the groin, which is something I would never have dreamed of doing in a zillion years, would be completely impossible in England, unthinkable really in England, but was common in Canada, or at least where I was.
So that's a whole different thing.
And so, you know, when you move cultures in England, it's sensitivity, it's a good sense of humor, it's wooing, it's language-based.
In Canada, it was, are you good at hockey and punching girls in the groin?
Because the boy who led this was very popular with the girls.
I mean, it's incomprehensible to me, but, you know, that's just a sort of switch.
So, language is reproduced by those with the best affinity to approaches to wooing, reproducing particular kinds of brains.
So, if you have, let's say, in France, to woo a woman is sort of a flowery, florid language and exaggerated analogies and you are so beautiful that I cannot breathe, you know, this kind of stuff, right?
And women respond to that and probably would not respond to the girls being punched in the groin.
And so, more florid language reproduces itself.
And then that reinforces that, right?
So, if a man wooing a woman with florid language is the most sexually successful strategy, then women will respond to men with florid language because then they will give birth to sons who will most likely inherit that capacity for florid language in a physical, genetic way, and therefore will be more successful.
This is how culture kind of works.
So...
All right.
So, let's see, what else does he say here?
And he says language, innate language or instinctive knowledge, yeah, for sure.
So, since language is a productive and organizing force, not only for men to organize hunting parties or war parties, you need a certain fluency in language, but if language is used to woo women, right, that's the old, what do we...
Why do we write poetry?
To understand the human condition?
No, to woo women, right?
That's sort of the joke that Robin Williams' character makes in Dead Poets Society.
And so language is used to woo women.
Language is used to make jokes, to make women laugh.
Language is used to plan and organize hunting parties and to plan and organize military expeditions, war and raids and so on.
And so those who have the greatest facility for learning language the fastest, We'll be the ones most likely to survive and reproduce.
Right?
So whatever random scattershots of genetics produce people who have the greatest facility to learn language as rapidly as possible and as accurately as possible.
You can't learn it rapidly and inaccurately.
So, yeah, of course.
I mean, this is basic evolution.
I don't know why this is considered a big insight, but basic evolution is, yeah, since language is such a massive evolutionary and reproductive advantage, those Offspring who are born with the greatest capacity to accurately learn whatever is considered locally the most effective between men and the most romantic for women language, well, that is how it's going to be, right?
So, yeah, of course, right?
So, Noam goes on to say, I would claim then that this instinctive knowledge, if you like, this schematism that makes it possible to derive complex and intricate knowledge on the basis of very partial data, is one fundamental constituent of human nature.
So he's saying that our capacity to learn language and to derive complex and intricate knowledge on the basis of very partial data, no, but that's a high IQ thing.
So he's saying that people who can extrapolate from very limited data huge amounts of complexity, well, that's a high IQ thing.
Now, high IQ is certainly not human nature, because that would be to say that those who are high IQ are more human than those who are less IQ, which would be false.
All human beings, right?
Now, there may be some people at the intellectually severely damaged or underperforming, right?
People who have general cognitive limitations at the very low end of the IQ scale that may be denied human rights because they don't have the capacity to process the consequences of their own actions or survive economically in the free market or anything like that.
So, we may say that.
But they're still human beings, right?
right?
They're just human beings with limitations or damage to their brains.
That means that they can't fully exercise.
But it's still human beings, of course, of course, right?
I don't need to say that.
So if we say that the ability to derive incredible complexity from limited data is human nature, then you're saying that higher IQ people are more human than lower IQ people, which is utterly false.
Yes.
Utterly false.
I mean, that's like saying that the...
That it's human nature to sing beautifully.
Well, no.
That would mean that people who are tone deaf or bad singers are less human.
Or even the singers with a bad cold who can't sing well are less human.
That's not, right?
Because there's lots of people.
I mean, Noam says, the schematism that makes it possible to derive complex and intricate knowledge on the basis of very partial data is one fundamental constituent of human nature.
Now, he could say, maybe what he's saying, If I understand, again, none of this is defined, so it's hard to say.
Well, it's impossible to say when things aren't defined.
You're always doing some stab-in-the-dark guesswork.
But he could be saying, well, you know, you learn what a tree is, and then you can identify a tree, even if it looks quite different.
Right?
So you identify a tree, you know, with oaks and elms or whatever it is, and then you see a palm tree, and you're like, oh, that's a tree.
And maybe that's what he's saying.
But, you know, a tall...
A tall wooden trunk with leaves at the top.
I mean, it's funny because palm trees look actually more like, you know, children draw trees like lollipops and you have the eternal challenge of leaves, right?
And so, in terms of a tree, a palm tree looks more like a child's drawing of a tree than most sort of Northern European trees would look like.
Or if you look at, you say, oh, it's a Christmas tree.
Like a pine tree is a tree, even though it has needles, not leaves.
And even though you usually can't see the trunk because the branches go all the way to the bottom, you still know that it's because it's very tall, right?
So maybe that's what he's talking about, but it's really hard to say.
I don't think he's talking about it because he's not mentioned anything about raw sense data of things in the world.
He's only talked about learning language.
So he's saying that you can derive complex and intricate knowledge on the basis of badly taught or limited language.
And again, that's a high IQ thing.
I mean, a low IQ person will end up with less language, even if they're taught in a sort of highly complex way.
So somebody with an IQ of, say, 80, you can get Noam Chomsky to teach them language and they'll end up with very little competence in the realm of language, where if you get somebody...
With an IQ of 130, and then they can be taught language by somebody with an IQ of 80 and end up with far more complex language because of their intelligence.
So, I don't know.
And he's got no facts, no data, no studies, no brain, no IQ, no twins, nothing, right?
All right.
So, he says, in this case, I think a fundamental constituent of human nature...
Sorry, I need to go back a little bit.
The schematism that makes it possible to derive complex and intricate knowledge on the basis of very partial data is one fundamental constituent of human nature.
In this case, I think a fundamental constituent because of the role that language plays, not merely in communication, but also in expression of thought and interaction between persons.
And I assume that in other domains of human intelligence, in other domains of human cognition and behavior, something of the same sort must be true.
Well, this collection, this mass of schematism's innate organizing principles, Which guides our social and intellectual and individual behavior.
That's what I mean to refer to by the concept of human nature.
Okay, so I thought that human nature was a part, like you've got the big circle called human nature and a small circle called language acquisition, but now he's saying that language acquisition, this mass of schematisms, not just in language, but in other domains of human intelligence.
That human nature is these schematics that allow you to get great complexity out of limited information.
Okay?
Again, I don't know what this great complexity refers to.
If you're talking human nature, it has to be something that's specific to human beings.
I mean, the ability to recognize a tree is shared by thousands and thousands of other species.
Of creatures in the world.
They all know what trees are.
Orangutans climb trees.
They know what trees are.
Toucans nest in trees or eat fruit from trees.
Bonobos, right?
So, creatures know what trees are, even though they don't have the concept or the language to describe it as a whole.
All right.
So, he's saying that human nature is...
Schematics built into people that allow for massive complexity from limited information.
So you're taught a limited amount of language, but you end up with this massive complexity of language, and that's human nature.
All right.
Now, that, of course, is related to IQ, so he's saying that lower IQ is less human, less human nature.
All right.
So then the moderator says, well, Mr. Foucault, when I think of your books, Like the history of madness and words and objects, I get the impression that you are working on a completely different level and with a totally opposite aim and goal.
When I think of the word schematism in relation to human nature, I suppose you are trying to elaborate several periods with several schematisms.
What do you say to this?
Michel Foucault, well, if you don't mind, I will answer in French, blah, blah, blah.
It is true that I mistrust the notion of human nature a little, and for the following reason.
I believe that of the concepts or notion which A science can use, not all have the same degree of elaboration.
And that in general, they have neither the same function nor the same type of possible use in scientific discourse.
Okay, excellent.
What?
I believe that if the concepts or notions which a science can use, not all have the same degree of elaboration.
And that in general, they have neither the same function nor the same type of possible use in scientific discourse.
Okay, not sure what that means.
Let's take the example of biology.
You will find concepts with a classifying function, concepts with a differentiating function, and concepts with an analytical function.
Some of them enable us to characterize objects, for example, that of tissue.
Others to isolate elements, like that of hereditary feature.
Others to fix relations, such as that of reflex.
Yep, got it.
There are, at the same time, elements which play a role in the discourse and in the internal rules of the reasoning practice.
But there also exist peripheral notions, those by which scientific practice designates itself.
It's easy to gap out with this stuff.
Let me just take a run at that again.
There are, at the same time, elements which play a role in the discourse and in the internal rules of the reasoning practice.
Okay?
So, is he talking about...
Scientific identifications, mammal versus reptile, and the scientific method, which is science describing how science is done, or reason describing how science is done.
But there also exist peripheral notions, those by which scientific practice designates itself, differentiate itself in relation to other practices, delimits its domain of objects, and designates what it considers to be the totality of its future tasks.
The notion of life played this role to some extent in biology during a certain period.
Yeah, I mean, biology has a...
I mean, a virus is alive.
Biology has a bit of a challenge trying to figure out what life is, but that's really only at the periphery.
Nobody looks at a rock and a lizard and says, I don't know which one is alive, but, you know, in the periphery, the edge cases, that kind of stuff, right?
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the notion of life was hardly used in studying nature.
One classified natural beings, whether living or non-living.
In a vast hierarchical tableau which went from minerals to man, the break between the minerals and the plants or animals was relatively undecided.
Epistemologically, it was only important to fix their positions once and for all in an indisputable way.
Okay, I mean, I'm not going to doubt our good friend Mr. Foucault.
Let's assume that that's true.
At the end of the 18th century, the description and analysis of these natural beings showed, through the use of more highly perfected instruments and the latest techniques, an entire domain of objects and entire fields of relations and processes which have enabled us to define the specificity of biology in the knowledge of nature.
So I think what he's saying is that, you know, you had microscopes, you could look at cells and so on and see the movements and processes of cells and they would be very different from minerals and so on, right?
So, okay.
All right.
I think that's what he's talking about.
So now you can much more closely value and define the difference between life and death, So throughout most of human history, slaves were considered the just spoils of war, and slavery was not considered immoral, and then With the spread of self-ownership and property rights, a human being cannot both be property and own property, and so slavery was revealed as a huge evil,
and so that which was good and evil changed.
So, we understand that.
Can one say that research into life has finally constituted itself in biological science?
Ah, yes.
So, this is the idea that...
Progress is infinite and we're only somewhere along the continuum.
In the past, people thought X. Now they know that X is false and they believe Y. But it could be true that Y is proven false and ABC or whatever will, right?
So it's the idea that...
So in the past, people thought the world was flat and they were certain of that.
And now we know the Earth is a sphere.
And so you can't be certain of anything.
Are we sure that we've arrived at the final shape?
Maybe the earth is in fact banana shape.
So the idea that people were wrong in the past is then transmuted into people can be wrong in the present, right?
Well, that's just not true though.
So the fact that people were wrong in the past does not mean that everything Is eternally open to revision in the present.
So, when I was a kid and I was learning my times table, I would get my times table wrong.
But now I know the times table.
12 times 12 is 144. 12, you went 1 by 1 to 12 by 12. So, because I got things wrong in the past, does that mean that when I say, like when I was a very little kid and I said 2 and 2 make 5, And I got that wrong, and now I say that 2 and 2 make 4, and I'm right.
Does that mean that 2 and 2 might not equal 4 because I got it wrong in the past, and therefore I can't be certain of anything in the present?
Well, that's nonsense.
Absolute, complete, and total nonsense.
So, when people thought that epilepsy in the past was demonic possession, does that mean that They were wrong, and it is, I don't know, some sort of electrical or biochemical storm in the brain.
I don't really know much about epilepsy, so whatever that is, something like that.
Does that mean that, well, no, it might not be, it could be alien possession, right?
Like, so the fact that we have accurate answers now, whereas things were incorrect in the past, does not mean that our accurate answers are equally open to question going forward.
So, when he says, well, you know, boy, people didn't really have much of a differentiation between minerals and plants or animals, the break was relatively undecided.
We just had to know what minerals were and what animals were and so on.
But once we got a hold of microscopes and we could see cell reproduction and division of mitosis, meiosis and all of that kind of stuff, then we got a better sense of what life was.
And so, this has enabled us, says Foucault, to define the specificity of biology and the knowledge of nature.
Can one say that research into life has finally constituted itself in biological science?
Has the concept of life been responsible for the organization of biological knowledge?
I don't think so.
Has the concept of life been responsible for the organization of biological knowledge?
Well, given that biology is differentiated from geology, in that biology studies living organisms and geology studies organisms, Which have not been alive and never will be alive.
Iraq was never alive and never will be alive.
So, I don't know what that means.
So, he says, has the concept of life been responsible for the organization of biological knowledge?
I don't think so.
What the ever-living hell does that even mean?
Okay, well, make the case.
He says, I don't think so.
Well, That's not an argument.
It seems to me, also not an argument, it seems to me, says Foucault, more likely that the transformation of biological knowledge at the end of the 18th century, the transformations of biological knowledge at the end of the 18th century were demonstrated on one hand by a whole series of new concepts for use in scientific discourse and on the other hand gave rise to a notion like that of life which has enabled us to designate, to delimit and to situate a certain type of scientific discourse among other things.
Uh, what?
I'm so sorry.
I gotta do this sentence again.
I'm sorry, man.
This is like fog-enabled brain rot.
Alright.
It seems to me more likely, and that's again, like, can you give some facts?
It seems to me more likely, would say the pseudo-intellectual, that rape is wrong.
More likely than not, right?
You're a philosopher.
or it's supposed to be about facts and proof.
It seems to me more likely, says Foucault, that the transformation of biological knowledge at the end of the 18th century were demonstrated on one hand by a whole series of new concepts for use in scientific discourse and on the other hand gave rise to a notion like that of life which has enabled us to designate, to delimit, and to situate a certain type of scientific discourse among other things. to delimit, and to situate a certain type of scientific Okay, so they learned more about life with microscopes and I'm simplifying, but they learned more about life with microscopes and therefore they could delineate what was living and not living better.
Okay.
Foucault goes on to say, I would say that the notion of life is not a scientific concept, it has been an epistemological indicator of which the classifying, delimiting, and other functions had an effect on scientific discussions and not on what they were talking about.
So is he saying that biology is not a science?
The notion of life is not a scientific concept, it has been an epistemological indicator of which the classifying Delimiting and other functions had an effect on scientific discussions and not on what they were talking about.
So, is he saying that, let's say that there were some, let's say that there were things that were thought of as potentially biological, but when you had a microscope, you could see that they weren't?
Or was he saying that there were things that were considered not biological, But when you looked at them under a microscope, they had indications of classifications that would normally be biological.
Well, of course, the classifications don't change the things itself, right?
When you get better classifications, it doesn't change the nature of that which you are classifying, right?
So, the sort of typical example is the duck-billed platypus, which has eggs and so on, and yet is considered a mammal.
It's kind of like an out-there edge case of Mammalian classification.
Okay.
So, whether you classify the duck-billed platypus as a mammal or not does not change the nature of the duck-billed platypus.
I get that.
Classifications are imperfectly derived from instances, from things in the world, and an inaccurate classification It does not change the nature of the thing itself.
When you inaccurately classified the Earth as flat, that did not change the fact that the Earth was a sphere.
And changing your understanding of the nature of the planet or the world from a flatland to a sphere does not change its nature.
So I get that.
So what?
All right.
So go on with all of this weasel words, right?
Well, it seems to me, and trust me, I've been very tempted to do an outrageous, empathetic, and ridiculous French accent, but I've decided not to.
Well, it seems to me that the notion of human nature, says Foucault, is of the same type.
It was not by studying human nature that linguists discovered the laws of consonant mutation, or Freud the principle of the analysis of dreams, or cultural anthropologists the structure of myths.
In the history of knowledge, the notion of human nature seems to me mainly to have played the role of an epistemological indicator to designate certain types of discourse In relation to or in opposition to theology or biology or history.
I would find it difficult to see in this a scientific concept.
It was not by studying human nature that linguists discovered the laws of consonant mutation or Freud the principle of the analysis of dreams or cultural anthropologists the structure of myths.
Well, they were studying these things and let's say that you accept Freud's, I don't think that Freud's analysis of dreams as wish fulfillments, is accurate and certainly it's I don't think that Freud's analysis of dreams as wish fulfillments, is accurate and certainly it's not accurate for everyone and I've done a bunch of dream analyses Freedom Main.
So, you keep studying patterns, and then you arrive at concepts.
So, When we're trying to figure out human nature, and I would argue that human nature is concept formation.
It is human nature to have concept formation.
And that's a black and white, right?
That's not, you're more human if you're better at concept formation, but it is human nature to form concepts.
Concepts being Abstract universalizations from individual instances, right?
You know your own mother and then you know what a mother is.
You have your favorite tree as a kid and then you can extrapolate to what trees are.
So the ability to form concepts or the act of forming concepts is human nature.
That's the most...
Because animals don't do it, right?
And so because I see that people form concepts and that differentiates us from the animals, I say, well, that's essential to human nature.
That is what human nature is, is the ability...
And the action of forming concepts.
Because animals can't do it.
Certainly not linguistically.
So, it is through studying people that I discover what human nature is.
I don't define human nature as the ability to form concepts and then just walk away.
Because I haven't tested it against reality, right?
So, I'm not sure.
You study people and then you find out what is the most essential characteristic of human beings and it is the ability and action of forming concepts.
The theory and practice of concept formation, which happens in an automatic fashion.
I mean, it is definitely human nature to generate concepts.
And this is in accordance with what Chomsky says, is you get more complicated stuff from limited information, sure.
So, it's really hard to know, as it is generally hard to know, what the living hell Foucault is talking about here.
So, if he's saying, well, we had better tools for studying life, matter, non-living versus living matter, we had better tools for it, well, of course, that's an epistemological revelation, right?
That you can study cells, mitosis, meiosis, cell division, replication, and so on, right?
Cell death, and so on, right?
So, I mean, back in the past, people thought you fight disease by praying.
You pray to God, and through praying to God, God will decide if he kills the disease on you or not.
And now, of course, we can look at white blood cells, T-cells and so on attacking the invaders, and we understand if somebody gets a transplant, they have to take immunosuppressant drugs, otherwise their immune system will view the transplanted kidney, say, as a foreign object and attack it and try and kill it.
So now we can see what's going on in detail.
I mean, a couple hundred years ago, 200 years ago and change, they didn't even know that the blood circulated around the body.
They thought it was just a bag of liquid that didn't pump, right?
So, yeah, now you can see the blood flowing around the body and so on, right?
In the past, you always had to have exploratory surgery.
Now you can get fMRIs, MRIs, and ultrasounds and scans and so on, right?
So, yeah, you've got better instruments for determining what the nature of reality is, so that gives you more knowledge.
So, it's an expansion and detail of epistemology.
Epistemology, sorry, is the study of the processes by which we determine truth and falsehood, right?
So, he says it's not a scientific concept.
It has been an epistemological indicator.
Yes.
So, when you get more knowledge, when you get greater detail, I mean, as simple as If your eyes are very blurry, it's hard to read.
When your eyes are sharp, it's easy to read.
If you're blind, you can't read words.
You can obviously feel braille, but you can't read.
If your sight is restored, then you get access to more information.
Sure, I get that.
But?
So, the invention of the microscope, and the telescope, of course, gave people greater knowledge, greater facts.
So, it's Pretty impossible to tell that Venus is a planet with the naked eye.
It's easy to tell that Venus is a planet with a telescope.
You can't see the moons around Jupiter with the naked eye, but you can see them with a telescope.
So, you have greater knowledge, which gives you a greater capacity to develop accurate.
Concepts.
So when you can see cells through a microscope, you have a greater ability to determine the difference between living and non-living matter.
When you can see the immune system in action, then you are less likely to believe that it is prayer that saves you from disease, right?
So, yeah, greater knowledge gives you more accurate concepts.
But greater knowledge without concepts is kind of useless.
So, all right.
So, I'm not sure what their difference is here.
So, this is supposed to be a debate, right?
So, the first thing that should be done is defining terms, right?
What is human nature?
Well, the most essential characteristic of humanity not shared by any other creatures and shared by all human beings, right?
That would be the definition, right?
So, they haven't defined human nature.
They haven't defined language acquisition.
They haven't defined teaching.
They haven't...
It's defined even whether the data that you're getting explicitly is from language instruction or from language instruction mixed in empirical reality.
So is it just somebody telling you what a tree is or is it somebody telling you what a tree is and pointing at a tree, which is the uniting of language or concepts with things in the world through sense data?
So I don't know.
There's no definitions here.
It drives me crazy.
So how can these intellectuals start off a debate that's there for common consumption, that they're paid for by the working class?
How can they...
It's exploitive and predatory and wrong to take millions of dollars from hard-working people and then not even define your goddamn terms so they know what you're talking about.
You thieves.
All right, Chomsky goes on to say, well, in the first place, if we were able to specify in terms of, let's say, neural networks, the properties of human cognitive structures that make it possible for the child to acquire these complicated systems, then I... At least we'd have no hesitation in describing those properties as being a constituent element of human nature.
That is, there is something biologically given, unchangeable, a foundation for whatever it is that we do with our mental capacities in this case.
All right?
So he's saying if you could identify the physical substrata of human cognition, but then you'd have differences in cultures, differences in ethnicities, and so on, right?
Not just IQ, but even language structures, right?
I mean, in Arabic, there's no word for secular.
Everything is based upon religion, so can you really have conversations in Arabic as robust as you would in English about atheism or non-religious things, right?
So then, I think he's saying if we could physically identify in the same way that microscopes allowed you to identify He
says, but I would like to pursue a little further the line of developments that you outlined, with which I, in fact, entirely agree about the concept of life as an organizing concept in the biological sciences.
It seems to me, oh God, it seems to me, it seems to me that one might speculate a bit further, speculate in this case, since we're talking about the future, not the past, and ask whether the concept of human nature, or of innate organizing mechanisms, or of intrinsic mental schematism, or whatever we want to call it, I don't see much difference between them, but let's call it human nature for shorthand, might not provide for biology the next peak to try to scale after having, at least in the minds of the biologists, though one might perhaps question this, already answered to the satisfaction.
Of some, the question of what is life.
In other words, to be precise about time, is it possible to give a biological explanation or a physical explanation?
Is it possible to characterize in terms of the physical concepts presently available to us the ability of the child to acquire complex systems of knowledge and furthermore, critically, having acquired such systems of knowledge to make use of this knowledge in the free and creative and remarkably varied ways in which he does?
So when you say, to be precise, is it possible to this, that, or the other?
That's not being precise.
Speculation is not precision by definition.
Can we explain, says Chomsky, in biological terms, ultimately in physical terms, these properties of both acquiring knowledge in the first place and making use of it in the second?
I really see no reason to believe that we can.
That is, it's an article of faith on the part of scientists, since science has explained many other things.
It will also explain this.
Well, it's a physical characteristic that gives rise to the capacity for human beings to create and act on abstractions, right?
Clearly, it's in the brain.
It's not in the wrist.
Chimps have wrists, but they can't do it, right?
So it's only in the human brain that concept formation exists.
And so clearly, it is a physical substrata of the brain that allows for this.
It's not an article of faith to saying, That which is a product of a physical substrata can be identified with greater details of that physical substrata.
That's not an article of faith.
Now, of course, consciousness is the most complicated thing that we study, and consciousness is, of course, consciousness studying itself.
The brain is studying itself, so there's challenges, of course, right?
But if the consciousness is a physical effect of the material brain, And therefore, there must be properties of the material brain that give rise to consciousness, saying that it's impossible for us, or it's an article of faith, saying that we can figure out consciousness by studying the brain.
Well, no, that's not an article of faith, because consciousness is an effect of the physical brain.
Now, might it be ridiculously complicated and take a long time?
Maybe.
Might it be, let's just take an outside case, might consciousness be so complicated that we will never, even with AI, even with the most brilliant minds working on it for thousands of years, are we going to say that human consciousness is so complicated that we're never going to be able to figure out its physical substrata?
Okay, but that still doesn't mean that the physical substrata does not give rise to consciousness.
It just means one can't figure out how it happens.
Right?
I mean, some primitive savage who turns on a computer and figures out how to use it will not understand How the computer works.
I mean, most people don't understand how computers work, but that doesn't mean that it's magic or that the effects of the computer has nothing to do with the computer itself.
So even if we can't explain with AI, with, I don't know, subatomic details and understandings and modelings, let's say that we can never ever figure out how the brain produces human consciousness, we still know that the brain produces human consciousness.
So, all right.
Noam goes on to say, in a sense one might say that this is a variant of the body-mind problem, but if we look back at the way in which science has scaled various peaks and at the way in which the concept of life was finally acquired by science after having been beyond its vision for a long period, then I think we notice at many points in history, and in fact the 17th and 18th centuries are particularly clear examples, that scientific advances were possible precisely because the domain of physical science was itself enlarged.
Right, I mean, Aristotle, of course, went kind of mad trying to figure out the tides because he couldn't conceive of the fact that the moon might have an effect, right?
And gravitational effects are not limited, like sound takes some time to travel to the moon, right?
A quarter of a second or something like that, right?
No, sorry, light.
That's light.
Sorry, that's light.
Light is eight minutes from sun to earth.
So sound travels at, what, 600 miles an hour or something like that.
But if the earth suddenly dematerialized, The moon would break orbit immediately.
Immediately.
So.
All right.
So he says, Noam says, what happened was that the notion of body, the notion of the physical, had changed.
To a Cartesian, a strict Cartesian, if such a person appeared today, it would appear that there is no explanation of the behavior of the heavenly bodies.
Certainly there is no explanation for the phenomena that are explained in terms of electromagnetic force, let's say.
But by the extension of physical science to incorporate hitherto unavailable concepts, entirely new ideas, it became possible to successively build more and more complicated structures that incorporate a larger range of phenomena.
Phenomena, sorry.
For example, it's certainly not true that the physics of the Cartesians is able to explain, let's say, the behavior of elementary particles in physics, just as it's unable to explain the concepts of life.
Similarly, I think one might ask the question whether physical science...
As known today, including biology, incorporates within itself the principles and the concepts that will enable it to give an account of innate human intellectual capacities, and even more profoundly, of the ability to make use of these capacities under conditions of freedom, in the way which humans do.
I see no particular reason to believe that biology or physics now contain those concepts, and it may be that to scale the next peak to make the next step, they will have to focus on this organizing concept, and may very well have to broaden their scope.
Okay.
I'm sorry, I'm out of juice with this stuff.
It is, um...
It's just wretched.
And then what happens is the moderator jumps in and then Chomsky goes on for another couple of pages.
I don't really have anything larger to say about all of this other than it seems to me entirely elementary stuff dressed up in a whole bunch of foggy pseudo precise language.
Anyway, if you find this stuff interesting, I find it an interesting exercise though.
I run out of juice with these guys fairly rapidly.
I just find it pretty gross.
And again, exploitive and revoltingly immoral to not provide value to the average working class person from whom you are ripping off their labor for your pampered and intellectual existence.
I just think that's absolutely horrible.
But yeah, tell me what you think if you find this kind of stuff interesting.
What did I get to?
I got to page 13 of 214, 12% through.
But yeah, there's no definitions, and it seems to me kind of boring to say, yeah, when you have better instruments, you can develop more accurate scientific concepts.
I mean, it really doesn't take that long to say, but apparently it's considered radiantly brilliant by these two people.
Ew, gross.
All right, let me know what you think, freedomain.com to help out the show.
Thank you, lots of love from up here.
Talk to you soon.
▲
Export Selection