I don't know how accurate Jaynes is in dating the events in the Iliad and how much liberty he takes in interpreting Homeric art, but I have done a play-by-play meta-analysis of his analysis of the Iliad, and it seemed to me like what he said about the really strange style it was written vis-a-vis how the characters may have perceived the world was pretty insightful. As to his theories being about as off-the-wall as theories about Atlantis, they are pretty crazy, but that's part of what makes them so interesting.
I didn't say that language ability shuts off after the critical period. I did say that the Language Acquisition Device - a device specifically in place for acquiring a first language - switches off after the critical period. There is some debate within the second language acquisition community about whether or not the LAD plays a role in SLA, but it's pretty obvious that learning a second language happens in a radically different way than native language acquisition does.
Jaynes' ideas about consciousness and Chomsky's ideas about a language acquisition device aren't mutually exclusive. Jaynes' bicameral mind theory only requires that it is possible to have language without consciousness, something that might actually require the existence of a LAD. Jaynes uses the Iliad extensively when discussing his ideas about the bicameral mind, but language isn't central to his argument - rather, he's using the epic as a window into the minds of the greeks of that time period and arguing that they don't have consciousness as he defines it.
I've always felt that the no-language-acquisition-device-hypothesis has been on really shaky footing. If you put kids w/o a first language together, they'll develop one - all on their own - without any linguistic input (there are a couple of pretty famous cases of this happening at schools for the deaf in developing nations) and it would be pretty hard to explain that without some existing linguistic structures in the brain.
I've got an undergraduate degree in linguistics - which, granted, isn't much, but i did spend some time learning about language acquisition. The general consensus within linguistics is that there exists both a language acquisition device (LAD) and a critical period for language learning. Language learning is a biological process on par with learning how to process visual data that (in neurotypical individuals) unfolds regularly given adequate input. After somewhere between 11-13 years the LAD switches off, and languages that are learned after this critical period are typically learned imperfectly.
I've seen side-by-side fMRI scans of people speaking two languages they learned before the critical period and of people speaking a language learned before and a language learned after. In the true bilingual speakers, both languages lit up the same area of the brain, and in the speakers who learned a new language after the critical period, the post-critical language lit up a different area of the brain from the native language.
As far as post-critical-period second language acquisition goes, there is some indication that the LAD is involved in the process - there is a specific order in which English speakers will learn grammatical features of German regardless of who taught them or what method they used to learn the language. There are actually some language acquisition theorists (Krashen in particular) who think that language processing and production (at a grammatical level) is all done at an automatic level, and that all our conscious brains do is monitor what comes out.
The environment you learn the language in and your degree of identification with the target language's culture do play a pretty big role in how accurately you'll be able to reproduce the target language, though.
Also, programming "languages" aren't capital-L languages and are (presumably) not handled by the part of the brain that handles language.
That's not entirely accurate. Censorship is the refusal to publish, etc. because the content is objectional, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient. This does not include declining something because it is unmarketable, poorly-written, or boring. As with most real-word categories, it is a fuzzy one: unmarketable and objectionable often overlap, and it's impossible to always point at a single reason that something could theoretically be declined.
Nevertheless, what Apple has done is clearly censorship; but simply (accurately) describing something as censorship doesn't imply that the censor has no right to do it; it can, however, imply that the decision is a poor or morally suspect one.
There is an incredible amount of space in between what we have a right to do and what we should do.
I'm willing to admit that some people use facebook to keep in touch, and certainly believe you that the majority in your age bracket do. However, the overwhelming majority of facebook users are students, either highschool or college. And people in those age brackets are the kings and queens of doing exhibitionist dances.
There are actually a constellation of features which define human Language as opposed to animal communication. Some of them are:
1) Displacement - the ability to describe things happening outside of the immediate context 2) Grammar - a way of ordering constituents with semantic meaning that creates relations 3) Recursion - The ability to infinitely embed clauses inside of each other or to do something similar 4) Productivity - the ability to come up with entirely novel utterances
there are a couple more, but I don't remember them right now. Some animal communication demonstrates some of these (i.e. bees can describe remote food sources and I think some birds are capable of using recursion in their songs), but no animal communication demonstrates all of them.
What is this McEducation you are talking about? The big corporations love the public education system
Well, in the absence of government-sponsored education, corporations are likely to step up to the bat. Very few parents are willing to put in the requisite amount of work to homeschool their kids, and those who are willing are oftentimes terrifying.
government brainwashed dupes make excellent consumers.
All I remember learning about in highschool is the Kreb's cycle and Lord of the Flies. Unbridled material desire, on the other hand, was taught to me by advertising and Disney movies, all of which I encountered outside of the boundaries of the, ahem, fascist government zombie consumer factory.
And, of course the government wants you to read Marx, Foucault, and Althusser, because they opposed liberal democracy
It doesn't sound like you've ever read Foucault or Althusser, both of whom are pretty merciless about laying bare the organs of state domination and power. Regardless of how Marx's philosophy has been (ab)used by leaders in countries current and past, it is fairly antagonistic to how our government works. Remember the McCarthy era? Or was that just an incredibly complicated feint by the powers-that-be?
Only a brainwashed government zombie would believe that state-socialism and corporate-capitalism are somehow diametrically opposed.
Oh, silly me. I always thought the state and corporations were often at odds - such as over regulatory or antitrust issues. Now I see that this is all shadow-boxing designed to lull me into acceptance. What a fool I've been!
We are not talking about you... we are talking about large populations of people in aggregate. You, as an individual, and morality in general, are irrelevant from the point of view of indoctrination and social engineering.
he government says jump, you *WILL* jump. The government says something is good, you *WILL* believe it is good. The brainwashing is too strong.
Oh, thank god. I though I might have to take responsibility for my ridiculous actions and beliefs. Now, I can just blame the government!
Much in the same way a free society needs a strict separation of church and state, a free society also needs a strict separation between education and state.
I'd much rather have a McEducation or a Pepsi-brand bachelors in the Delicious Arts than this state-sponsored degree teaching me the works of philosophers like Marx, Foucault, Althusser, and Orwell.
I'm an English major in my last year, and I'm tired of everyone assuming that all of the liberal arts are blow-off majors. Most people who comment about them rather obviously have never, ever been involved humanities classes above the introductory level, let alone the real meat of the major, which for my English program is stuff like literary theory and cultural studies
Little Bobby and his half-assed, drank-all-month-and-stayed-up-all-night-to-complete, book report on "Catcher in the Rye" doesn't qualify him to design a hydroelectric dam that holds back a million tons of water. You think Little Bobby could take part in designing an aircraft? Absolutely not, let little Bobby fill spreadsheets and do financial audits while the big kids, the Engineers, take on the big problems.
Why would someone who is presumably a finance major be writing a report on Catcher in the Rye? That question aside, do you think any of these miraculous hydroelectric dams would be around if not for people who were able to do financial audits and keep the numbers straight?
I've got news for you: engineering isn't the only worthwhile pursuit, nor is it the only difficult one. Writing coherently about literature isn't something you can do after getting drunk and staying up all night: good professors can tell if your essay is shit and will call you out on it. Nobody writes book reports in college, anyway, assignments for lit classes are usually more specific and require a degree of creativity to complete successfully that many people can't muster.
You've clearly never taken humanities classes above an introductory level. Anyone who says this has clearly never tried to read anything by Derrida or write a coherent essay over Nietzsche, or tried to read Samuel Beckett's novels and actually understand what is going on. The humanities can be very difficult, but they are difficult in a different way than the hard sciences.
Sure, I don't spend any hours a week in the lab, and I spend very few doing homework, but each and every assignment I complete is, by necessity, entirely original. That is difficult to do week after week, regardless of how easy you might think it is. Additionally, writing well is a difficult skill a lot of people never master - but a bare minimum necessity for the humanities.
I hate that being a part of the Apple community means sharing space with people who go apeshit when you make a single observation about the negative aspects that Apple's products sometimes have.
Are you a windows user? A linux user? Do you play Playstation? Xbox? Are you an enthusiast? Because all of those communities have members who engage in ridiculous behavior related to that community. Welcome to being human.
And I know they're Mac users because no matter where I sit, they always make sure I can see the little logo.
Well, the logo is on the back of the screen. And assuming that most computer users tend to look at the screen when they use it, the logo is (by default) facing the rest of the world.
Essentially there's two ways a computer can be compromised - either a self-propagating virus that get's in through a security hole in a piece of software running with high-level privileges or a directed attack trying to buffer overflow ("crash") a particular service to drop it to a shell prompt. The former are common Windows exploits, the latter are common UNIX exploits.
Aren't these essentially the same thing? I've always thought that an exploitable buffer overflow is just a type of security hole, and if the program that's being overflowed is running without high-level privileges, then the arbitrary code you should be able to execute won't have access to do anything beyond what the program being overflowed could do.
The way I understand it, the only way a virus can get a foot in the door is the execution of arbitrary code on the target machine. This includes stupid users running untrusted executables as well as cleverly designed buffer overflow exploits for what-have-you version six. Once this happens, the level of privilege that the user/program has controls how much damage can be done - can it infect the whole system or just that user's home directories?
I'm also given to understand that Vista has fixed the problem that almost everybody and their dog can run processes as admin, leading to a lot of things with high-level access, but that this new security model won't really be fully effective until people stop using all of the old XP programs, etc, that expect to be able to piss all over protected areas of the system and don't function properly without that ability, fundamentally weakening Vista's security model and bombarding the user with much-maligned UAC prompts, whereas OSX/unix applications are used to these restrictions and play nicely.
I think we're in agreement as to where we've gotten, but I don't know if I accept your analysis of how we got here:
Really, what we're seeing here is what happens when a society becomes fundamentally amoral: America operated on what was essentially an honor system for centuries. People didn't do this kind of thing because, well... good people just didn't do this kind of thing. Even corporate leaders had some respect for the system.
I don't know that large corporations ever had respect for anything other than profit. Truck systems are a good example of ways that corporations used to screw people over that are (thankfully) dead and gone now, at least where I happen to be. Maybe this style of rampant lawyer-use is just more of the same for the 21st century; maybe it's some sort of implicit recognition of information being the new currency and trying to control that. What I don't think is that corporations used to be warmer and fuzzier than they are today - and this may be pure opinion - but it seems like capitalism has been and always will be inherently cutthroat. It's just manifesting itself differently now.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know how accurate Jaynes is in dating the events in the Iliad and how much liberty he takes in interpreting Homeric art, but I have done a play-by-play meta-analysis of his analysis of the Iliad, and it seemed to me like what he said about the really strange style it was written vis-a-vis how the characters may have perceived the world was pretty insightful. As to his theories being about as off-the-wall as theories about Atlantis, they are pretty crazy, but that's part of what makes them so interesting.
I didn't say that language ability shuts off after the critical period. I did say that the Language Acquisition Device - a device specifically in place for acquiring a first language - switches off after the critical period. There is some debate within the second language acquisition community about whether or not the LAD plays a role in SLA, but it's pretty obvious that learning a second language happens in a radically different way than native language acquisition does.
Jaynes' ideas about consciousness and Chomsky's ideas about a language acquisition device aren't mutually exclusive. Jaynes' bicameral mind theory only requires that it is possible to have language without consciousness, something that might actually require the existence of a LAD. Jaynes uses the Iliad extensively when discussing his ideas about the bicameral mind, but language isn't central to his argument - rather, he's using the epic as a window into the minds of the greeks of that time period and arguing that they don't have consciousness as he defines it.
I've always felt that the no-language-acquisition-device-hypothesis has been on really shaky footing. If you put kids w/o a first language together, they'll develop one - all on their own - without any linguistic input (there are a couple of pretty famous cases of this happening at schools for the deaf in developing nations) and it would be pretty hard to explain that without some existing linguistic structures in the brain.
I've got an undergraduate degree in linguistics - which, granted, isn't much, but i did spend some time learning about language acquisition. The general consensus within linguistics is that there exists both a language acquisition device (LAD) and a critical period for language learning. Language learning is a biological process on par with learning how to process visual data that (in neurotypical individuals) unfolds regularly given adequate input. After somewhere between 11-13 years the LAD switches off, and languages that are learned after this critical period are typically learned imperfectly.
I've seen side-by-side fMRI scans of people speaking two languages they learned before the critical period and of people speaking a language learned before and a language learned after. In the true bilingual speakers, both languages lit up the same area of the brain, and in the speakers who learned a new language after the critical period, the post-critical language lit up a different area of the brain from the native language.
As far as post-critical-period second language acquisition goes, there is some indication that the LAD is involved in the process - there is a specific order in which English speakers will learn grammatical features of German regardless of who taught them or what method they used to learn the language. There are actually some language acquisition theorists (Krashen in particular) who think that language processing and production (at a grammatical level) is all done at an automatic level, and that all our conscious brains do is monitor what comes out.
The environment you learn the language in and your degree of identification with the target language's culture do play a pretty big role in how accurately you'll be able to reproduce the target language, though.
Also, programming "languages" aren't capital-L languages and are (presumably) not handled by the part of the brain that handles language.
no, no! this time computers are doing the measuring. They're never wrong.
That's not entirely accurate. Censorship is the refusal to publish, etc. because the content is objectional, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient. This does not include declining something because it is unmarketable, poorly-written, or boring. As with most real-word categories, it is a fuzzy one: unmarketable and objectionable often overlap, and it's impossible to always point at a single reason that something could theoretically be declined.
Nevertheless, what Apple has done is clearly censorship; but simply (accurately) describing something as censorship doesn't imply that the censor has no right to do it; it can, however, imply that the decision is a poor or morally suspect one.
There is an incredible amount of space in between what we have a right to do and what we should do.
Hello, straw man. Any reasonable person is going to be able draw a line between animal life, plant life, and bacterial/viral life.
I'm willing to admit that some people use facebook to keep in touch, and certainly believe you that the majority in your age bracket do. However, the overwhelming majority of facebook users are students, either highschool or college. And people in those age brackets are the kings and queens of doing exhibitionist dances.
You forgot your irony tag. Someone might accidentally take you seriously.
5nd? It sounds more like it was written by a 3th grader.
mmm, yellowcake.
There are actually a constellation of features which define human Language as opposed to animal communication. Some of them are:
1) Displacement - the ability to describe things happening outside of the immediate context
2) Grammar - a way of ordering constituents with semantic meaning that creates relations
3) Recursion - The ability to infinitely embed clauses inside of each other or to do something similar
4) Productivity - the ability to come up with entirely novel utterances
there are a couple more, but I don't remember them right now. Some animal communication demonstrates some of these (i.e. bees can describe remote food sources and I think some birds are capable of using recursion in their songs), but no animal communication demonstrates all of them.
Why is Oklahoma so windy?
Because Texas blows!
Well, in the absence of government-sponsored education, corporations are likely to step up to the bat. Very few parents are willing to put in the requisite amount of work to homeschool their kids, and those who are willing are oftentimes terrifying.
All I remember learning about in highschool is the Kreb's cycle and Lord of the Flies. Unbridled material desire, on the other hand, was taught to me by advertising and Disney movies, all of which I encountered outside of the boundaries of the, ahem, fascist government zombie consumer factory.
It doesn't sound like you've ever read Foucault or Althusser, both of whom are pretty merciless about laying bare the organs of state domination and power. Regardless of how Marx's philosophy has been (ab)used by leaders in countries current and past, it is fairly antagonistic to how our government works. Remember the McCarthy era? Or was that just an incredibly complicated feint by the powers-that-be?
Oh, silly me. I always thought the state and corporations were often at odds - such as over regulatory or antitrust issues. Now I see that this is all shadow-boxing designed to lull me into acceptance. What a fool I've been!
What?
Oh, thank god. I though I might have to take responsibility for my ridiculous actions and beliefs. Now, I can just blame the government!
I'd much rather have a McEducation or a Pepsi-brand bachelors in the Delicious Arts than this state-sponsored degree teaching me the works of philosophers like Marx, Foucault, Althusser, and Orwell.
Actually, I am.
Since when is college "fake" life?
Why would someone who is presumably a finance major be writing a report on Catcher in the Rye? That question aside, do you think any of these miraculous hydroelectric dams would be around if not for people who were able to do financial audits and keep the numbers straight?
I've got news for you: engineering isn't the only worthwhile pursuit, nor is it the only difficult one. Writing coherently about literature isn't something you can do after getting drunk and staying up all night: good professors can tell if your essay is shit and will call you out on it. Nobody writes book reports in college, anyway, assignments for lit classes are usually more specific and require a degree of creativity to complete successfully that many people can't muster.
You've clearly never taken humanities classes above an introductory level. Anyone who says this has clearly never tried to read anything by Derrida or write a coherent essay over Nietzsche, or tried to read Samuel Beckett's novels and actually understand what is going on. The humanities can be very difficult, but they are difficult in a different way than the hard sciences.
Sure, I don't spend any hours a week in the lab, and I spend very few doing homework, but each and every assignment I complete is, by necessity, entirely original. That is difficult to do week after week, regardless of how easy you might think it is. Additionally, writing well is a difficult skill a lot of people never master - but a bare minimum necessity for the humanities.
Are you a windows user? A linux user? Do you play Playstation? Xbox? Are you an enthusiast?
Because all of those communities have members who engage in ridiculous behavior related to that community. Welcome to being human.
QED.
Well, the logo is on the back of the screen. And assuming that most computer users tend to look at the screen when they use it, the logo is (by default) facing the rest of the world.
Aren't these essentially the same thing? I've always thought that an exploitable buffer overflow is just a type of security hole, and if the program that's being overflowed is running without high-level privileges, then the arbitrary code you should be able to execute won't have access to do anything beyond what the program being overflowed could do.
The way I understand it, the only way a virus can get a foot in the door is the execution of arbitrary code on the target machine. This includes stupid users running untrusted executables as well as cleverly designed buffer overflow exploits for what-have-you version six. Once this happens, the level of privilege that the user/program has controls how much damage can be done - can it infect the whole system or just that user's home directories?
I'm also given to understand that Vista has fixed the problem that almost everybody and their dog can run processes as admin, leading to a lot of things with high-level access, but that this new security model won't really be fully effective until people stop using all of the old XP programs, etc, that expect to be able to piss all over protected areas of the system and don't function properly without that ability, fundamentally weakening Vista's security model and bombarding the user with much-maligned UAC prompts, whereas OSX/unix applications are used to these restrictions and play nicely.
I don't know that large corporations ever had respect for anything other than profit. Truck systems are a good example of ways that corporations used to screw people over that are (thankfully) dead and gone now, at least where I happen to be. Maybe this style of rampant lawyer-use is just more of the same for the 21st century; maybe it's some sort of implicit recognition of information being the new currency and trying to control that. What I don't think is that corporations used to be warmer and fuzzier than they are today - and this may be pure opinion - but it seems like capitalism has been and always will be inherently cutthroat. It's just manifesting itself differently now.