Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel talks to Noam Chomsky about how to communicate with aliens?
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Have you ever had trouble getting your message across to someone? Maybe you've had an argument with a friend or a disagreement with a coworker, and try to talk it through. Sometimes if you can get to a point of common understanding, you can find a way out. The other side. Other times, well, it can feel like you're seeing the same facts in a different light. Maybe where you grew up, it's not rude to belch at the table, or maybe it's rude to not belch at the table. When misunderstandings come from deep cultural differences, it can be very hard to bridge the divide and understand each other. Now consider this, what are the chances we'll be able to make that kind of connection with alien intelligence? Are we likely to accidentally belch or not belch our way into planet wide extermination? Hi? I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I have so many questions about how the universe works. From basic questions like what's inside the electrons and quarks that make us up? To deeper questions such as why these particles are not other particles, to cosmic questions like is what we are learning about the cosmos something that's true and universal or hopelessly human centric? And Welcome to the podcast Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe, where we ask all of these questions and much more, and dive into what science does and does not know about the answers. We don't shy away from exploring the biggest and deepest of cosmic mysteries, because we think that everyone out there wants to know the meaning and the context of our lives. How did it all start, how does it all work? How will it all end? And everyone deserves to share in our understanding, limited as it may be, and in our confusion, extensive as it is. Because science is just people being curious and methodically building knowledge about the universe, and we are all curious creatures. You might be curious why we call it Daniel and Jorge explain the universe when today it's just Daniel, my friend and co host Jorge is a way today, so it's just me. But you are in for a very special treat today. We have an interview today with a guest who I am super excited to talk to, Professor Noam Chomsky, world famous linguist and world class intellectual. I invited Professor Chomsky on the show today to talk about a question that I suspect nobody has ever asked him before. As regular listeners of the show are no doubt aware, I am very keen to believe in aliens. Not that I'm hoping to be abducted and probed, but that I am desperate to meet extraterrestrial intelligence. Desperate because just meeting them would answer one of the biggest and most important questions in modern science. Are we alone in the universe. I suspect the answer is no, and that the galaxy is teeming with intelligent beings, but we can't know until we actually know, so I'd like to believe, But as a scientist, I'm also a skeptic. We did a fun program recently on those Navy UFO videos where Mick West gave us some pretty convincing non alien interpretations of those videos. I know that some of you out there are not fans of his and his relentless debunking, but I have respect for the skeptical approach as long as you stay open minded enough to be persuadable given enough evidence. But today's episode is not about whether there are aliens or whether they have visited Earth. That's very well trodden territory. Today's episode is about what happens next. Say that aliens do exist and do visit the Earth and don't fry us from space with the planet wide death ray. Here's what really excites me about that alien visit. Beyond knowing that we are not alone. What excites me is that we might be able to ask them science questions. If they have traveled between stars to get here, assuming they aren't octopied from seas under Europa, then they must know more about the universe than we do. At the very least, they probably know different things about the universe, and so we could compare notes and learn. Rather than just struggling for decades or centuries to unravel the puzzles of the universe ourselves, we can get the answers straight away from our new alien friends, or could we? Could we manage to set up a communication system that would allow us to talk to the aliens, to communicate with them deeply enough that we can get past the welcome to Earth please don't kill us all the way to what's inside an electron? Or what happened before the Big Bang? Or even just how does your warp drive work? Is that actually possible? So on today's episode, we'll be asking the question will we be able to learn science from aliens?
To help me.
Explore this topic, I'm very pleased to introduce Professor Noam Chomsky.
Please be with you.
Well, let me get a started with something of a less serious question. One thing you're famous for is answering all of your emails, and that's something that I try to do as well, though I'm sure I don't receive nearly as many as you do, and I'll admit to having been inspired by your approach here, but it's very much counter to what most of our colleagues in academia do, who treat email from the public as a nuisance. So what motivates you to be so accessible and so responsive?
Well, first of all, I don't answer all of it. Anything that's within the realm of sanity moderate seriousness, which is a lot I try to answer. I just assume that people ought to be taken seriously well wonderful.
I hope that when aliens arrive and start talking to us, that they also take us seriously. So the question we're diving into today is first, how do we begin to talk to aliens? And then I want to get deeper into the question of whether we could actually learn things from them, understand their mental models of the universe. But let's start with imagining what it might be like as a linguist to work on this problem. How do you begin say you receive a recording from SETI and they ask you if you think a series of pulses from space is language, if it has information, is it possible to know whether there's information in there without being able to decode it first and actually translate it.
If there are any intelligent aliens, which is an open question, and if they exist, we could ever get in contact with them, which is an even more open question, then the question would arise. It's a pretty remote question, and the only way to proceed, as usual, would be to try to find some common ground begin with that. So what's the likely common ground. Well, there's some clausible openings. There's an interesting article by Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of artificial intelligence, maybe thirty years ago, when he addressed this problem in an interesting way. He pointed out that he and one of his students had done a thought experiment with the touring machines abstract computers, and it's known that you can have a universal touring machine, one in which you can put a program for any possible algorithm and it'll implement it, and it can be reduced to a small size. I think the smallest is maybe two states and three symbols or something like that. So what they did was pick the simplest possible touring machines, the ones with the smallest intrinsic characteristic states and symbols, and just let them run freely and see what they did. Most of them either got into endless loops or crashed, but some of them survived and what they produced basically was the successor function. So Minsky suggested that maybe if an intelligence existed somewhere, they would at least have the successor function, and that might be a way to establish contact with them. Has some linguistic interest because you can show that if you take the simplest possible human language, one which has only one word in its vocabulary and uses the simplest version of the computational principles that are used in human language, if you do that, you basically get the successor function. So maybe there's a point of contact. These systems also, with a little bit of tweaking, give you arithmetic, so maybe that's a broader point of contact. If you could establish that far, you could try to spread the range of intercommunification beyond. There's a lot of things you can do with just arithmetic, coding thoughts and expressions. For example, she really gets sophisticated about it. You could do girdle numbering, you know, get culture.
So the assumption there is that they may have discovered similar mathematical principles which they would recognize. If we sort of expressed our version of them, they might identify them and then recognize us as intelligent creatures worthy of discussion.
Well, there's a good chance that at least arithmetic, maybe not mathematics, but at least arithmetic is universal and absolute. You really get fancy. There are models or non standard models of arithmetic that don't satisfy panose axioms, but we can put that aside. A basic arithmetic is very possibly an absolute system. The rest of mathematics is in part at least a human construction can be done in different ways still be consistent. Some of the major results of modern mathematics have been to demonstrate then, so it could be that if you go off into broader domains like set theory, you might find other ways of looking at things. It's a fair guess that at least arithmetic would be close enough to be absolute, so that anything we might call intelligence that we would recognize as intelligence would at least hit on that.
But how do we know the difference between what's absolute and what's just human thinking. I mean, is it a question of definition that these is the class of intelligence that we can communicate with, and therefore we define intelligence to be people who think with a mathematical basis, or can we actually make some argument that basic mathematics is inherent to the universe rather than just a property of our thinking.
Well, you're reaching in to a much debated and rather obscure area of foundations of mathematics. That there are viewpoints like Kirk Girdle, for example, who argued these are just the truths of mathematics, or like the truths of physics, they're just part of the world. You know, nothing to do with us. We can grasp them the way we can grasp other phenomena. But the numbers are there in some ideal platonic world and we grasp them the same way I can see the sun in the sky just perception. There are others who try to argue that these are human creations. It's characteristic of the mind that we construct these things. I don't know of a really solid way of resolving this question. There are many sophisticated debates about it.
It strikes me that in some sense, we ask similar questions about the nature of biological life. Life I've been putting aside aliens and intelligence. We wonder what life might look like on other planets to make educated but ignorant guesses based on the diversity or the lack of diversity here on Earth. So we imagine common structures that are everywhere on Earth might be universal to all life. Can we play the same game and think about how alien languages might work based on the diversity or the universality of elements of language here on Earth. Are there common structures to human languages or Earth languages that might be universal?
You can make some speculations based on what we know. What we know is not enormous, but there's speaking of human language, there's fairly solid evidence that it's an essential species property common to human support from severe pathology and without analog in other organic systems. So it seems to be something unique to humans and common to humans. Now, archaeological evidence is not definitive by any means, but there is substantial archaeological evidence that indicates fairly strongly that before Homo sapiens appeared roughly two to three hundred thousand years ago, there's no significant sign of symbolic activity, maybe a scratch on a piece of wood or something like that. Not long after modern humans appear, means in evolutionary time, like maybe tens of thousands of years. Not long after that you do start to get rich symbolic evidence of extensive symbolic activity. Pretty soon you get really remarkable examples like the cave drawing and so on. There's genomic evidence now that humans began to separate at least one hundred and fifty thousand years ago, now an evolutionary time, that's not long after humans appeared. So putting all this together to plausible speculation that along with anatomically modern humans came some rewiring of the brain, which led to the basis for human language, human symbolic activity, human thought, which doesn't exist elsewhere and hasn't changed since it emerged, which is a short period of time. If that's true, we could then ask is there something about human language that makes it possibly maybe as universal as arithmetic might be. So if you think about the nature of evolution, what kind of a process is evolution? Well, what happens is, first some accident takes place. You have a functioning system, maybe bacteria around for millions of years. Then some accident takes place. In this case, the accident apparently was one bacterium swallowing another microorganism by accident, well, that broke structural barriers. Could be a mutation, could be gene transposition. There are lots of possible kinds of accidents that can happen. Could be a shower of cosmic race, you know, a volcanic eruption. But some disruption takes place in this case, back a couple of billion years ago, it was apparently a bacterium swallowing another microorganism. Well, then the second stage of evolution is nature comes along and it tries to construct the simplest way of handling the system that was disrupted. As a standard principles sometimes called the Galilean principle that nature is simple and it's the responsibility of scientists to prove it. Then it is an assumption, but it has been so successful that it's not challenged really, so I think we can take it to be a plausible assumption. So nature steps in constructs the simplest answer to how to deal with this disruption. Then comes the third stage of evolution, which is winnowing, basically of the organisms that survived the second stage, at which ones are more reproductively successful, and then it'll turn out those proliferate. That's natural selection. Now, going back to the case of language, what may very well have happened is that some disruption took place which led to modern humans. They're different, obviously in many ways, and we can roughly time it on the order of two to three hundred thousand years ago. Nature came along, found the simplest way of dealing with it. That's the basis for human language and human thought. It was fixed. We have some idea of what it might be. We're getting to the point where you can begin to explain complex phenomena of language on the basis of the assumption that nature picked the simplest possible computational system. Then it never changed because it's there. Everybody's got it. So that's a possibility. If you count heads among linguists and people who study evolution, almost nobody accepts it. But I think it's very likely correct, and I think we're moving towards showing it well. I suppose you could. Then we would have reason to believe that if the kind of disruption that led to intelligence, life ever occurred elsewhere in the universe could very well follow the same course.
So essentially you're arguing that our language might be some optimal solution to this problem and therefore a common point in evolution even on other planets.
There is a thesis as a name, it's called the strong minimalist thesis, which sets as an ideal to see if you can show that language is the simplest form of a computational system that will meet an external criterion, And the external criterion is that it constitutes thought. Means it has to have semantically significant atoms which can combine. Has to meet that condition. So the simplest way of conforming the properties of computational efficiency could be language. Now we're very far from having demonstrated that, but there's steps towards it.
Does that mean, therefore, that we should be able to decode every human language? And is that the case? Aren't there examples of human languages that we've had a great difficulty decoding, for example, Egyptian hieroglyphics. Would we have unraveled their mysteries without the Rosetta stone.
In the past several decades, there have been thousands of human languages of every typological variety that have been studied in some depth, and when you first look at them, they seem very diverse. The same is true if you look at anything you don't understand, it looks wildly diverse. Or if you go back in biology about forty or fifty years, it was assumed that organisms are so radically diverse that each one has to be studied on its own terms can't draw any conclusions from one to others. By now that's known to be radically false. It turns out that organisms are sharply restricted forms that they can too, and the nature of the way they're constituted. It's so extreme that it's even been suggested tentatively that there might be a universal genome, just basically one organism and then minor variations on it. It's not considered an impossible assumption, applausible though not demonstrated assumptioning well, the same has happened in the case of language. You go back to the days when I was a student nineteen forties, the virtually universal assumption was languages can vary in every possible way, and each one has to be studied on its own, and you can't draw any conclusions from one about others. It's kind of a foundation of philosophy of language linguistics and still pretty widely held. I think we're moving in the same is biology. It's as you study it would appear to be radically diverse languages. It seems that at a deeper level you do find uniformities. And it's even becoming increasingly possible that the component of language which basically creates thoughts as close to uniform or maybe even uniform one humans, and that the locus of variation is in the superficial aspect of how you externalize it, like as if you had to take it analogy, it's take your laptop computer which has a program and another program doesn't care what printer you link it up to. Language may be something like that, there's an internal program you can link it up to one or another computer. In fact, it doesn't even have to be sound, could be signed, could even be touched. Any sufficiently rich sensor emotor system seems to be available as a means of externalizing the internal thought system. This incidentally, is picking up on a tradition of about several millennium which lasted into the twentieth century. There was short break in the twentieth century with the rise of behaviorism and the structuralism and linguistics, both of which were kind of like operationalism and physics. You should just look at the phenomenon the data, no complicated theories. That was it, and the conception of language changed in the twentieth century. Became viewed as basically an instrument of communication, because that's what you can observe. I think we're now learning that the tradition was correct. It's basically a form of constituting thought with communication and answer every property. Okay, very little of our usages language is communication. It's almost all internal what we call thank you.
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Experimentation, We start by trying to find common grounds, maybe arithmetic, maybe even some aspects of what's called universal grammar, core fixed properties of language. If you can really show that these are the optimal solution to the problem of restructuring and organizing a computable function, recursive function that generates in finitely many things, that's the basis of language. So if language is a kind of an optimal solution to that, you could explore whether that's shared. At some point you may get the points that are not shared, okay, and you try to discover what they are. It's not fundamentally any different than trying to find out what are the elementary particles, what's the chemical composition of the water. We don't perceive it, you know, it's a foreign universe for us. We have found very extensive and successful ways to understand a great deal about these totally alien systems, namely all science totally. I mean, this is very interesting. A history of this, I don't know if you want to go into it, but if you go back to the early modern science Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, you know, Wigans the great figures who founded modern science because they had a conception of what the world must be. It must be what they call the mechanical universe, the kind of thing that an artisan could construct out of pears and levers and so on. That was what the world must be. That's the base of modern science. Newton's great discovery was to show that there are no machines. There's nothing mechanical. Everything has what we're considered to be ghostly properties, interaction without contact and repulsion without contact, and so on. Newton thought that was completely obsurd. He wrote that no one who has the slightest scientific understanding could believe any of this, And in fact, if you look at his great work Principe, it's mathematical principles, not physical principles. Of course, Newton felt, along with his contemporaries, that he had not found a physical basis for motion, interaction and so on. He only had a mathematical theory of it. For the rest of his life he tried to find some mechanical formulation of this, of course, in vain. In later years, a major change took place in the pursuit of science. Scientists gave up the hope of finding an intelligible universe. All they wanted was intelligible theories of the universe. Newton's theories were intelligible. Leibness could understand Newton's theories like Newton. Leibnitz considered them observed. Basically, the goals of science were lowered. Let's just try to find theories that are intelligible and explain things, even if the universe that it provides is unintelligible to us, because it doesn't matter what's intelligible does. That's a fact about our cognitive sistence. So any child will assume that the world is mechanical, Like when you do experiments with young children and you have see two lines that move in common, a child will automatically assume there's an invisible bar connecting them. Let's just have to have a mechanical universe. Well you don't. Unfortunately, it's not a mechanical universe. So that's a case where cognitive capacities just don't happen to conform to the nature of the universe. So we have to proceed in other ways, like trying to find intelligible theories that will explain things. And I think it's the same problem if we deal with an ad might be that they have a form of intelligence that is inaccessible to us. Fine, if so, we'll try to discover explanatory theories which account for their form of intelligence, maybe account for theirs and ours. A super theory will show what kinds of intelligence there might be. It's such a far off dream that you can barely speculate about it, But I think that's the way we'd the only way can imagine. We just to proceed, in fact, using our own experience, with our own history of science.
It strikes me that you draw such a sharp line between humans and every other species on the planet. If I've understood correctly, you are arguing that humans are the only intelligent species on the planet and the only ones with this capacity for symbolic thought and expression. What about other species like dolphins, or whales or pigs, which are known to be intelligent and have some examples of communication. Can we exercise these principles on dolphins?
Every organism has communication. Trees communicate, so communication is kind of the universal. And if you think that language is just an instrument of communication. The modern behavior structuralist approach, which essentially rejects the conception of inner structure, which is radically adding scientific. In my view, all of science is talking about inner structures, not just arrangement and organization of data, but structuralism and behaviorism as chewed the search for innerstructures not led to do that. You can only look at the data and the organization of them. Well, that's a sure way of guaranteeing you'll never find anything, And exactly pretty much that's what's happened. Well, I think we've extricated ourselves from that period of human thought, at least we should have, and we're now back to what great physicist Jean Baptist Pain in his Nobel Laureate address described the essential nature of science as finding the hidden invisibles that make sense of the complex visibles. I think every scientist knows that behaviorism was a sharp departure from it, but it's a pathology which I think has to be overcome. When we overcome it, we see that communication though. It's what we observe is the complex visibles. It's not the hidden invisibles. The hidden invisibles turn out to be I think pretty much what the tradition assumed the construction of thought. Now, what about intelligence, that's too loose a concept. So I happen to live in Arizona, not far from the desert out in my backyard. There are desert ants that have cognitive capacities that humans can't begin to approach. I mean, they can navigate in ways which are impossible for humans, knowing figuring out from where the sun is, whether they're in the northern or southern hemisphere, using solar evidence solar azimus to carry out what's called dead brickoning, you can want around in the desert, find something to eat when you go on a straight line back to the nest. Humans can't do that. We can do it. We need complex technical instruments to be able to duplicate that. Sailors on the ocean have to have complex instrumentation to head back to port. They can't just do it the way ant does. So are they more intelligent than we are in some dimensions? Point as intelligence at least if it means things like ability to solve problems has many dimensions. Humans are very good at some of them, awful at others. Other organisms different. When you get the whales and dolphins, they have big brains, big even relative to body complex bins. They do communicate over long distances in the ocean, for example, And they have complex behavior. They cooperate, they've worked together. As I've watched dolphins. I used to sail when I was younger. You could sail through areas where there were dolphins and you could see them. If they caught a bunch of fish, they'd start circling around the area of the fish, driving them into a smaller area and finally eating them. All all right, that's complex cooperative behavior. Humans couldn't do it that easily. We'd have to have a more complicated way of doing it. Well, do they have anything like human language? Be kind of strange if they did, but there's no evidence for it. They have their capacities accommodating to their ecosystem. We have errors. Something peculiar happened in the history of life on Earth a couple hundred thousand years ago, a very strange organism emerged accidentally. Look the history of the long evolution of humans, it's a long series of accidents, started with, as I said, the formation of complex sills back billions of years ago. Then many other accidents, one of them sixty five million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth, wiped out about eighty percent of species end at the age of the dinosaurs. There were some small mammals around that managed to survive. Okay, that's us pure accident. A million other accidents along the way, and this series of accidents ended up at a point where one last accident seems to have provided a computational procedure or a human language which is not found elsewhere in the organic world, and then it seems that nature just found the simplest way to deal with it. Maybe that's what happened, We don't know, but that's what it begins to look like. If so, it's very unlikely that we're going to find anything like human language in dolphins or whales. If I take our closest relatives, chimpanzees. There have been extensive efforts totally pointless in my opinion, but very extensive efforts to see if you could, with massive training from infancy, see if you could elicit any language like behavior from a chimpanzee. All total failures. A lot of my students were involved in this, and very good psychologists. My own feeling is that it's about us ridiculous as trying to teach humans to do the waggle dance. Of bees. I mean, you could probably train graduate students to do something that looked kind of like the waggle dance, but totally pointless endeavor. They're not doing it the same way. It's a different organisms functioning differently. We're not at the peak of intelligence. There's no great chain of being, you know, starting with bacteria ending up with us. That's a long abandoned idea. There's many different branches. Organisms do in many different ways, and they have their own forms of what we might call intelligence. We have ours, desert ants of theirs, dolphins of theirs. It would be absolutely a biological miracle if we found that chimpanzees could acquire language. It would be like saying that chimpanzees have this amazing nobility with enormous survival value, but they never thought of using it till humans came around. It's as if someone were to come along and show humans how you can fly. You can get away from that lion that's chasing you. Why don't just fly? And humans said, oh, I never thought of that, and you go like that and you started flying. That's not going to happen. That's not the way biology works. If there's a capacity that's of survival value, they're going to use it.
So the message I'm getting is that you don't consider there to be sufficient intelligence in other creatures on the Earth to develop the kind of symbolic language that we could decode. So it's not a fair proxy for the question of could we understand an alien intelligence? Okay, well, I have a lot more I want to ask you about, but first let's take another break. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient intense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit us dairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
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Okay, we're back and we're discussing with esteemed Professor Chomsky the possibility of communicating with aliens and whether or not anybody in the scientific community takes this prospect seriously. You mentioned something earlier, you said that the possibility of trying to decode an alien language is a remote possibility, and I'm wondering if it's something that linguists as a field are excited about or think about. You know, biologists, If you told a biologist I have a sample of life from another planet, they would be very excited. They would dive in immediately, they would be salivating at the opportunity. Are linguists excited about this as well? Or is this something that just is so remote that nobody really takes seriously.
Some linguists are interested in it, Actually, I'm one of the very few. I'm a co author of a couple articles and what's called zeno linguistics. What could you do if you found an alien intelligence? And what we suggested is something along the lines of what I discussed. I don't think it's a topic that interests many linguists, because there's nothing to say about it. First of all, we have no idea whether intelligence of anything we'd call intelligence even exists. You're familiar, I'm sure with Fermi's paradox. Where are they? You know? I mean, from a point of view an astrophysicist, Fermi could show that there's huge numbers of planets which have conditions for life pretty much like ours. So there ought to be lots of life. It should have evolved into higher intelligence. We've made massive efforts to investigate it, searching for any signal of intelligent life. So far total zero nothing. So where are they? Well, one possibility is they're just not there, that the series of accidents that led to humans was so totally improbable that just wasn't dubligated. In fact, is even I'm not confident to judge their accuracy. But there are studies published in serious peer reviewed biological journals arguing that even the complexity of RNA is so improbable that it's very unlikely to have found in any accessible part of the universe. Of course, lots of the universe just isn't accessible, but the parts that we can conceivably have contact with, or maybe that's true, there won't be any. The answer to Family's paradox is there aren't any. There are other possible answers. Actually we're in the process of giving an answer. There's several aspects to intelligence. One is the capacity to destroy. Human intelligence has discovered the capacity developed the capacity to destroy everything. The doomsday clock of the atomic scientists measures that every year now has the human species developed the moral capacity to constrain its ability to do everything? Well, so far the evidence on that is not very strong. Maybe it doesn't, and it may turn out that one aspect of intelligence is that the capacity to destroy simply exceeds the capacity to constrain it. If so, there might have been any number of human civilizations and they all destroyed themselves because natural law, it's the way it works. Could be another answer to Family's paradise. But the fact of the matter is they're just not there, or at least we can't find them. So given that it doesn't attract a great deal of interest to look into how to deal with it except just kind of thing we're talking about, amusing puzzle to think about. How could you proceed to say, my own opinion, we proceed very much in the way that humans proceeded with human science, which is an alien world. The universe is an alien world to us, totally alien. We have no gress with it, but nevertheless we've been able to learn a lot about it.
Well.
I think it's a very intriguing question because it goes to the heart of lots of fascinating topics about whether what we've learned is universal. And of course we won't know anything until we actually meed aliens, if that ever happens. But you know, as a scientist, I see the depiction of my field of science in popular literature all the time, and sometimes it's very accurate and sometimes it's cringe inducing fictional descriptions of how linguists might communicate with alien intelligence. I wonder what your thoughts are on various fictional depictions. Is there a particular fictional depiction of linguist decoding alien language that you find plausible or at least amusing.
The only thing that I think is plausible is what I just described. It's like the problem of finding out the inner nature of an organic compound. We don't have any intuition about that. It is what it is. There was a period of human science, a flourishing active, vigorous period created modern science. Basically Galileota Newton in which there was such a picture, turned out there isn't any such picture, so we give up on that hope. We now study everything from the outside, including our own intelligence or intuitive belief of what it ought to be. Is an interesting comment about our cognitive nature, but it tells us nothing about what we're studying. Yeah, that was the lesson of Nottonian physics.
I think, well, I think the deep question that I'm curious about here is whether the invisible truths that we're revealing, as you say, we use the visible evidence to try decode with the invisible truths about the universe, are whether those really are universal? And the way you're describing it sounds to me like you you the universe as fundamentally ununderstandable. We are putting together sort of mathematical stories that we tell ourselves as humans to make sense of it. But doesn't that mean that it's very likely that, for example, alien scientists are coming up with completely different stories that make sense to them, you know, even the human stories have varied over the last few hundred years, or our understanding for what might be going on in science, So is there a chance we ever met aliens that we could talk science with them, that we shared some sort of fundamental mental constructs about what's going on inside the universe.
Well, I can only repeat the only way we could find out is by starting with common ground. No other way. Common ground might be arithmetic. Maybe it could be something like the universals of human cognition, human language. Maybe if it's a fact that that's the optimal way for nature to construct any system of infinite generative capacity, then it's likely that it will be universal in all forms of intelligence. It's about as far as we can go after that. It's just asking forgetting aliens. What might we discover about the nature of elementary particles? Who knows? You know, discover it when you discover it.
Well, I have a sort of sociological question then for you, which is, if aliens made themselves known and arrived on Earth and were curious and peaceful and wanted to communicate with Dea, you think that linguists and scientists would be allowed contact. Do you think that society and politicians would allow sort of unfettered scientific communication with extraterrestrials?
Ford to know what humans will do? Take a look at the United States, the country we know best. There's a couple of dozen states where the state legislatures are passing laws. Let's say that parents can sue teachers if they teach things that parents don't like. Okay, that's the kind of creature we are in Stolen aust Russia, you could be sent to the Gulag for it. In states. In the United States, you can be sued by parents for it. Wills, going back to your question, will the politicians allow scientific communication? Many of them don't even allow human communication.
Well, speaking of communications, there is some history. We have sent some messages out into space. There's you know, encodings on the voyager. There's a message we've sent from Arasibo. Looking back on those messages, which we're designed with some attempt to be founded in mathematics, do you think that it's possible for alien intelligence to decode those you look, you find those to be well constructed in general, or do you think that they're just reflective of the thinking at the moment.
Well, we'd have to begin with things like simple arithmetical truths. If you have two things over here, three things over there, do you have five things all together? If you can get that for we can go on from there.
So it seems to me that to summarize what I think is your view is that it's likely that mathematics is at the core of all intelligence and language. From that we might be able to build up some grammar based on the most basic operations. Is that a fair summary.
It's a fair summary. Tempted by platonism, the idea that numbers are real, they're just there. We discover them, we don't create them. It's contentious idea. It's not very clear what it means, but something on that order seems at least plausible. If so, they're going to be there for every form of intelligence. As far as language and thought are concerned. That depends on the answer to an open and significant scientific question. Is human language the optimal solution for meeting the minimal external condition of expressing thought, having ways to express thought, agent actions, events, and so on. I think there's this work pointing in that direction. There are steps towards that conclusion. As a minority opinion, most linguists don't pay attention to this, but and those who do doesn't make any sense. But I think there is work tending strongly in that direction. If it turns out to be true, well then we have another way to deal with and intelligence if it is really optimal, basically as a natural law should show up everywhere where nature operates. Okay, that's a possible, whige possible based on a lot of empirical assumptions.
Well, let me ask you a silly question then to end, which is all human culture and all human languages seem to have a uniform concept of what is a joke? You think that it's likely to have aliens, if they're intelligent and communicate in some way that's intelligible to us, will be able to make jokes. We'll get our jokes. We could understand alien humor.
Actually, I just read an interesting book about that about humans. It's by social history. It's a study of early modern conceptions, behavior, and so on, including what were jokes. So it turns out that one of the great jokes in I guess the eighteenth century was massacring cats. The book is called The Great Cat Massacre. It's a very interesting book. It's a study of the ways in which people looked at things. It's not mostly about cats, just one example. The way they looked at things in the early modern period not that far from US eighteenth century, and a lot of things that look like jokes don't look like jokes. Does all right?
Well, I hope when the aliens arrived they leave our cats alone. Thanks very much, Really appreciate your humoring me for these silly, but I think are fascinating questions that probe not just the nature of our language, but the nature of our thought and maybe the nature of our understanding of the universe. So thanks again very much for coming on the podcast. Well, thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with Professor Chomsky. His reactions gave me a lot to think about, especially on the topic of whether or not some of the ideas the stories we tell about elementary particles are fundamentally true, universal to alien physicists as well, or just sort of mathematical stories that we tell ourselves in our ongoing effort to understand this crazy, bonkers universe that's out there. To me, one of the deepest ways to get a handle on this mystery will be to talk to aliens bysists about it, if it ever happens, because they might reveal that the way we are looking at the universe is very human centric that we've missed something obvious because we don't have one of the senses that they have, where we have not developed a branch of mathematics, or maybe even mathematics is holding us, but we won't know until we have a chance to interview one of them on the podcast. So thanks very much for joining us. Tune in next time, Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. How is us dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last sustainability to learn more.
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