EFTA00707302.pdf

From: Noam Chomsky To: "jeffrey E." <jeevacation@grnail.com> Cc: Valeria Chomsky Subject: Re: Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2016 00:08:40 +0000 What is better for thought than echt Jewish delicatessen food. Glatt kosher, I hope. Very interesting experiment. It might tell us a lot about musical genres and their underlying structure, and the cognitive capacities that organize thought, creativity, and experience in these apparently human-specific ways. On blind children, you might want to look at the fascinating study by Landau and Gleitman on the language of the blind: Language and Experience: evidence from blind children (or something like that). What is striking is that without visual experience, the blind learn language virtually in parallel with sighted children, with the same changes that plainly have to do with maturation and the very specific internal concepts of human cognition, leading finally to understanding of extremely refined visual concepts, all with only minimal experience that can't be directing these developments any more than the nutrition of the embryo, while obviously necessary for development, can determine that we have a mammalian rather than visual system. There are also some quite intriguing differences. E.g., at the age when sighted children acquire the words/concepts see, look at, etc., blind children also do, but necessarily give a tactile rather than visual interpretation. So for the blind child, to look at something is to touch it, and to see it is to grasp what it is. The child is therefore surprised to find that its mother cannot see the back of the dolls they are holding, since the child can. Lots of results like these. What is particularly striking, however, is how similar the cognitive growth is to normal physical growth, of course elicited by experience but then substantially following its internally determined path. The widely-held belief that cognitive development is somehow different from the rest of biology in that it is experience- determined is, I think, a residue of traditional dualism -- a kind of "methodological dualism," which is, I think, more pernicious than traditional metaphysical dualism, which, in fact, was quite serious and reasonable science at the time. Long story. Noam On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 8:46 AM, jeffrey E. <jeevacation@gmail.com> wrote: happy to provide some camegie deli sustenance for thought. today I conducted an experiment encouraged by Noam's wholly justified aggressive and detailed directives to joscha. . joshcha focused on layers being developed in the brain . the timing for the development of each layer being different per species . I postulate that music might be a frosted window into that structure. symphonies begin with their first " layer " a theme. in fact , there might be more than one theme in the first layer „ the second part of symphonic form is the complex development stage. where those themes are inverted, deconstructed , reconstructed etc ,and the development stage takes the most time . in the conclusion of the symphonic form the recapitulation of all that has come before it forms a " phenenoma of the piece " a whole ,made up of its smaller concepts . As opposed to listening to music to record which neuron is firing, as most musciolgists attempt . I propose that the music may be the audible result of those neurons firing, made possible by a select few who would attempt to notate those neuronal firings. Beethoven for example. The experiment . I mashed all of the four symphonies together , playing recordings of the 3rd 5th 6th 7th all overlayed on each other, playing at the same time. - the way a brain might develop. I expected an EFTA00707302 ordered noise but to the surprising contrary , IT WAS AMAZING. . you can hear new "concepts " forming, iI wonder whether in the mind of a blind child , the " music" would be created even without the visual referencial. but created none the less. later when the visual can be tied to concepts , the anatomy may be hijacked to produce sounds . that somehow relate to the concepts. . I tried to mix music from different cultures- it didn't work. African does not work with western europe,- chinese works with neither of the other two. but within the same cultural music ( the brain of the local species ) the mash ups are beautiful. I would note that computers engage in "parallel processing" only in order to take a hard problem and break it into its component parts , working on each component separately, here each problem Interacts and the their resolutions interact in remarkable ways. please note The information contained in this communication is confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may constitute inside information, and is intended only for the use of the addressee. It is the property of WE Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by return e-mail or by e-mail to jeevacation@gmail.com, and destroy this communication and all copies thereof, including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved EFTA00707303