is DNA stupid?

In general, I notice if you post from America, you take your eyes off the subject and focus on some person rather than the topic under discussion. I wonder why that is? Do find that easy or is it just that you are taught to respong like that?

Go study some neuroscience and get back to us when you're done.

Thanks :)

Hint: if you are going to cut and paste your responses, use a spell checker first. You will still look like a buffoon, but at least you will look like a semi-literate buffoon.

The problem with cut and paste is that one reply rarely fits three posts. In my case, I am focusing of you math error and you are scurrying like a cockroach when the lights come on in a desperate attempt to change the subject.

DEAL WITH YOUR MATH ERROR!! DO IT NOW!!!

Do a Google search for "poverty of the stimulus". You will find several papers which do just that.

That article doesn't mention that 95% figure you spoke of, nor is it one of Chomsky's own refereed journal publications. It isn't even one of Chomsky's unreviewed books. I'm ready to believe that Chomsky made that claim, but you haven't shown us where he made it.

If you'd care to take some time off from cutting and pasting, perhaps you'd be willing to supply us with the following information:

1) How -- exactly -- do you believe Shannon's theory applies here?

2) Where -- exactly -- do you get the 95% figure from Chomsky?

Guy Macon wrote (really, this time):

Ooops -- my bad. No more paint thinner for me today!

The Artist Formerly Known as Kap'n Salty wrote:

If you work in AI, you know that information has to be programmed in, otherwise a desirable behaviour is never exhibited. If you study Shannon as electronics engineer, you would also be told that new information cannot be created out of thin air as you get led into information and compression and all the things revolving around information. Shannon in combination with Chomsky's result is putting a limit on what a human could have learned by year 2. There just isn't enough information that can be programmed into a person in that short period. Thus from Shannon's perspective, it must be preprogrammed. Even if aspects of it isn't, the mechanisms for learning must all be pre-programmed with concepts without which learning itself will fail. Sure enough, in experiments we can reproduce this result. If a child isn't taught language by age 14 for example, that facility is dropped by the human brain. In other words, the ability to learn a language is present in the brain at time of birth, but that one specific computer program is erased at age 14. (Its not erased if you learn a language - and you can continue to learn more languages.) If that specific program exists in the brain at time of birth, then it must be programmed in before birth and that information must be coded in the DNA. Unfortunately, comparing with chimp, there doesn't seem to be enough information for it to have been put into the DNA. May be it is there, but it is too difficult to see where its been stored. So if you follow the Shannon argument, it is either in the DNA and we can't see it, or it is being downloaded and programmed into the brain by some method that is still undiscovered - basically because the information content is too high to be transferred on the DNA.

This is a reasonable figure banded about for Chomsky. Whethers its 94% or 99% thats down to personal beliefs as no experiment has yet been devised to narrow the margin of error.

See what I mean!

In any case, I asked each person the same question.

Well on the whole they don't knock down Chomsky. There is war between the philospher's camp and the linguists camp. The philosophers simply don't like the idea that our minds are mechanical and who is to argue? The problem is the translation of this epic battle to the AI world where unfortunately Chomsky's resulty apply with deadly precision and philosphers have nothing to offer in battling with computational logic, software algorithms and reams of printouts.

Its in some encyclopedia (Britannica?) that I don't have to hand.

...

It seemed on my reading that they did, by showing that the arguments to date in favor of "poverty of the stimulus" were incomplete and/or incorrect. I haven't seen anybody prove that hypothesis to be false, just that the attempts to prove it true have so far failed.

Many of us take issue with that, or at least with the assumption that that is true. If you assume that it's the case you can get all kinds of spurious results, like the Chinese Room. It may very well be the case that our minds can't be matched by non-metaphysical means, but that has not been proven.

Philosophers can get away with a lot of things that scientists can't, in the reasoning department. They can make broad statements supported by rhetoric without ever having to test them against the world. That's fine as far as philosophy goes, but science demands a higher standard of proof.

I'm not sure how to unpack this. It seems as though you're saying both that philosophers can't compete with scientists in the area of logic, algorithms, and printouts, and that Chomsky's "results" apply with precision. I don't see how to reconcile those statements with each other.

Find the reference. Until you do that there is no reason to think that you haven't misinterpreted things.

-- D. Jay Newman

Sorry, but this *is* the field I studied in college.

I have not been able to find any reference to your statement. And I spent part of last night searching the internet and my books.

So nobody has to debunk anything that you won't actually bring up to the table.

-- D. Jay Newman

To debunk this theory we would have to raise a child in isolation for two years.

Not only is this illegal, immoral, and unethical, it would take longer than five minutes.

There have been *many* studies on children who have, for some reason, been raised without language. In all cases, they were not able to pick up language completely.

This was from the wikipedia link.

So basically your statement has already *been* debunked.

-- D. Jay Newman

The problem is that you made two statements:

1. That DNA has only 20,000 bits of information (as in 1s nad 0s).
2. Chomsky's so-called statement

I have never insulted you even though you have done this to me. I am from the US.

You refuse to explain either point, even after many people have asked. You have never stated a reference for the so-called Chomsky statement.

In other words, you are attempting a discussion based on a lack of evidence. Every logical attempt to refute you has been met with stonewalling. I think it is time to either put up or shut up.

-- D. Jay Newman

If you work in AI, you know about emergent behavior.

If you study Shannon as electronics engineer, you would know that the system you are studying has a one megabit per second source of input information feeding it.

Count the seconds in two years of time. Now multiply by a million bits per second. Oh... That's right... I forgot that you are incapable of doing simple arithmatic, as evidenced by you continued insistance that a 3 billion bit genome has only 20,000 bits. Never mind. You are too stupid to ever understand where your logic went off the track.

600 million years of trial and error and survival of the fittest all over the earth. 7 million years from chimps to humans. All over the western hemisphere.

But human technology went from walking to rocket ships in about 5000 years.

Human technology is proceeding much faster than Darwinian evolution. Say, maybe 10,000,000 years from walking to flying in dinosaurs; 5,000 in humans.

When the Jew's ancestors discovered eugenics about 6000 years ago that speeded things up also.

The curve is not exponential.

It's hyperbolic.

That means the singularity will be here soon:

I could describe a dinosaur in about a thousand words.

And teach it to a child in about 5 seconds.

Strange. I thought the main point of AI was to have a program that didn't need to be programmed, rather it would learn from experience. Like a human learns.

Hmmm. What about imagination? Perhaps information cannot be created out of thin air, but new combinations of existing information could be made.

Has Shannon said that? If so, would you please send us the reference.

Strangely enough few people here have disagreed with this statement.

Yes. In other words, if a child doesn't *learn* language early then he can't. I fail to see how this agrees with your main assertions.

What I've read and experienced (I've studied over a dozen languages, three of them to fluency and only in English can I speak like a native is that the language aquisition mechanism goes away. Yes, you can learn new languages after 14, but it is more difficult and you can't learn to native fluency.

Yes, the brain does seem to be programmed to absorb languages during certain years. After that, this mechanism is disabled; I suppose to free up that part of the brain for something else.

How do you know how much information it takes the brain to learn language? If it is like an ANN then only a slight shift in priorities allows it to learn different things.

Perhaps this insight could be used in a robot. Essentially starting with a focus on learning about the environment and then switch the shape of the network for more normal use. I'll have to think on this.

People learn. Young people learn extremely quickly.

Yes, it is probable that our brains are set up to learn languages during a certain age, and that there is some basic simularity between languages because of this.

However, DNA doesn't set up a grammar. If it did everybody would be speaking the same language.

If the learning came from a non-physical source, then why woulc children learn the languages that are used around them?

So you claim. Nobody seems to be able to find a reference.

Please provide one.

-- D. Jay Newman

Who says? What's wrong with all the studies of deaf and other incapacitated children?

Yeah but they sure as hell know a lot more than they were ever trained. Take the deaf for example.

Yeah right - raising a child in isolation forms a pretty steep example of your limited understanding of debunking I assume?