Original subtitles

I discovered Noam Chomsky by

picking up a couple of DVDs at a video store in New York a few

years ago: "Manufacturing consent" and "a rebel without

a pause." I remember the sequence

where a few kids from a school radio station are interviewing

Professor Chomsky at their little station.

Noam was giving them his full attention, as he does to

everyone who requests it. Film and video are both, by

their nature, manipulative. The editor or director proposes

an assembly of carefully selected segments that he/she

has in mind. In other words, the context

becomes more important than the content, and, as a result, the

voice that appears to come from the subject is actually coming

from the filmmaker. That is why I find the process

manipulative. The human brain forgets

the cuts -- a faculty specifically human that, I will

learn, Noam calls "psychic continuity."

The brain absorbs a constructed continuity as a reality and,

consequently, gets convinced to witness a fair representation of

the subject. On the other hand, animation

that I decided to use for this film is clearly the

interpretation of its author. If messages, or even propaganda,

can be delivered, the audience is constantly reminded that they

are not watching reality, so it's up to them to decide if

they are convinced or not. Also, I have been looking for a

project that would add up a long process to a hopefully coherent

result, a way to focus my often shattered creativity and maybe

contribute to expose values I share.

Of course, the egotistic side of me also felt empowered about the

prospect of spending some time with "the most important thinker"

"alive," as he is described in a paragraph which, coincidentally,

ends by asking why Chomsky is an "American-hater," a

misconception only possible if you consider that the same

people who run a country also constitute it!

But what the hell? Professor Chomsky is not getting

any younger, and I better hurry up.

After all, I just did a film about my aunty for similar

reasons -- not animated, though.

Then again, she is less controversial, or is she?

We're gonna have a conversation, and, um, sometimes it's gonna

run, or sometimes, not so. Hopefully, it's not gonna be too

distracting. >> No, it isn't bad.

Okay. 'Cause it's a bit noisy, so...

It's like that.

It's a old-fashioned sound. >> Yeah, it's good.

So I wanted you to be prepared.

Hearken back to your youth.

Doesn't it wreck the audio? >> A little bit, but -- we will

hear the camera, but as long as we understand the words, I don't

mind. >> Yeah.

So, I prepared my question a little bit, but I... Uh...

Sorry, I'm a little bit nervous. I-I, uh...

You are nervous? >> He is.

After all your experience in the public eye?

No, not... It depends on the person I'm meeting more than

me. So, I wanted to start with

asking you if you could record the very first memory of your

life?

First memory of my life? >> Yeah.

Yeah, I suppose.

There are memories that I can date because I know where they

were. Mm.

So, I can date memories from about a year and a half, when I

was sitting on a -- I know where it was, so it had to be a

year and a half -- where I was sitting on a counter in my,

uh... My aunt, who -- my parents had

jobs...

...which was unusual. This was the 1930s.

So, there was a stream of aunts and cousins and others who came

through, and there were several aunts who spent time with us.

One of them was trying to get me

to eat oatmeal, which I didn't want to eat...

...So I just put it in my cheek

and refused to swallow it. And she tried to figure out how

to get me to swallow that oatmeal, but I must have sat

there for a long time. I was a stubborn kid.

>> I was not going to eat that

oatmeal.

I remember that very well, and that had to be at about...

16 months or 17 months, and I remember other things from that

time. I was in a nursery school.

I remember sort of standing there looking around, wondering

what all these kids were up to, and why, and so...

Mm-hmm. Do you think it's -- it's

connected with the development of language, the formation of

memories? Does it correspond to where the

brain starts to grasp... >> A lot is being learned about

language acquisition. The more intensively the topic

is studied...

...the more sophisticated the research techniques, the more we

learn that children know quite a lot of language, much more than

you would expect, before they can exhibit any of that

knowledge. >> Mm-hmm.

The direct evidence about this -- and there's also

indirect evidence. So, just to mention some of the

indirect evidence, there is a...

...technique of teaching language to the deaf-blind.

Actually, my wife did a lot of the work on this.

It's called the Tadoma method. >> Yes, with the hand!

Well, what they do is teach the person to put their hand on

someone's face...

...and using the motions of the face and the vocal chords, to

interpret what you're saying. Extremely little -- very little

information comes through, but people get a very satisfactory

knowledge of language from that. I mean, so much so that you

have to do pretty complex tests to see what they don't know.

However, they have never succeeded in using this

method...

...for people who lost sight and hearing before about 18 months

old. What seems to be the case is

that during the early exposure, where the child is not

manifesting very much knowledge, maybe producing a

word or two-word sentences, they're acquiring the basic

character of the language -- quite a lot of knowledge, which

they can then build on when they -- it's unconscious, of

course.

But they can build on it when they get, at least later,

instruction which has very little evidence.

And they can, in fact, live in a society where people are

talking...

...and they can understand what they're saying if they can put

their hand on your face. In fact, I should say that, you

know, one of the most striking things about language, which has

really not been studied... Just consider an infant, you

know, a 1-day-old infant. Now, there's all kinds of things

going on in the world. How does the infant figure out

what part of what's going on in the world has to do with

language? It's an incredible feat!

Now, their -- >> well, you know what?

When I grew up, we used to believe in reincarnation.

What? Reincarnation? Oh, that's Plato.

It's a fairy tale, but I think it makes me look to a new

being as a fully completed person.

That's Plato. That's Plato's theory of

remembrance. >> Uh-huh.

He was puzzled by the question of how you know so

much, and he said, "well, you must remember it from an earlier"

life." You're as smart as Plato.

So, I wanted to ask you,

quickly, the type of education you received from your parents

and, quickly, at school. >> It was a Deweyite progressive

school, which was very successful.

And it was -- for me, at least, it was perfect.

It was not unstructured, but it

did emphasize initiative, creativity, and working with

others. There was no grading, you know,

but you -- you were encouraged to pursue your own interests...

Mm-hmm. >> ...And -- but within a

structure that was established. So, you went, you did, you know,

Learned the things you had to

learn, but you were all pursuing your own interests and often

working with others. In fact, I didn't -- I

wasn't even aware that I was a good student until I went to

high school. I went from this relatively

free, creative, exciting environment to a pretty

regimented academic high school where everyone was ranked and

did exactly what they were supposed to do and everyone's

trying to get into college and so on.

And then I discovered I was a

good student. I mean, I knew I had skipped a

grade, and everyone else knew I'd skipped a grade, but nobody

else... The only thing anyone noticed

was I was the smallest kid in the class, but it didn't mean

anything, aside from that. And I can remember the school

years very well. I barely remember high school.

It's kind of like a black hole. >> And do think competition is

counter-stimulating? >> It shouldn't be th--

what's the point of being better than someone else?

And where was this school? >> Right outside the city limits

of Philadelphia. It was in kind of an open

countryside, so, you know, by the time I was old enough to, my

best friend and I would spend Saturday riding our bikes all

over the countryside.

Did you keep friends from this age all during your life?

Uh, we sort of separated by high school, you know, went our

separate ways. >> Uh-huh.

You spent a lot of time on your own?

With my father, by the time I was 10 or 11 or so, every Friday

night, for example, we would read Hebrew classics, you

know, 19th-century literature...

...essays. And that was just part of the

routine of incorporating the...

...the emerging reviving Hebrew culture, that was all their

lives. I mean, that's what they

were devoted to -- the revival of -- of the language, the

culture, and the palestinian community.

This hebraic revival that --

Did you say "palestinian community"?

Well, you know, it's pre-Israel, so it's a Jewish

community in palestine. >> Okay.

Yeah. I suppose, by now, my father

would be called an anti-zionist. He was then a deeply committed

zionist, but for him, it was a cultural revival, basically.

Mm-hmm. >> Not particularly interested

in a Jewish state. >> Mm-hmm.

Do you remember if you had an ambition for your future, as a

child? >> A lot of crazy ambitions.

I remember once telling my mother that I had decided that

when I grew up, I wanted to be a taxidermist.

A taxidermist? >> Don't ask me why.

I guess I liked the word.

I was about 8 years old. >> So, since I'm ignorant, I got

the luck to discover descartes. I mean, I knew who descartes

was, but I read him after I read you.

And I noticed it gives you the tools to doubt what he's saying.

It's like the opposite of dogmatism.

I mean, that, you know, ought to be the ideal of teaching,

anyway, whether it's children or graduate students.

They should be taught to challenge and to question.

Images that come from the enlightenment about this say

that teaching should not be like pouring water into a vessel.

It should be like laying out a string along which the student

travels in his or her own way, and maybe even questioning

whether the string's in the right place.

And, you know, after all, that's how modern science started.

For thousands of years, it was accepted by scientists that

objects move to their natural place.

So, a ball goes to the ground, and steam goes to the sky.

And these things are kind of like common sense, and they were

taken for granted for literally thousands of years...

Mm-hmm. >> ...From Aristotle.

And it wasn't until Galileo and the modern scientific revolution

that scientists decided to be puzzled by these obvious things,

and as soon as you start to question things, you see nothing

like that makes any sense. And every stage of science, or,

you know, even just learning -- serious learning -- comes from

asking, "why do things work like that?"

Why not some other way?" All right?

You find that the world is a very puzzling place,

and if you're willing to be puzzled, you can learn.

If you're not willing to be puzzled, and just copy down

what you're told or behave the way you're taught, you just

become a replica of someone else's mind.

I mean, some of the technical work I'm doing now is initiated

by my suddenly realizing that assumptions that have been

standard throughout modern history of generative grammar --

but, in fact, throughout the traditional study of language --

just have no basis. And when we ask, "okay, then",

why do we assume them?" You have to look for a basis,

and lots of avenues open up. And that happens constantly.

And do you remember when you start to build your own

voice or your own philosophy, in a way?

And could you describe how this process happened?

It's a constant process, and it probably starts with my not

wanting to eat my oatmeal, you know?

"Why?" You know? >> Uh-huh.

And in any kind of scientific inquiry, any kind of rational

inquiry -- it's striking in science -- you have a conception

of how things ought to work. If you look at the empirical

data, they're, usually, at least partially recalcitrant.

Things don't fall into place. So, you, typically, are working

with a conflict between a conception of the way things

ought to work, in terms of, you know, like, in simplicity,

naturalness, and a look at the messy way in which things do

seem to work. The galilean revolution,

which was a real revolution in the way of looking at the world,

for one thing, because of the willingness to be puzzled about

what seemed to be simple things, it's a hard move to make.

In the case I mentioned, it was 2,000 years, you know -- smart

people. >> Yeah.

They said that nature is simple...

...And it's the task of the

scientist to show that it's simple, and if we've not been

able to do that, we've failed as scientists.

So, if you find irreducible complexity, you just haven't

understood. Well, that's a pretty good

guideline, and it does turn out to be a very effective driving

element in inquiry. Because -- there's good reasons

where I think it ought to turn out to be simple, you know?

I mean, for Galileo and the

whole of early modern science right through Newton -- great

scientists, you know, huygens, others, bernoulli, up through

Newton, you know, this is that kind of classic period of

modern science -- there was a very clear concept of

intelligibility. The goal of science was to show

that the world is intelligible, and "intelligible" meant

something. It meant something that an

artisan could create, like gears and levers, and something like a

model was these, let's say, medieval clocks, you know, which

did all sorts of amazing things. Now, that goes right through

Newton. It's called the mechanical

philosophy. "Philosophy" just meant science.

So, it's mechanical science, and that's the goal.

And then Galileo, at the end of his life, was kind of distraught

because he was not able to construct mechanical models of

the tides and the motion of the planets and so on, so he felt

his life -- scientific life had failed.

Mm-hmm. >> But then it went on.

Finally, you get to Newton, and Newton demonstrated that, to his

dismay, that the world doesn't work like a machine, that there

are what his scientific colleagues called occult forces,

namely attraction and repulsion, which don't operate by contact.

So, you can attract things at a distance, which was just

unintelligible. Newton himself thought that this

was, what he called an absurdity, which no person with

any scientific understanding could ever believe.

Uh-huh. >> There are just inherent

mysteries which are beyond our cognitive capacities.

Well, that was correct, and that was a real shocking discovery.

It has now been absorbed. So, to talk about the current

stage is misleading, if you're thinking about...

...Emerging fields, like

cognitive science, because we're not in that stage.

Mm-hmm. >> We haven't got to the

galilean stage, yet. >> Me, I work like a machine.

I know this sequence is quite a struggle, and believe me, it's

taking me forever to animate it. So, I'll take a break.

Noam kept coming back to Galileo, Newton, the

enlightenment, and I tried very hard to keep it short,

but it seems endless. However, this is a very

important part, in fact, and I must get through it.

I think that Noam is telling me what it takes to do true

science... Something to do with ideas,

creativity, and rigorous observation of nature and the

willingness to be proven wrong and start the experiment again

all over at any time. Richard feynman, the great

physicist, often talked about science integrity and said you

should always publish the results of your experiment,

especially when they prove you wrong.

He also had a funny story about a good scientist that was

ignored. In 1937, young, he was called,

was trying to teach a rat to count three doors to get some

food. So, he would place the food each

time in a maze, three doors away from the right, to get it to

count three doors. He would place the rat in a

different place each time, with the cheese three doors

away. But the rat never counted the

doors. He always went right through the

door where the food was placed the time before.

No matter where young placed the rat and the food, the result was

the same. He thought the rat must

recognize a detail on the door, so he repainted them all

identically. Still, the same result.

He then thought the rat could still smell the food from where

it was the previous time, so he put some chemical to wipe

any possible remaining smell. Still, the rat went to the exact

same door. Maybe the rat could notice some

light from the lab and use them as a guide, so he covered the

maze. Still, the same result.

He eventually found out that the rat could tell by the way the

floor sounded when he was running down the corridor, so he

put the whole maze on sand. The rat couldn't tell anymore

and had to learn to count the doors.

Feynman called this experiment an a-class experiment because

young had to go through all the possible steps before he could

affirm it was conclusive -- a rigor that he felt was,

unfortunately, uncommon in the science the way it was

conducted at this time. Now I am just adding stuff that

is not even from Noam. But I've put a loop under it, so

it is not so much work. The truth is that I am

frantically going through this animation, and it has been two

years since I started, so Noam is now 84.

I neglect my appearance, and I should be focusing on the film I

am preparing, "I'écume Des jours," but I won't

stop. I must finish the film and show

it to Noam before... Well, before he's dead.

My room is a pile of animation paper, my mother is at the

hospital, but I only care about Noam's health, only to show him

the finished film. This is childish and

unscientific, but true.

A few sessions we did before, we talked about evolution.

You're very skeptical, and I thought...

Not skeptical about evolution.

There's a common confusion, outside of serious biology.

Now, I mean, natural selection's a factor in evolution -- no

serious biologist doubts that -- but it's one of many factors.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> For example, mutation's a

factor. >> Yeah.

I mean, there are many other factors.

For example, if you just take a look at our, you know, our own

genetic endowment, a lot of it comes from transposition.

When you -- when you talk about the "andormant"...

The... "Enduremount"? How -- I'm sorry -- how do you

say "undoment"? >> When you're born with what...

What? Like, uh... >> Innate.

Yeah. But do you use the word

"andoumant"? >> How do you spell it?

Write it on the blackboard.

I don't know what he's saying.

"An-dou-ment"? >> Endowment!

Oh, endowment! >> Just had to write it down.

Sorry. I just couldn't hear. >> So, you think that we have a

way to comprehend the world within our self...

Yeah. >> ...And we can only comprehend

the world up to this limit? >> Well, that's just hume --

that's Newton and hume. So, you try to discover, "what"

is this cognitive endowment that we have?

That it is a fixed cognitive endowment is not really

arguable, unless you think we're angels.

Yeah. >> But if we're part of the

organic world, we have fixed capacities, just like I can't

fly, you know? These capacities have a certain

scope, and they have certain limits.

That's the nature of organic capacities.

Then comes the question, "okay, what are they?"

In fact, one of the striking things is what I just mentioned.

We -- our cognitive endowment sort of compels us to regard the

world in mechanical terms. We know that's wrong...

Yeah. >> ...But we can't help seeing

the world like that. If you look at the moon rising

in the early evening, at the horizon, it's big.

Yeah. Yeah. >> And then it gets smaller and

smaller. It's called the moon illusion.

We know it's not true, but you can't help seeing it.

Yeah. Well, I thought of it a lot, and

I know its one of the paradox, but I think our brain zooms.

It's like if you see the world through a window which is at a

far distance and you will see a bridge in the distance and the

window delimits your attention, then you would feel the bridge

is much bigger than what it is. >> But now you're trying to give

an explanation, and there's been a lot of work on what the

explanation is. >> Yeah.

But whatever -- and it's not so trivial -- but whatever the

explanation is, we can't help seeing it, okay?

We just see it, just like we can't help thinking that the

world works by physical interaction, contact.

Some other part of our brain tells us it's not true, well,

because of theories that have been developed and say it can't

work like that. >> Yeah.

But that can't change our perception and interpretation

because that's just fixed. >> Okay, try to visualize -- or

I guess it's not visualizable, but this endowment.

So, we see a tree, and we understand it's a tree.

Does it mean that our brain is equipped with a fixed capacity

that tells us, "this is a tree"? >> Here's another question where

it's good to be puzzled. "How do we identify something as

a tree?" It's not so simple.

So, for example, you plant a tree, say a willow tree, which

is a good example. It grows.

At some point, you cut a branch off it, and you put that branch

in the ground. Now, suppose it grows and it

becomes exactly identical to the original tree.

Now, suppose the original tree is cut down.

Is that new one the same willow tree?

Why not? It's genetically identical.

It has all the same properties. But we know it's not the same

tree. Well, why not?

I mean, and if you go further, it turns out our concept of

"tree" or "rock" or "person" or anything is extremely intricate.

And furthermore -- see, here's what I think -- it's just a

classic error that runs right through philosophy and

psychology and linguistics, right up to the moment...

...That's the -- the idea that

words, say, meaning-bearing elements like, say, "tree" or

"person" or, you know, "John Smith" or anything --

pick out something in the extramental world, something

that a physicist could identify, so that if I have a word, say,

"cow," it refers to something in a, you know, a scientist,

knowing nothing about my brain, could figure out what counts as

a cow. That's just not true.

That's why you have classic books with names like

"words & object" -- "word & object," quine's major

book, or "words and things," Roger brown's major book.

That referentialist assumption is simply false about humans.

Mm-hmm. >> And it's true with

animals. Like, as far as we know, in

animal communication, yeah, that's actually true, but for

humans, it's simply untrue. And furthermore, every infant

knows it. And that poses a huge

evolutionary problem. Where did that come from?

It imposes an acquisition problem, a descriptive problem,

an evolutionary problem. It's never been looked at

because everyone assumes, "ah, well, there's just a

relationship." That's like assuming things move

to their natural place. We're never going to have a real

understanding of semantics unless those illusions are

thrown out.

Well, something that always struck me since I was young is,

like, you get the representation of the world by symbols first.

Like, logically, you would see a dog, and then you would see a

drawing of a dog and make the connection.

But in your life, you get exposed to the representation of

a dog in a very, actually simplified way.

And then you go to the -- or let's say you go outside and

you see a real dog. >> The trouble is, that's not

the way it works. Yeah, that's very

commonsensical, just false. >> No, I'm not --

I'm saying it's how it's exposed, like --

it makes sense, and every work on philosophy or

linguistics says exactly that. This just happens to be false.

And furthermore, every infant knows it.

Now, fairy stories are based on the fact that it's false.

Like, take a fairy story that any child understands.

No, I'm not saying the child believes it's a real dog.

What I'm saying is -- >> that's not the point.

We do not identify dogs in terms of their physical

characteristics. >> Hmm.

As you can see, I felt a bit stupid here.

Let me explain. I think I couldn't get my point

through to Noam. Misuse of words and heavy accent

aggraved -- I mean, aggravated my attempt.

I was simply expressing that, in life, we first encounter images

of certain things, such as animals, then, later, we would

see the real thing. For instance, I saw many

pictures of a tiger before I saw a real one in a zoo.

There is nothing to argue about that, but Noam kept saying it

was false because of my use of the word "representation."

I'm pretty sure that he understood it as "mental"

"representation," as I was just talking of an image in a book.

Nevertheless, it gave him the opportunity to deepen his

argument, which is hard to understand.

So, I kept the whole thing, even though I look stupid.

Meanwhile, I decided to recycle some of my drawings since he was

making the same point again. >> We do not identify dogs in

terms of their physical characteristics.

Hmm. >> We identify dogs, for

example, in terms of a property of psychic continuity.

Like, if a witch turns a dog into a camel, and then some

fairy princess kisses the camel and it turns back to a dog, it's

been a dog all along, even when it looked like a camel.

I mean, that's the basis of fairy tales.

Yeah, I was not saying that it's --

but psychic continuity is not a physical property.

Mm-hmm. >> It's a property that we

impose on things. So, therefore, there is

no hope for finding a way of identifying the things that are

related to symbols by looking at their physical properties.

They're individuated. They're identified in terms of

our mental constructions, so they're basically mental

objects. >> Mm-hmm.

And that means the whole referentialist concept has to be

thrown out... And you have to look at the

relation of language to the world in some different fashion.

So, and do you say we constructed the world in

mirroring this image we had in our mind, then?

We do it, but we don't do it the way philosophers and

linguists think we do it. We certainly do it.

So, for example, sure, we see the world in terms of trees and

dogs and rivers and so on, but then the question is, "well",

what are those concepts?" Now, the standard assumption is

those concepts are linked to physical -- identifiable,

physical things in the extramental world, and that

assumption is just false. >> Mm-hmm.

And unless we rid ourselves of that assumption, we won't be

able to understand the way thought and language relates

to the world. But that's a topic that's just

taboo in philosophy and psychology, so they're stuck.

They're like mechanics, pre-Galileo, where everything

went to its natural place. Well, as long as you keep to

that for thousands of years, you're never going to understand

the mechanics of the world. That's why -- I think these are

the kinds of reasons why it makes very good sense to think

back to the earliest stages of the scientific revolution.

Not Einstein -- that's too sophisticated.

Let's go to the earliest stages, where people had that incredible

intellectual breakthrough, and they said, "let's be puzzled"

about what seems obvious. So, why should we take it to be

"obvious that, if I let go of a ball, it goes down and not up?"

Uh-huh. >> "I mean, it's sort of"

obvious, but why?" Well, as soon as you're willing

to ask that question, you get the beginnings of modern

science. If you're -- if you're not

willing to ask that question, you say, "well, it goes down"

'cause it belongs on the ground."

No science develops. >> Once again, I had posed my

question the wrong way. I was trying to ask if the way

humans built things such as cities, art, cars, and so on,

was reflective of a sort of a blueprint we would carry

within our endowment... Like bees constructing their

hives, for instance. So, next time I met Noam, I

showed him this animation, hoping it would help to make

sense.

And it did make sense. At the beginning of the second

interview, I showed the work in progress to Noam, who

was quite pleased, it seems. And I noticed in the second

interview that he was more receptive to my ideas.

So I asked my question again, but using bees and the hive as

an example made it more confusing.

I suppose there is an... Interaction.

So, if you watch children... Building, trying to build a

house with cards, you know, you stack them up and you put

something on top and... They must have some initial

conception in mind of what they're planning to do, but

it's certainly altered by the process.

You see, "well, this is not going to stand, so I have"

to rearrange it and do something in a different way."

I mean, take the building we're in -- one of its striking

characteristics, when you're sitting in my office, is that

there aren't any right angles in many of the buildings, so...

Everything's a little skewed. The -- I don't know what was in

Frank Gehry's mind, but one architect who came through,

working on the -- looking at the structure of the building,

suggested to me that it has, in some respects, the character of

a three-dimensional version of a mondrian painting.

Yes, so, I wanted to know if you have any thinking of the

mechanism of inspiration. >> It's a mystery.

It's something common to humans. You see it in young children.

You see it in scientists. You see it in carpenters trying

to solve a complex problem of how to build a house.

But... It's just something that happens, in all kinds of

conditions -- strange conditions.

So, for example, I was watching a couple of carpenters working

on a summer cottage, and they had a kind of an idea in mind,

but were kind of going along to see how it would work.

They reached a problem that looked insoluble, you know, and

they -- so they took off for a while, and then they came back,

and then they immediately did it.

And I asked, "how'd you do that?"

And they said, "well, we went out and smoked some pot, and it"

just kind of came to us.

Who knows? That's inspiration. >> I wanted to get out this

sequence. For a short time period, I had

an episode myself where I indulged into this habit -- very

shortly, in fact. And, looking back, it didn't do

me very good at all. Now that I've said it, I can

keep this sequence. That's interesting.

For instance, in my case, I use a lot of my misunderstanding as

a source of inspiration, and I realize that lately, like,

because my English is not good, many times, when people talk to

me, I understand something different.

I remember I was talking to my friend, and she told me she had

made a model of a boat in a forest, and I understood the

forest was in the boat, so I imagined a sort of vegetable ark

of Noah -- Noah's ark. Right.

I think something jarring takes place, and that can happen in a

class, for example. You're lecturing.

A student raises a question. Suddenly, you recognize that

something you thought was obviously true has a problem

with it. And for a while, it may seem

insoluble, but you may take a walk, or maybe overnight there's

something -- when you're sleeping, something comes to

you, and all of a sudden, you just see ways of looking at

the -- at the issue and the world a little bit differently.

I think that's how, from childhood on to...

People do creative work. That's somehow the way it

happens. Actually what's going on, nobody

understands. >> In the little clip I'll show

you, you're talking a lot about how we try to interpret the

world and how we ought to throw away what's believed in

linguistics or philosophy. You say, "why do we recognize"

that this is a different tree when it's been cut and it grows,

and it's identical?" And since then, I've read about

genetics, and that's a clone. Basically, when you reproduce,

it's asexual reproduction, so it's a clone, so it's

potentially identical. But my only -- the only answer I

could give was that I know it's a different tree because I saw

somebody come and cut it, and then grow again.

Mm-hmm. >> So I was thinking, it's

probably less trivial than that. >> Well, actually, I think

there's a real point there. Part of our concept of a tree

has to do with a certain, pretty abstract, notion of continuity.

So, the original tree has a continuous existence, which we

impose on it because, genetically speaking, the branch

that was cut off is the same object...

Yeah? >> ...But when it becomes a

tree, it doesn't have the kind of continuity that we interpret

as continuity, and a different intelligence could interpret

continuity quite differently and say that the new one is the

real tree. That's our conception of

continuity... >> Yeah.

...and it's a very complex one.

So, for example, there's a children's story which my

grandchildren like -- liked when they were little.

It's a story about a donkey named Sylvester.

And something happens, and it turns Sylvester into a rock.

And the rest of the story is the rock, Sylvester, trying to

explain to his parents -- parent donkeys -- that it's

really their baby Sylvester. And since children's stories

have happy endings, something else happens, and it turns him

back to Sylvester and everybody's happy.

Well, the children understand that the rock, though it has

none of the properties of a donkey -- physical properties --

and has all the properties of a rock, is really Sylvester.

And, for example, if he was turned into a camel later or if

something would be a jar -- he's got to come back and be

what he is -- Sylvester. >> Mm-hmm.

All right. What that tells you is that,

without any instruction, of course, an infant understands a

certain special kind of continuity.

It's a very specific kind, even more -- much more abstract,

even, than the case of the tree. But there's a kind of psychic

continuity that we impose. It's part of the interpretation

we impose on the world... That... Identifies the objects

that are around us, whether it's persons or rivers or rocks or

trees or anything else. >> I think I have an example

that, maybe, make me understand the concept.

When I meet a friend that I didn't see for 20 years, only

the appearance is completely different, first I feel I'm

meeting a different person, and then, in the course of the

conversation -- it's generally 20 minutes, 30 minutes -- this

person become my friend, and the old image of my friend, like

his picture, becomes younger than he is, so I readjust, and I

was wondering if this is a phenomenon that everybody

perceive... >> All time time.

I mean, we -- >> but is this the same

phenomenon that we apply to objects?

Yeah. It's the same as with objects,

like the tree or a river or -- let's say, take the

Charles river over there, the river going past the

building. What makes it the Charles river?

You can have substantial physical changes, and it would

still be the Charles river. So, for example, you can reverse

the direction -- it would still be the Charles river.

You can break it up into tributaries that end up

somewhere else, and it would still be the Charles river.

You can change the content -- so, maybe you build a

manufacturing plant upstream and the content is mostly arsenic,

let's say. Well, it's still the

Charles river. On the other hand, there are

very small changes that you can make, in which case it won't be

the Charles river at all. So, suppose you put panels along

the side, so it goes in a straight path, and you start

using it to ship freight up and down.

It's not the river anymore -- it's a canal.

Oh, yes. >> And now, suppose you make

some minimal physical change, an almost-undetectable change,

which hardens it. It's called a phase change --

undetectable, but it makes it glass, basically, and you paint

a line down the middle, and people start to using it to

commute to Boston, it's a highway.

It's not a river. Now, somehow, we -- and we can

go on and on like this -- but we understand all these things

without instruction, without experience.

They have to do with very complex notions of continuity of

entities a physicist cannot detect because they're not part

of -- I mean, of course the physical world is part of them,

but it's only one part. A major part of how we

identify anything in the world, no matter how elementary, is the

mental conceptions that we impose on interpreting very

fragmentary experience. And our experience is, indeed,

very fragmentary, so visual experience is just, you know,

stimulations of the retina, but we impose an extremely rich

interpretation of it, including things like, let's say,

continuity. Actually, a lot of science

fiction is based on this. So, if you, you know, if

somebody is in a spaceship, and they get -- I forgot what the

word is used -- they transposed, or something.

Teleportation? >> Yes, tele-- tele--

what is it? >> Teleportation.

Yeah, okay. And they go somewhere else and

they reappear. Well, I've watched my kids

watching these things. They understand immediately

that it's the same person who appeared over there, though

there's no continuity. On the other hand, I ask them

sometimes, "well, suppose that they had this teleportation",

or whatever it's called, and he appears over there, and suppose

"he's still here. Which one is the person?"

And at that point, you get confused.

Yeah. >> You don't know, because our

conceptions don't give an answer to that.

Actually, there are classical philosophical problems that

are based on this. One famous one that's called

"the ship of theseus" -- goes back to the greeks -- suppose

that theseus has a ship and he's on the ocean and one of the

boards falls off, so he throws it into the sea, and they put

another board there. It's still the ship of theseus.

Now, suppose this keeps happening until every board has

been replaced. Still the ship of theseus.

Suppose someone on the shore has been collecting all these boards

and reconstructs what, in fact, was the actual original ship.

That's not the ship of theseus. It's the one that theseus is on,

even though it's the other one that's physically identical to

it -- this one isn't. So, there's no point trying to

solve the philosophical problem. The problem is an

epistemological one. It's only about the nature of

our cognitive systems. And, so, it appears that, as far

as it's understood, non-human animals have a direct connection

between symbolic representations in their minds and identifiable

physical events in the world. So, you take a vervet monkey,

which has alarm calls, and, apparently, those alarm calls

are triggered automatically by a certain, you know, movement of

leaves in a tree, which -- they give a predator call, you know,

and, apparently, it's reflexive. >> While I was doing these

interviews, I was editing "the green hornet."

One day, I walk into the edit room, and I realized that some

of the object had a different kind of entity than the other,

the one I had interacted with. It's like if they jumped to tell

me the story we shared. The sofa -- I was so tired after

the shooting that I asked for something more comfortable to

rest on. They treated me with a sofa.

But I had to move the chair to the side to make room.

The coffee table -- I dragged it closer to the sofa so I could

check my e-mails while watching the editing on a giant screen

that was specially installed for me.

And my editor, of course, but he's a person, so it's not

surprising to have a relation with this.

Do you remember the first exposition you had to

science? >> Should I tell you an

embarrassing experience, which I've felt guilty about

all my life? Okay.

In third grade, I decided I wanted to do a science project

on astronomy, so the teacher said, you know, "fine."

And I went and looked. What I finally did was, took the

encyclopedia britannica, and I copied out a section on

astronomy, and I handed it in, knowing that that's not the

right way to do it. And nobody ever -- there was

no -- I mean, the teacher could obviously tell, you know.

But there was no censure or

anything and, but, it's what -- I must have been -- third grade,

so I was 8 years old, so that's about 75 years of guilt.

I had the same experience than you at school, much later.

The first essay I wrote, my best friend wrote it for me, and I

got the best notation for the class, so I had to read it in

front of everyone.

And have you felt guilty all your life?

Oh, so horrible! Okay.

But and the funny part is I... >> We're partners.

But the funny part is, I got

good grades after that. >> Yeah.

You know, like a lot of kids, I had a chemistry set down in the

basement, and... Producing horrible smells that drove my

parents crazy, and they were hoping I wouldn't blow the place

up, and that sort of thing. Electrical circuits,

chemistry -- things like that. Now, with one -- my closest

friend, since nursery school, right through high school was --

we would go every Saturday afternoon -- by the time we got

old enough to take the subway, you know, 10, 11, we'd go to

the Franklin institute. That's a science institute in

downtown Philadelphia, which had lectures, exhibits.

And we'd spend most of the afternoon in the -- either in

the Franklin institute or the museum of natural history, which

was right next door. That was our Saturday afternoon.

Noam spent also hours at the library, devouring 19th-century

French and Russian literature. I had just finished

reading "fathers and sons" by Ivan turgenev, and I pointed out

to Noam that constant feeling of generalized deterioration of the

world that each generation blames the next one for.

"When I was young, life was better."

Things were much simpler. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah." I was wondering if there were a

biological explanation for this phenomenon.

When I was young, life was better.

Things were much simpler. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah. >> But Noam took the

conversation to a different place.

It could well be a property of urban, industrialized

societies. I'm not sure it's true of

peasant societies -- a farming society where you learn the

skills and you apply the skills and you transmit them to your

children, and so on. I mean, for example, one thing

that has been discovered -- surprised a lot of

anthropologists and agricultural scientists -- is that when

a people -- when -- there have been development

programs in which, say, you know, in, say, Liberia, there

happened to be one, where scientific agriculture was

introduced -- you know, peasants were taught the most

sophisticated techniques of agriculture and so on.

And they determined that yield dropped.

And when it was investigated, it --

eel dropped? >> Yield, the production.

Oh, yeah, yeah. >> So, they were producing less

with scientific agriculture than with traditional peasant

agriculture. At first, nobody knew why, but

when it was investigated, it turned out that agriculture had,

in fact, become a science, known only to women.

So, women had extensive, detailed lore about planting --

you know, "you plant this seed, under this rock, at this hour of"

"the day," and so on and so forth.

And it was transmitted from mother to daughter for maybe

thousands of years. And it got more and more

sophisticated, and it got to give very high yields in not

very productive soil. And the men in the community

didn't even know about it -- nor, of course, did the

outsiders who came in. Well, you know, that's a case

where people kind of reproduce, improve.

I doubt that, say, those little girls would have had the -- the

feelings that you were describing.

You're getting something from your mother, which is a

repository of, you know, endless tradition, and maybe you find

ways of adapting it or slightly improving it, but -- but you're

essentially reproducing what you grew up with.

And, so, how do you balance this knowledge that's come from

the ages to the improvement of science?

Like, now science and the technology has advanced, you

would feel that previous knowledge would be obsolete, but

yet, there is an instinct -- or I don't know if it's correct to

call it an instinct, but people know there is a science of

knowing what plant to use. >> It's lore, not instinct.

Yeah, how do you call that -- "lo"?

"Lore," just accumulated, unarticulated knowledge.

It's like you know how to behave.

I mean, you know, you're taught, or you learn in childhood, how

to behave in social situations. You can't articulate it...

Yeah. >> You're not conscious of it.

So if you find a child who has, let's say, Asperger's syndrome,

I mean, they just don't pick up social cues.

Yeah. >> They don't understand when

you're supposed to talk to someone and when you're not

supposed to talk to them and how you're supposed to act towards

them. I mean, these are children who

will have a lot of problems from nursery school on.

I once asked a mental-health specialist what it was -- I

didn't know what Asperger's syndrome was, 'cause I've heard

about it. And she laughed, and she told

me, "walk down the halls of M.I.T., and half the people you"

see have Asperger's syndrome."

How do you deal with somebody, coming to you and talking about

astrology? >> Astrology?

Yeah, because a lot of women, for instance, and it's terrible

to generalize -- Michèle here, she's going to kill me -- but my

girlfriend, for instance -- she gets mad at me if I dismiss her

belief in astrology. And I want to maintain my

relationship. >> I don't dismiss the person's

interest in it. >> Uh-huh.

I mean, people have all sorts of irrational beliefs --

me too, you know. I may think they're irrational,

but to them, they're meaningful. And, after all, some pretty

smart people were interested in astrology, like Isaac Newton,

for example. >> Uh-huh?

So, it's not -- it's not imbecility.

I mean, humans have a -- kind of like an automatic -- in this

case, instinctive -- drive to find causal relations, to

explain things that are happening in terms of causes.

When you can't see the causes, you postulate hidden causes -- I

mean, infants do this. You can -- you do experiments

with infants in which, you know, something is moving along and

then something starts moving this way.

They'll make up in their minds that there's some hidden contact

there that you can't see, you know.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> And we just do this

instinctively. I mean, if things are happening

around us, we try to find some agent behind it...

Yeah. >> ...Often an agent, you know,

like an active intelligence that's doing it, sometimes

something mechanical. So it pretty naturally leads to

beliefs like astrology, especially because you find -- I

mean, life is full of coincidences.

So you try to make a connection between the coincidences, and

you find a pattern in the stars, or it's a full moon, so this is

going to happen, and so on and so forth.

'Cause I notice in what you're saying, like, you're not

a believer -- if I do some research on you, you're not

going to come up as atheist, and I think because the religion is

really for a lot of people, and you don't want hurt that.

Well, I think one or another kind of religious belief is a --

it's a real cultural universal. I don't think any group has ever

been discovered that doesn't have some sort of belief in

something, you know, beyond their conscious experience

that's directing things, or that's somewhere in the

background and giving their lives meaning.

I mean, they may not believe in a divinity, but some sort of a

spirit in the world that we can't grasp that's making sense

of things, that's giving meaning to life.

Throughout history and throughout every society we

know, people are just not satisfied to think, "look, I go"

from dust to dust, and there's no meaning to my life."

Well, what's your personal feeling on that?

I think you go from dust to dust, and there's

no meaning in your life. But that's hard for a lot -- I

can easily understand why plenty of people wouldn't be happy to

accept this. I mean, you can easily

understand if -- let's suppose a mother has a dying child...

Yeah. >> ...And wants to believe that

she's going to see him again in heaven.

Okay, that's an understandable belief, and I certainly don't

ridicule it or try to teach her that -- give her a lecture in

epistemology or something. >> You don't want to hurt

people. >> It's something that I don't

personally have, and I don't listen to rock music, either.

Yeah. >> But it doesn't mean that

other people shouldn't do it. >> Yeah, yeah.

And, furthermore, the fact of the matter is that religious

beliefs do create communities. They weld communities together.

And we're a tribal society. You know, people form families

and clans and groups, social groups, professional groups.

So you want to be part of something...

Yeah, yeah. >> ...And religion happens to

be, in fact -- again, cross-culturally -- one of the

ways in which the group coheres and gets something more out of

life than just my individual existence.

Yeah. >> So it's understandable that

there should be one or another form of religious belief.

I think we should change the camera.

I think it's time for the -- for the break.

Lunch break? >> Oh, I see, okay.

So we get another camera next time?

Yeah, I'm gonna use this one, because I -- I'm...

Okay. The discussion is so good, I

don't want to lose a drop.

In fact, I eventually decided to stick to my plan and continue

to shoot the rest of the interview with my old mechanical

bolex. This way, I could only film

short fragments of Noam, and I was committed to what moments he

would appear in the final version.

I was also committed to have to animate 98% of the whole film

and hear the sound of my cranky camera each time Noam would

appear so I would have to illustrate its sound every

single time.

Do you remember what was your first thinking of linguistics?

There's background, like when I was a child.

My father worked on history of the semitic languages, so I

read work of his -- like, I read his doctoral dissertation

when I was -- I don't know -- 10, 12 years old.

Uh-huh. >> It was on a medieval

grammarian -- medieval Hebrew grammarian -- so I kind of knew,

had some acquaintance with the field.

Later, I sort of got into it by accident.

And when I got into it, yeah, I found it intriguing, but -- and

did things that we were taught to do, and, at some point, I

realized, "this doesn't make any sense," you know, the way

we're taught to do things was descriptivist.

So, the -- the way you... Linguistics at that time -- and,

to a large extent, still -- is a matter of organizing data.

So, a typical assignment when I was an undergraduate, let's

say, would be to take data from some American Indian language

and put it into an organized form.

You didn't ask the question, "well, why is the data this way

and not some other way?" That wasn't a question that was

asked. In fact, I remember,

dramatically, the first talk I gave when I was a graduate

student invited to a major university to give a talk on

work that I was doing -- you know, the normal thing -- the

leading figure in the department, one of the famous

linguists, met me at the airport.

And you know, we drove to the college.

And on the way, we talked, and I asked him what he was working

on. And he said he's not doing any

work now -- what he's doing is just collecting data and storing

it. And he had a good reason, which

is implicit in the linguistics of that day in Europe and

the United States. Computers were coming along, so

pretty soon, you'd be able to analyze huge masses of data.

It was assumed that the procedure, the methods of

analysis that had been reached in the structuralist traditions,

that they were the right way to understand everything about

language. Well, you know, if you sharpened

up those procedures, you could program them for a computer,

then you feed the data in, and you're done.

How old were you when you -- >> that was 1953.

Okay. >> So, I mean, I kind of

half-believed it, because that's the way I was trained, but the

other half of my brain was telling me this makes absolutely

no sense. >> Can you tell me the

transition, and, also, the inspiration that started your

theory? >> Well, it was pretty

straightforward. When I was an undergraduate, I

had to get an honors thesis. You'd do a piece of work that's

your honors thesis. And the faculty member who I was

working with -- very famous and very significant person, very

influential -- rightly, he suggested to me that I do a

structural analysis of modern Hebrew.

Well, I knew some Hebrew, so it made sense, and I did what we

were supposed to do. What you're supposed to do is

get an informant and then carry out field-work procedures.

So, there's a set of routines you go through to take the data

from the informant, you know, find the phonology, find the

morphology, you know, a few comments about the syntactic

structure, comments about the semantics, and that's your

thesis. So, I started going through the

routine with him. And after about a month, I

realized this is totally ridiculous.

I mean, I know the answers to these questions.

Why am I asking him? And the questions that I don't

know the answers to, like the phonetics, I don't care about.

But the parts that I care about, I already basically know the

answers, so why do I care? Why do I have to get it from

him? So, we -- I stopped the

informant work, and I just started doing what seemed like

the obvious thing to do -- write a generative grammar.

And that's what I did, but it was kind of a hobby.

I don't think anyone even looked at it -- you know, the fact

that, finally, it was published about 30 years later, I think.

Can you tell me, like, in a simple way -- like, this first

approach of generative grammar? >> It's almost a truism.

I mean, if you think about what a language is -- say, what you

and I know -- we have, somehow, in our heads, a procedure for

constructing an infinite array of structured expressions, each

of which is assigned a sound and assigned a semantic

interpretation. That's like a truism.

Furthermore, these structured expressions have the property of

what's called "digital infinity."

They're like the numbers -- the natural numbers -- you know,

there's 5 and 6, but nothing in between.

That's not natural numbers anymore.

And the same with language. There's a 5-word sentence, a

6-word sentence, there's no 51/2-word sentence.

They're very much unlike the communication system of bees or

any other system, you know. Now, that's very rare in the

natural world -- digital infinity.

And by that time -- say, late '40s -- the mathematics of

it were well understood. The theory of computation had

been developed, the theory of recursive functions -- so these

were familiar concepts within contemporary mathematics.

And, you know, I studied them when I studied advanced logic

and mathematics. And it just sort of fell

together. The -- you have -- you have this

system of digital infinity and its procedure of some sort that

generates an infinity of structured expressions.

Well, that's a generative grammar -- in fact, that's all

it is. >> Mm-hmm.

So that ought to be the core of the study.

And then comes the question -- well, okay, what is it?

Then, you run into the problem I mentioned before -- as soon as

you try to do it, you find that, in order to deal with the data

available, it has to be extremely complex and intricate.

But that doesn't make any sense, either, because every child

masters it in no time. So, somehow it can't be rich and

complex. And then comes the field.

The field is to try to show that what appears to be rich and

complex is, at the core, just very simple.

Actually, there's -- you know, when you think about it, as we

started to do from the '50s -- there's an evolutionary basis

for this, too. Language is a very curious

phenomenon. I mean, one question we ought to

be puzzled with -- well, two questions -- is, why are there

any languages at all, and another one is, why are there so

many? If you go back, say,

50,000 years, both of those questions were answered, because

that's when our ancestors left Africa.

And there's been no relevant cognitive change since, so

children everywhere in the world have the same capacity for

language acquisition. So, the questions were finished

by about 50,000 years ago. And if you go back very shortly

before that, maybe 100,000 years ago, the questions were answered

'cause there weren't any languages.

From an evolutionary point of view, that's the flick of an

eye. >> How do you have this record?

Well, that comes from paleoanthropology.

Ah, yeah, the tombs the Americans --

well, we know the fossil record.

We know the record of the, you know, creation of artifacts, and

so on. >> Yeah.

And it's pretty well recognized that there was a

sudden explosion -- sometimes called "the great leap forward"

roughly in that period, you know, maybe 75,000 years ago.

You can argue tens of thousands of years -- it doesn't matter

much. From an evolutionary point of

view, it's an instant. So, somewhere in that instant,

some small hunter-gatherer group -- you know, it could have

been a couple of thousand of people -- you suddenly find a

burst of creative activity, complex tools...

Recording natural phenomena... More complex family

structures... Symbolic representation, you

know -- art, and so on. From an evolutionary point of

view, it's an instant. Now, it's generally assumed

that -- and it's hard to think of an alternative -- that that

instant must be the time when language suddenly appeared,

'cause language is required for all these things.

Before, there could have been, you know, primitive

communication systems, like every animal has.

But human language, with the property I just mentioned -- the

capacity for thought constructing in your head --

when you walk around, you're talking to yourself.

Yeah. >> You can't stop.

I mean, it takes a real act of will not to talk to yourself.

And what you're doing is thinking, basically,

recollecting, or, you know, whatever it is.

Yeah. >> But you're making use of,

constantly, of this capacity to construct an unbounded array

of structured expressions, which have a meaning and a sound.

Now, that's the core of our ability to create, to invent,

you know, plan, interpret... >> Yeah.

...and so on. Well, that must have happened

right about that time. But if it happened suddenly, it

has to be simple. There's no time.

In evolutionary time, that's nothing, remember?

Yeah. >> Which means that some small

thing must have happened -- some small mutation, probably.

And one -- and a mutation is in one person.

It's not in a group. Suddenly, it gave that person

the capacity to -- this capacity.

Well, that person was unique in the animal world -- it could

plan, it could think, it could interpret, and so on.

But if that happened -- and there's no pressures on that

system -- no selection nor other pressures.

Yeah. >> It just appeared.

Well, if it just appeared, it's gonna be perfect.

It's going to be like a snowflake.

Uh-huh. >> And it just follows from

natural law -- that's what appears, like a snowflake is

what it is. You know, it doesn't evolve.

Well, you know, that capacity would have been, in fact,

transmitted to offspring, partially.

And after some time, maybe a couple of generations, this

capacity might have dispersed through the group.

And at that point, there becomes a reason to externalize it -- to

find a way to take what's going on in your head and turn in into

sound or gesture or something. >> Yeah. But does this capacity

give an advantage to this person or this group?

It does give an advantage to the person because, look, if you

have the capacity to plan and interpret and so on, yeah, you

have advantages over others. It's not such a trivial matter

for advantageous traits to proliferate.

They often just die off. So, for all we know, this might

have happened many times in the preceding couple 100,000 years,

but once it took -- we know that it took 'cause we're here, you

know? So, at one point, this took.

A number of people had it. Some point, you start getting

externalization. Then, you can get communication.

But what that means is that, contrary to thousands of years

of speculation, and what's almost universally assumed now,

communication couldn't have been a significant factor in

evolution. It's a secondary process.

Today, during the lunch pause, Noam went to see his

doctor and get some test results.

Are you worried about your

health?

Mm. I'm not. Doctors are, but I'm not.

So, you don't have anxiety?

I figure, three score and 10 -- that's

what we're supposed to have -- 70 years, according to

the Bible. Anything else comes free.

When I was about 10 years old, I used to get frantic about dying.

You know, what happens when that spark of consciousness

disappears? I had nightmares about it, but

by the time I was a teenager, I figured it's ridiculous, you

know. My model is David hume.

When he died, he had his friends with him, like Adam Smith, and

he was very placid, you know. He said, "you know, this is the"

way existence works, and goodbye, no afterlife --

nothing." >> Do you mind if I ask you

about your feeling when your wife passed away?

I'd just as soon not talk about

that. >> It's too soon.

I can't get over it, you know.

Yeah, I know. I'm sorry. >> Yeah.

I'm so sorry.

♪ I gave you my home ♪ I gave you my hope

♪ the walls... >> It seems that you had the

perfect relationship from the outside point of view.

It wasn't -- you know, nothing's perfect, but it was

very intimate, yeah. >> I think a lot of human beings

spend a lot of their life trying to solve problems of a

relationship or find a relationship, and...

Well, we pretty much solved it when we were children.

We were children when we got

married. >> Yeah.

Carol was 19, and I was 20. >> ♪ here in my kitchen

♪ soup is on ♪ lover

♪ lover ♪ come on over

And do you think it helped you in your work?

It's hard to say -- I mean, Carol was kind of a social

butterfly. You know, she was -- as a

teenager, you know, went to all kind of parties, dating, this

and that. I was very solitary.

But -- and for a couple of years, we more or less lived her

style of life. But, you know, I'd sit in a

corner at the parties. But after a while, we just

drifted into a very private life, you know, saw a couple

friends. We -- we weren't hermits --

like, you know, children, grandchildren, friends, and so

on, but, mostly, we lived -- we preferred to be alone, you know.

So... >> ♪ come on over

and we started to talk about your education with -- last

time, but more about the school. Can you tell me a bit more about

the relationship you had with your parents?

Things were quite different in those days.

I mean, the relationship was fine, you know, but not very

close, really. So, for example, there were

things happening in my childhood that I never would have dreamt

of talking to them about. We were the only Jewish family

in a neighborhood that was largely Irish and German

catholic. This is in the '30s, and

very anti-semitic, and pretty pro-Nazi, in fact -- the Irish

'cause they hated the British and the Germans 'cause they

were Germans. It's not like today.

A boy in the streets wasn't gonna get shot, you know.

But it was unpleasant, you know. There was a lot of

anti-semitism. And the streets -- there were

streets I couldn't walk through because the Irish kids lived

there, and I'd go somewhere else.

And -- but I never talked to my parents about it.

I don't think they knew, till their deaths.

You know, by the time the second world war came, everything

changed -- superficially. So, in December 7, 1941, the

people who had been still having beer parties at the fall of

Paris, which I remember, were walking around with tin hats,

telling everyone to pull down their shades, because the

luftwaffe was going to bomb the city and so on -- a very

striking transition, which taught me something.

But then, during the war, for reasons I don't understand,

there were race riots all over the place.

In fact, there was a teenage curfew for a couple of years.

At 7:00 -- >> in Philadelphia?

Yeah, if we wanted to go out after 7:00, we had to have

parental permission. And I went to a Hebrew school,

and, actually, we had police protection from the subway stop

to the school and back, unless we were on the subway --

you were kind of on your own. But I don't know why, but there

was some kind of phenomenon that took place during the war.

And when did you hear about the camps the first time?

Well, rumors were coming through by '42, '43, but nobody

really knew the scale. And it was downplayed,

strikingly downplayed. The most dramatic as, actually,

as I'm sure you know, there were international conferences to try

to do something about the people who wanted to flee the

continent, but nobody was willing to do anything.

Roosevelt, in fact, turned back a ship at St. Louis, which came

with, I think, 1,000 refugees from Europe.

And they went to Cuba -- sort of wandered around the region, but

the U.S. just turned it back. They were sent back to Europe.

Most of them ended up in, you know, in gas chambers.

The most striking thing was, after the war, in 1945, there

was -- by then, everybody knew -- there was no longer any

pretext for not saving the survivors.

And there were a fair number of survivors.

And they were living in concentration camps, but the

camps were not very different from the Nazi camps except that,

you know, the gas chambers weren't -- no --

no extermination, but living under horrible conditions.

And they came back with a very grim picture of what was life

was like in the camps. >> You mean the same camp in

Poland? >> Same camps.

You know, maybe another detention camp, but the

circumstances were not very different.

But they were like, not in detention -- they were...

Well, you know, they weren't extermination camps -- no gas

chambers, you know, no killing, no slave labor -- but the

conditions were horrible. You should read

the Harrison commission. >> How do you call that?

Harrison? >> Harrison -- h-a-r-r-i-s-o-n.

I suppose it's obtainable. It's a pretty grim picture of

life in the camps. >> "Generally speaking, three"

months after victory of Europe day and even longer after the

liberation of individual groups, many Jewish displaced persons

and other possibly non-repatriables are living

under guard behind barbed-wire fences, in camps of several

descriptions -- built by the Germans for slave-laborers and

Jews -- including some of the most notorious of the

concentration camps, amidst crowded, frequently unsanitary

and generally grim conditions, in complete idleness, with no

opportunity, except surreptitiously...

...have managed, in spite of the many obvious difficulties, to

find clothing of one kind or another for their charges, many

of the Jewish displaced persons, late in July, had no clothing

other than their concentration camp garb, a rather hideous

striped pajama effect, while others, to their chagrin, were

obliged to wear German S.S. Uniforms.

"It is questionable which clothing they hate the more."

Actually, you know, this is pretty normal.

I mean, treatment of holocaust victims is grotesque.

But right now, take France -- the Roma were -- you know, they

were treated pretty much like the Jews.

France is expelling them to miserable poverty.

They're expelling basically holocaust survivors and their

descendants, and it's particularly dramatic in France

because there's so much posturing there about holocaust

denial. I mean, you can't have a more

extreme case of holocaust denial than taking survivors and

punishing them. And as far as I can see in

France, there's almost no discussion of this.

In fact, when the European union protested, Sarkozy condemned

them, you know, for their anti-French extremism and so on.

I mean, you know, the cynicism about all of this is pretty

remarkable. >> Um... Can I come back to

maybe more happy matters?

Pick at random, and the world won't be very happy.

I know, but we're going to

come back -- go more inside your memories and...

Okay. >> I wanted to know if the --

the education you gave to your children was influenced by what

you believe in language acquisition or what's going on

with the brain. >> Well, I mean, the education

at home, yes. So, you know, we read to the

kids and encouraged the kids to read and encouraged them to

follow their own interests. The three kids were quite

different.

My -- my son, from a very early age, was mostly interested in

science and mathematics, so, you know, by the time he was

10 years old, we were reading together popular books on

relativity theory and things like that.

But we just let the kids go where they wanted and encouraged

them. You know, they went in different

directions -- it was fine with us -- and, you know,

tried to just encourage them to do what they wanted.

The school was conventional. We wanted them to go to the

public schools, and it worked reasonably well.

And one child was not making out in public school -- we moved her

to a quaker school, which was better.

They... Essentially picked their own paths.

They left home -- they went off to become political activists.

My older daughter spent a couple of months at college, couldn't

stand it, and went off and joined the united farm workers

and, ever since then, has been very involved in political

activity. My young -- her younger sister

went to Nicaragua in 1980 and stayed.

And my son went off in a different direction.

But my children grew up in an atmosphere of extreme political

tension. I don't know how much they felt.

For example, I was in and out of jail, and I was facing a long

jail sentence, enough so that my wife went back to college after

17 years to try to get a degree -- an advanced degree --

because we assumed she'd have to take care of the children.

She'd need a job. And the kids kind of grew up in

this atmosphere, but I don't think they felt any particular

tension. My wife told me once that my,

probably 8-, 10-year-old daughter, I guess, told her when

she came home from school -- she asked, "what'd you do in"

show-and-tell?" She said, "well I described -- I

told them how my father was in jail."

What makes you happy?

Happy?

Children, grandchildren, friends, you know.

I don't really think about it much.

I don't spend much -- any time in self-indulgence, especially

since my wife died. I do almost nothing -- don't

go to the movies, don't go to the theater, don't eat out.

I do what I have to do. Mm.

But, I mean, there are a lot of

things that are very gratifying. So, for example, especially

seeing victims -- like, I just came back from Turkey, where I

was -- I've been there several times.

And this -- it's always issues related to the repression of the

Kurds, which I was there one -- the first time I was there, it

was to take part in a trial and be a co-defendant.

But, this time, it was for a conference on repression and

freedom of expression. You see people who are really

dedicated, courageous, struggling all the time,

standing up against repression. It's quite inspiring.

A couple of months before that, I was in Southern Colombia.

And Colombia has the worst human-rights record in the

hemisphere, and, of course, the most U.S. military aid in the

hemisphere -- they correlate. These places I was visiting --

quite remote endangered villages -- and the people were

just inspiring. Actually, it was a very moving

experience, personally. I was there in part because they

were dedicating a forest to the memory of my wife.

And it's the kind of compassion and kindness that you just don't

see in the world we live in. And it was just kind of

natural -- no pretentiousness about the ceremony.

And you -- you see things like that all over -- all over the

world here, too... >> Mm-hmm.

...not much in the circles in which we live -- you know,

elite, intellectual circles. >> Yeah.

...much more abstract, even, than the case of the tree.

There was a sudden explosion. The answers to, like, the

phonetics, I don't care about.

My father worked on history of the semitic languages.

During the early exposure, where the child is not...

We learn that children know quite a lot...

It's a story about a donkey named Sylvester.

In one of your books from the '70s, you give this example of a

sentence -- "the man who is tall is in the room," and how

the child naturally can postulate the question.

And I was wondering if you could explain, just quickly because I

could do a very nice animation from that.

This is a simple question. And it's interesting that it

never bothered anyone. It's a little bit like, for

2,000 years, scientists were satisfied with simple

explanation for an obvious fact.

If you take an apple and you detach it from a tree, it's

gonna go down. If you take steam, it's gonna go

up. >> Yeah.

So, 2,000 years -- the answer was, well, they're going to

their natural place -- end of discussion.

As soon as people started getting puzzled about that, like

Galileo and Newton, then you have modern science.

But can you -- >> this is the same.

Take the sentence that you gave me -- "the man"

"who is tall is happy," or whatever it is.

If you want to form a question from that, you take the word

"is," and you put it in the front.

So, "is the man who is tall happy?"

All right? That's the question.

You don't take the first occurrence of "is."

You don't take the closest one to the front...

...and say, "is the man who tall is happy?"

That's gibberish.

And how does it -- why? I mean, why doesn't the child do

the simple thing -- take the first occurrence of "is" and put

it in the front? That's, computationally, that's

much easier than finding the main occurrence, which requires

knowing the phrases and so on. But it's an unconceivable error.

No child has ever made that error.

And it's the same in all -- you know, with minor variations --

it's the same principle that's in all languages, so why?

Well, you know, there are some interesting explanations for

why, but this is a good example of the brute-force approach in

computational cognitive science, where they, as a matter of

principle, want to believe that the mind is essentially empty.

The man who is tall is happy. The man who is tall is happy.

The man who is tall is happy. Then, Noam took my pen and wrote

the following sentence. >> Look, there are serious

questions about it, like, take, "the man who is tall is happy."

This is a predicate, this is the subject, okay, and this is

sort of the main element -- you know, that's the main element of

the whole sentence. And that's the one that,

structurally, is closest to the middle -- to the beginning.

This one is more remote from the beginning, structurally, because

you have to work through this whole business, okay?

So, structurally speaking, this is the closest to the front.

Uh-huh. >> Linearly, this is the closest

to the front. >> Right.

Now, the question is, why do you use structural proximity and

not linear proximity? And it's not just this case --

it's everything -- every language, every construction.

Is that the evidence of this generative grammar?

Well, that's the data, and there is a principle -- I mean,

the principle is, keep to minimal structural distance.

Okay, now where does that come from?

This part is probably just a law of nature.

Computation tries to do things in the simplest way, but the

structural distance part is a fact about language.

I mean, you could have minimal computation if you did it this

way. In that case, what we would

say -- "is the man who tall is happy?"

The child picks structural closeness because that's a

property of language, probably genetically determined.

Yeah, but that's -- that's about all there is to it.

The man who is tall is happy. >> Yes, the man who is tall is

very happy. >> Is the man tall and he's

happy? Is the man who is tall happy?

Is the man who is tall happy? Is the man who tall is happy?

Is the man who is tall happy? Is the man who tall is happy?

Okay, I guess we're being...

Okay. >> Yeah, I got to rush him over.

He's gonna miss the thing. >> Okay.

Good to see you again. >> Yeah.

I'm glad you're doing well.

We got to get you out of here. Your bag.