From: Noam Chomsky
Sent: Monday, July 11, 2016 12:09 AM
To: jeffrey E.
Cc: Valeria Chomsky
Subject: Re:

What is better for thought than e=ht Jewish delicatessen food. Glatt kosher, I hope.

Very=interesting experiment. It might tell us a lot about musical genres =nd their underlying structure, and the cognitive capacities that organize =hought, 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). =AO What is striking is that without visual experience, the blind learn lan=uage virtually in parallel with sighted children, with the same changes th=t plainly have to do with maturation and the very specific internal concep=s of human cognition, leading finally to understanding of extremely refine= visual concepts, all with only minimal experience that can't be direc=ing these developments any more than the nutrition of the embryo, while ob=iously necessary for development, can determine that we have a mammalian r=ther than visual system. There are also some quite intriguing differ=nces. E.g., at the age when sighted children acquire the words/conce=ts 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.=C2 The child is therefore surprised to find that its mother cannot see =he back of the dolls they are holding, since the child can. Lots of =esults like these.

What is particularly striking, however, is=how similar the cognitive growth is to normal physical growth, of course e=icited by experience but then substantially following its internally deter=ined path. The widely-held belief that cognitive development is some=ow different from the rest of biology in that it is experience-determined =s, I think, a residue of traditional dualism -- a kind of "methodolog=cal dualism," which is, I think, more pernicious than traditional met=physical dualism, which, in fact, was quite serious and reasonable science=at the time.

Long story.

Noam

On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 8:=6 AM, jeffrey E. <jeevacation@gmail.com <mailto:jeevacation@gmail=com» wrote:

happy to provide some carnegie =eli sustenance for thought.

today I conducted an experiment encouraged by Noam's wholly jus=ified aggressive and detailed directives to joscha. . =C2 joshcha focused on layers being developed in the =rain . the timing for the development of each layer being diff=rent 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 , =AO , the second part of symphonic form is the complex development stage= where those themes are inverted, deconstructed , reconstructed =tc ,and the development stage takes the most time . in =the conclusion of the symphonic form the recapitulation of all that has come b=fore it forms a " phenenoma of the piece " a whole ,made up of its smaller concepts . =C2 As opposed to listening to music to record which neuron is firing, as mo=t musciolgists attempt . I propose that the music may be the audible result =f those neurons firing, made possible by a select few who would attempt=20 to notate those neuronal firings. Beethoven f=r example.

The experiment . I mashed all o= the four symphonies together , playing recording= of the 3rd 5th 6th 7th all overlayed on each other, playing at the same time. - the way a brain mig=t develop. I expected an ordered noise but to the surprising cont=ary , IT WAS AMAZING. . you can hear new =AO "concepts " forming,

it wonder whether in the mind of a blind child , the "=music" would be created even without the visual ref=rencial. but created none the less. later when the visual c=n be tied to concepts , the anatomy may be hijacked to produce sounds . that someh=w relate to the concepts. .

I tried to mix mu=ic from different cultures- it didn't work. African =oes not work with western europe,- chinese works with neither of the other two. but within the same cultu=al music ( the brain of the local species ) the mash ups are=20 beautiful.

I would note=20 that computers engage in "parallel processing" only in orde= 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.

## =AO please note

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