Noam Chomsky: My Unlikely Spiritual Guru

How Chomsky’s theory of language shook up my understanding of thoughts and consciousness

Controversial Linguist

Noam Chomsky, the Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and an Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT, is something of an iconoclast.

A controversial yet respected member of the linguistic intelligentsia, Prof. Chomsky has amassed critics and supporters alike, but none to dispute his brilliance in the field.

His scientific work transformed the landscape of linguistics, and with no alternative theories to refute his influential and original ideas, Prof. Chomsky’s theory of language has staked its prominence in the field simply by its sheer presence.

If there were a list of the top intelligent people of our times, he is certain to score a spot.

With such lofty laurels, Prof. Chomsky sure flabbergasts me silly, not with his complex ideas that clearly fly a mile over my head, but with his by-the-by sort of supplementary observations.

But firstly, some basics.

The Disruptor of Traditional Linguistics

What put Prof. Chomsky on the map was a cognitive revolution that he started more than half a century ago with a single scholarly review that packed enough arsenal to wipe out psycholinguistic theories of decades standing.

When behavioral psychologists claimed that we are all born with a clean slate for a mind and learn the language through mimicry, trial, and error, Prof. Chomsky proposed that all humans possess an innate capacity for language embedded in our genes.

He claimed that evolution has endowed us with a genetic preprogramming in our brains to grasp the core structure that is common to every language.

This ‘internal grammar’ is what makes tiny tots, who cannot yet count, tie their shoes or hop on one foot, still manage to learn their primary language without any formal instructions and produce original sentences by the time they are two.

It is this biological predisposition that makes us comprehend and frame grammatically correct sentences without even being aware of the exact rules and principles behind them.

This genetic embedding is how we are able to perfectly understand jumbled letters and nonsensical phrases in all their misspelled and ungrammatical absurdity.

But as generous as evolution has been in providing us with the capacity for language, which is fundamental in expressing thoughts, it has also imposed limitations on what we can and cannot achieve in that capacity.

Limitations of Language

According to Prof. Chomsky, humans as biological organisms have a genetic endowment that enables them to grow into their mature forms. Consequently, an endowment that has the scope to establish the organism in its defined form also comes with set limits to confine it within its definition.

“If the genetic endowment imposed no constraints on growth and development of an organism it could become only a shapeless amoeboid creature. The endowment that yields scope also establishes limits. What enables us to grow legs and arms, prevents us from growing wings.” — Noam Chomsky

Prof. Chomsky states that what is true of physical abilities in a biological being, by virtue of logic, should also apply to cognitive abilities, like language, which are also a biological given.

Hence, there are hard limits to what we can access through our cognitive capacities, and some phenomena, like consciousness, free will, and creativity sit squarely beyond our mental abilities for the simple reason that we are biological creatures.

Ever since Newton discovered gravity as action at a distance, which his contemporaries accused of being occult by nature, science has come to terms with the reality that the properties of the natural world are inconceivable to us.

Thus, instead of seeking to show that the world is intelligible to us, it started constructing theories about the world that are intelligible to us.

So what we make of the world, and abstract concepts like consciousness, are not exact facts but compromised theories we created to conform to our limited intelligence.

Things were enlightening up until this point, even if a little intimidating given my steep learning curve.

But here is where Prof. Chomsky’s theory about language started to chip away at the pedestal atop which perched my glorious archangel of all things metaphysical — Consciousness.

What is Consciousness

I have always thought of consciousness as the bedrock upon which I see, feel, and live my life. It is the seat of my awareness, the access point into my reality. It is what I see the world with and what I see the world as.

Consciousness is all there is and there is nothing without or beyond consciousness.

Or at least that is what I thought until Prof. Chomsky took down my rose-tinted glasses and slid them under my feet.

Thinking Originates Beyond Consciousness

“Internal speech is re-internalization of externalized speech. So when you are consciously thinking about something, you are using the external language to re-internalize it. But the actual thinking is just not accessible to consciousness.” — Noam Chomsky

It is phenomenally mind-blowing and embarrassingly simple when we pay attention to how thinking actually works.

When we think of a thought, we are not creating it, but simply becoming aware of it. A thought appears in our mind in whatever abstract, amorphous form and we only realize it as a thought after we use language to put it into words and re-interpret the same to ourselves.

But this happens at a breakneck, T-minus quantum warp speed, so we experience it as instantaneous.

If we were born deaf and if sign language is our mode of external representation, then our “inner voice” would probably be visual rather than verbal, but the concept still remains the same.

I may think that I ‘thought a thought’ but my conscious awareness is only of the language I have used to re-internalize what I thought of the ‘thought’. This means I was never, and will never be, privy to that pre-language thought.

Then what was my thought before it became a ‘thought’ to me?

“The act of formulating thoughts, sometimes externalizing them with sound, is unconscious and inaccessible to consciousness.”

“We will never find out what thought is as long as attention is restricted to what is accessible to consciousness.” — Noam Chomsky

Truth Lies Beyond Our Consciousness

In neuroscience, the readiness-potential experiment showed that the brain was making decisions microseconds before the person became aware of it, thus sparking debates about free will being an illusion.

But according to Prof. Chomsky, this experiment is misinterpreted as an argument about free will, while it is actually evidence to show that decisions are made in a way that is inaccessible to consciousness.

There is a phenomenon called blindsight where people with damage to their vision respond to visual stimuli even when they are not consciously aware of perceiving it. The brain was ‘seeing’ even when the blind person did not have an awareness of seeing.

Where Does My Consciousness Begin?

Is the all-encompassing consciousness not as inclusive as I have hyped it to be?

With my decisions and thoughts originating outside of my consciousness, is my life just an afterthought to something that I could never reach into?

Do my original thoughts that are already filtered outside of my consciousness get further filtered when I describe them with my limited language ability?

I could knock my head for all eternity against the metaphysical concepts that make for the walls of my spiritual maze, but I am not getting anywhere as long as my thoughts don’t come to the surface and my consciousness won’t go any deeper.

It feels like Prof. Chomsky zoomed me out for an aerial view of my spiritual maze, that for a brief instant looked like the Penrose steps, and dropped me back in to figure things forward.

With my glorified consciousness shattered into pieces right under my feet, I am now wondering if I have misread and misinterpreted the entire concept of consciousness.

Even if I could grasp the grand subject of Consciousness at some point, would it still only be a ‘theory’ and not the real thing?

“There is little reason to believe that we have even the intellectual resources to pose the correct question, let alone to find the correct answer.” — Noam Chomsky

Touché, Prof. Chomsky.

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