Unravelling Digital Infinity
Knight, C. and C. Power (2008). Unravelling digital infinity. In A. D. M. Smith, K. Smith and R. F. i Cancho (eds), The Evolution of Language. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference (EVOLANG 7). New Jersey & London: World Scientific, pp. 179-185
‘The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations’. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1973 [1762]: 195).
1.1. Digital minds in an analog world
Language has sometimes been described as a ‘mirror of mind’. Chomsky attributes this idea to ‘the first cognitive revolution’ inspired by Descartes among others in the seventeenth century. ‘The second cognitive revolution’ – triggered in large measure by Chomsky’s own work – is taken to have been a twentieth century rediscovery of these earlier insights into the nature of language and mind. In 1660, the renowned Port Royal grammarians (Arnauld and Lancelot 1972 [1660]: 27) celebrated
‘this marvelous invention of composing out of twenty-five or thirty sounds that infinite variety of expressions which, whilst having in themselves no likeness to what is in our mind, allow us to disclose to others its whole secret, and to make known to those who cannot penetrate it all that we imagine, and all the various stirrings of our soul’.
If this ‘marvelous invention’ reflects some part of human nature, then on Cartesian first principles it must correspond to some innate mechanism in the biological mind/brain. Chomsky (2005) calls it ‘discrete infinity’. Or as Pinker (1999: 287) puts it: ‘We have digital minds in an analog world. More accurately, a part of our minds is digital.’
But if ‘a part of the mind is digital’, how did it ever get to be that way? Under what Darwinian selection pressures and by what conceivable mechanisms might a digital module become installed in an otherwise analog primate brain? Can natural selection acting on an analog precursor mechanism transform it incrementally into a digital one? Is such an idea even logically coherent?
If these were easy questions, the ‘hardest problem in science’ (Christiansen and Kirby 2003) might long ago have been solved. Chomsky concludes that the transition to ‘Merge’ – the irreducible first principle of ‘discrete infinity’ – was instantaneous, commenting that ‘it is hard to see what account of human evolution would not assume at least this much, in one or another form.’ Note that whatever the account of human evolution, the assumption of instantaneous language evolution must stand.