[zR0x]

We had to learn to collaborate before “language”.

Perhaps thinking language is a key aspect of consciousness is wrong.

Chomsky has said human languages themselves are just random sounds we’ve been polishing the meaning of.

So yeah I have no doubt a machine can sort them correctly if we tell it to. They mean what we want and see in them.

That’s hardly proving anything about consciousness. Just that a computer can sort and count syntax, and guess at meaning by frequency of relative placement.

It’s acting on English data sets. Not human biology.

[mcswell]

"Chomsky has said human languages themselves are just random sounds we’ve been polishing the meaning of." I've read a lot of Chomsky, and I don't recall him ever saying anything like this. Can you provide a citation?

And I don't think "sorting" has anything to do with language.

[emodendroket]

Theoretically, if we had a perfect understanding of human mechanisms of language, we could reproduce it in code. Of course we don't.

[zR0x]

I don’t understand how we don’t?

I make sound snapping my fingers. Whistling.

Why is it so hard to accept mirror neurons fired when early humans heard birds and animals, each other’s grunts and over time we refined it?

Everyone has some capacity to refine and strengthen muscle. Why do we need some abstract meta-construct to explain where language comes from? It comes from us. Fleshy meat bags that mutate state over a short period then die.

Chomsky diagrams, conceptual organs and the like are useful for “being on the same page” in a particular context, but there’s no reason to believe language is a requirement for consciousness except our own propensity for romanticizing our existing.