Brian MacW/copy

[Tom Givon]

From:   OREGON::TGIVON       "Tom Givon"  1-FEB-1997 13:00:47.68
To:     TGIVON
CC:
Subj:   Brian McW/copy

Dear Brian,

That was a nice note--as far as it went. But people tend to forget that
the real bridge between the level we are working at and neurology is,
most likely, **not** at the level of individual neurons and their connections.
With both language and other higher cognitive systems, we are dealing with
much higher levels of genetically-directed and developmentally-executed
complex organization. It is at this higher level that one can see the
linguistic functional specificity of various sub-modules, in spite of the
(undeniable) fact that the lower-level architecture is much more simple
and comparatively universal (cross-modal).

This is precisely the level of organization that is relevant to higher
cognitive processes, including language. It is a level of connected
modules rather than connected neurons. And this -- especially the detailed
function-specific architectures that **never** arise from zero through
learning, but rather are partially there already as precoditions for
learning -- is what I have yet to find in the connectionist literature.
This is also why I stopped following that literature. I figured, if I
had to read one more paper about the "acquisition" of past-tense forms
that somehow, conveniently, bypassed the delicate (but to me crucial)
phase of learning the contexts -- semantic and pragmatic -- in which
one would want to employ those alomorphs, I was in grave danger of
throwing up.

I stopped following this literature when it dawned on me that so much
of it seemed to take it for granted that evolution has never happened;
that every child/organism must starts learning from scratch (nevermind
the conveniently pre-set 'weights', which can't but remind me of you-
know-who's 'parameters'. And perhaps worse, that literature seemed to
take it for granted that the very same architectural organization runs
from the bottom (neuron) to the top (function-specific modules) of the
primate brain organization.

The way I saw it at the time I stopped following, there are so many
prima-facie reasons why one would not want to invest too much faith
in such a reductionist exercise.


Thanks again and best regards, TG