Noam Chomsky is one of the most important intellectuals in human history. I first read about Chomsky in a 1992 Rolling Stone magazine article that I happened to stumbled upon. Reading him transformed my worldview. Until then, I had never encountered a more honest and scientifically grounded perspective on reality.
Chomsky has two important sides. He’s a cognitive scientist and he’s also a political thinker. When it comes to thinking and morality Chomsky is a personal hero, and I think I agree with him on almost everything he says.
Politically speaking I think he has made the world a better place by being such an important dissident in the fight against oppressed people all over the world. However, I think strategically and tactically, a lot of people view his opinions as being a bit too difficult to put into practice, and I tend to agree.
Drawing inspiration from my inner Popper, I find it more compelling to highlight the areas where I diverge from his views.
He seems to believe that the Language Acquisition Device (LAD), which he famously discovered, was not gradually designed by evolution through natural selection. He appears to think that the language faculty was exceptionally designed, and evolution just seems inadequate in explaining its genesis. Many think this is misguided and incorrect because it appears to regard this human trait as some sort of supreme and exceptional, almost magical phenomenon.
He thinks that artificial intelligence cannot duplicate human language understanding using statistical modeling. However, his objections appear to be true only if we want the models to behave in perfection. But why should anyone have this expectation? He seems to suggest that the human language capacity is so exceptionally unique that it will never be artificially duplicated.
He thinks that there are some humans that are more wicked than others. True, but to hold their brains specifically more accountable because (understandably) it is a greater evil just doesn’t seem fully rational. Morally, we can still defend accepting that some (the more wicked ones) are made out of the same basic neural circuits.
He doesn’t seem to think that challenging incorrect religious thinking is a worth-while affair. I think he’s a bit off on this. Irrationalities, of which religion is just one form, corrupts our thinking. That’s almost comparable to him saying that fighting injustice is not worth-while because some people aren’t going to change their minds anyway, which he surely doesn’t believe.
Speaking of tactics, during the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, he seemed too keen to point out that Bernie Sanders was not as progressive as many would have wish for. This attitude seems to impede advancement of progressive politics in the US. Afterwards, it looked like he backed off a bit from these types of criticism, and instead pointed out how revolutionary and effective Bernie’s campaign had been. In general, his occasional negative demeanor can be quite vexing and runs counter to the causes he champions.
Regarding philosophy of mind, it was initially unclear to me what Chomsky means by:
If there were no limits to human intelligence, it would lack internal structure and would therefore have no scope. — Noam Chomsky
He touches on this idea in Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding, as well as in a short interview with Lex Fridman. Chomsky’s point is that there are mutually exclusive bounds on the ways a biological system, like the human brain, can develop and organize information. These constraints provide the internal structure that makes meaningful cognition possible. Without such structure, intelligence would have no determinate domain in which to operate.
Daniel Dennett challenges Chomsky’s emphasis on innate constraints. He argues that cognitive limits need not be pre-specified or biologically hardwired; instead, intelligence can emerge through interaction with the environment, evolutionary processes, and learning. From Dennett’s perspective, structure is not a prerequisite but a product of successful cognitive operation. Intelligence is defined by what systems reliably do, rather than by fixed innate rules, and constraints emerge naturally as part of that process. This view implies that human or artificial cognition could develop flexible intelligence without requiring the strict, pre-defined limits Chomsky emphasizes.
He explains that there are mutually exclusive bounds of possibilities in the way a biological system like the human brain develops, which makes sense, though not sure how that relates to this.
A cognitive prosthesis could conceivably extend certain human capacities, but it would not fundamentally remove the underlying structural constraints of human cognition; it would only supplement them.
Even the creation of an AGI would not render Chomsky’s observation moot, as AGI could operate under different principles, yet his insight remains relevant for understanding the nature and limits of human intelligence specifically.