Noam Chomsky is the thinker who did most to shape how I see the world. A magazine profile led me to him early on, and I had never met a more honest or more scientifically grounded view of reality. He has two sides, the cognitive scientist and the political dissident, and on thinking and morality I agree with him on almost everything. Politically he has made the world better by standing with the oppressed, though many find his positions hard to turn into practice, and I tend to agree.
Following my inner Popper, the place where I diverge is more interesting than the agreements. Chomsky holds that the language faculty appeared through a single mutation rather than gradual selection, the single-step theory. That treats one human trait as exceptional, almost magical, and I find the gradualist account that Dennett defends more plausible.
If there were no limits to human intelligence, it would lack internal structure and would therefore have no scope. — Noam Chomsky, Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding
His point, developed in that essay and in an interview with Lex Fridman, is that a biological system can only develop and organize information within bounds, and those bounds are the structure that makes cognition possible. Dennett pushed back: limits need not be innate, since structure can emerge from learning, environment, and evolution, and intelligence is what a system reliably does rather than a set of fixed rules. A cognitive prosthesis would supplement our constraints, not remove them, and even an artificial general intelligence running on different principles would leave Chomsky’s observation standing for human minds.