Noam Chomsky is the thinker who did the most to shape how I see the world. A magazine profile led me to him early on. I had never met a more honest or more scientific view of reality.
He has two sides: the cognitive scientist and the political dissident. On thinking and morality I agree with him on almost everything. In politics he has made the world better by standing with the oppressed. Many people find his positions hard to put into practice, though, and so do I.
Following my inner Popper, the place where I differ is more interesting than the agreements. Chomsky holds that language appeared through a single mutation, not through slow selection. This is his single-step theory. That treats one human trait as special, almost magical. I find the gradual account that Dennett defends more likely.
On the limits of human intelligence he wrote this in Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding:
If there were no limits to human intelligence, it would lack internal structure and would therefore have no scope.
His point, from that essay and from an interview with Lex Fridman, is simple. A living system can only build and organize information within limits. Those limits are the structure that makes thinking possible.
Dennett pushed back. Limits need not be inborn, since structure can grow from learning, environment, and evolution. Intelligence is what a system reliably does, not a fixed set of rules. A tool that extends the mind would add to our limits, not remove them. Even an artificial general intelligence built on other principles would leave Chomsky’s point standing for human minds.