From: Noam Chomsky < Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2015 9:51 PM To: Jeffrey E. Subject: RE: Re: The third problem can be posed — though few will understand it. The first two can be posed but there is no known way to address them — the first for reasons that Dick Lewontin explained in his important paper on evolution of cognition (which those who write about the topic refuse to read), the second because it reaches to issues that are total mysteries even in much simpler domains — perhaps, though many don't to contemplate the fact, because of limits of human cognitive capacity. Puppet and puppeteer, again. There are lots of narrower problems that can be posed, but there are issues of general import. What was very special, maybe unique, about Hilbert in 1900 was the advances in the field had reached the point so that questions had that miraculous combination of being (1) potentially within reach and (2) of very great import for the field of mathematics. That's hard to achieve. Will think more about it — repeating the Hebrew words to myself. Did you learn them as a kid in Hebrew school? Noam From: jeffrey E. [mailto:[email protected] Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2015 5:09 PM To: Noam Chomsky Subject: Re: Re: I understand the limitations of questions too far from the boundary of contemporary thought but as you speak hebrew. i will paraphrase the reason you should consider posing the questions now. -- If not now. when? On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 3:59 PM, Noam Chomsky wrote: The main questions that interest me are about origin of the language faculty, which, I think, created modern humans, the most unusual, nutty, and remarkable of all biological phenomena. There are two problems that seem beyond reach: the origin of elementary human concepts, which appear to be radically different from anything in the animal world; and the "creative aspect of language use," the phenomenon that astonished Galileo, Descartes, and other leading figures since. The thi