Mind-Brain Lecture: Luc Steels (Brussels/Wiko Berlin)

“Language as an evolutionary system in its own right”

A scientific resolution to the problem of the origins and evolution of language is of high interest to many researchers. Here I will discuss some of the basic ideas that have guided our own approach to this topic. I will argue that language required the recruitment of four high level mental capacities: a problem solving engine, a conceptualization engine, a massive structural memory for storing symbols, and the capacity for handling multidimensional problems. Once these capacities had been recruited in the service of communication, language developed as an evolutionary system in its own right. The units of evolution are conceptualizations (on the meaning side) and lexical and grammatical constructions (on the linguistic side). They multiply with inheritance by reuse and social learning. Variation is unavoidable due to performance deviations and distributed innovation. Selection is based on maximizing expressive power and communicative success while minimizing cognitive effort.

The talk will show how we can make these hypotheses more concrete up to a point where we can do synthetic experiments using agent-based computer simulations and robotic experiments. These experiments are similar to experiments on the origins of life. They try to achieve through synthetic means the major transitions in the origins of language, from action to symbolic gesture, from gesture and sound to words, from words to multi-word protolanguage, and from protolanguage to grammar.

Bio. Luc Steels is currently an ICREA fellow at the Institute for Evolutionary Biology (UPF-CSIC) in Barcelona. He has a background as a linguist and AI researcher. He has been a professor of computer science at the University of Brussels (VUB), and founder of director of its Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He was founder and director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris from 1996 to 2014. His research has spanned many areas of AI, from robotics to language processing, and focuses from 1995 on the investigation of language evolution using agent-based synthetic experiments. Luc Steels
ICREA, Institute for Evolutionary Biology - Barcelona
http://biologiaevolutiva.org/lsteels/ Currently at: http://www.wiko-berlin.de/fellows/fellowfinder/detail/2015-steels-luc/ All are welcome!

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