This chapter consists of a transcription of a fictitious forum discussion in which a number of fictitious scholars participated, including some very surprising participants. The wide-ranging discussion covers the topics discussed throughout this book, and the chapter ends with the conclusion that the nature–nurture debate is still a vibrant one in which we are seeking to understand the interplay between the nurturing experience and the role of nature, whether in the form of an innate biological endowment or in the form of natural factors that go beyond the realm of the human mind.

People have always been fascinated by “talking animals.” Dr Dolittle could understand the “languages” of animals, but what if they could use our language? Can they? This chapter reviews various attempts to teach human language, or something close to it, to other animals. Bottom line: They can’t do it. (But we can’t do their “languages” either!)

There is evidence that language has some innate basis. Babies are born with certain expectations as to how language works, and language learning, according to Chomsky, is simply a matter of parameter setting. Pinker and Bloom (1990) take an evolutionary perspective on language. Chomsky’s recent theoretical work suggests that very little of the language ‘organ’ is specific to language. Some language deficits have been traced to a malfunctioning variant of the gene FOXP2. While this initially excited attention as ‘the language gene’ or ‘the grammar gene’, subsequent research has shown the true story to be more complicated. Research suggests that language may well have been around for almost 2 million years. There are a number of hypotheses suggesting that language evolved to fulfil a social function, such as social grooming (binding groups together), the making of social contracts (to enable monogamy) and the use of language to impress potential mates.

This chapter turns to memetic experimentation. Meme blends, meta-memes, or cases of ‘memeception’ (or recursivity in memes) all manipulate aspects of form to create new meaning effects. Antimemes, on the other hand, do not alter the form, but change the viewpoint structure and so, the meaning. Some memes, finally, appear to enjoy memetic form for form’s sake, and border on art forms; the so-called Loss meme is our main example here.

Recursiveness is one of the features of the syntactic structure of any language, and morphology also shows recursiveness, even if it is strongly restricted, and the way in which it operates is not the same across all kinds of morphological structure. A new way of considering recursion in suffixation is proposed.

Chapter 5 is devoted specifically to the history of the head-complement parameter. The first explicit proposals in this respect are found in Graffi (1980), Stowell (1981), and Travis (1984). Then, attention is focused on Kayne’s (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom and its contribution to the crisis of the head-complement parameter. After considering Chomsky’s (1995a, 1995b) Bare Phrase Structure theory, the discussion turns to the two current main hypotheses about head directionality: on the one hand, that linearization applies in the PF component, as proposed by Richards (2004, 2008); on the other hand, that linear order is determined within narrow syntax, as put forth by Biberauer and Roberts (2015) and Roberts (2019). The chapter ends with a review of Donati and Branchini’s (2013) experimental perspective on linearization, which supports the idea that linear order is part of externalization rather than narrow syntax.

We motivate the book based on categorical formulations of recursion and induction. We also discuss the background that readers should have and preview many of the topics in the book.

The syntax of choreographies is enhanced with the possibility of writing and invoking recursive procedures, yielding the language of Recursive Choreographies. This opens the door to modelling protocols that allow for retries and data streams of unbounded length. The language of process implementations and the notion of EPP are updated accordingly.

This chapter presents the hypothesis that working memory and language evolved in tandem. It reviews the evolutionary origins of each of the components of Baddeley’s working memory model and their role in the evolution of language. The chapter reviews the gradualist position that language did evolve slowly from aurally directed early primate calls and notes that the primary purpose of language has always been communication. The chapter also presents the novel idea that the pragmatics of speech (the purposes of speech) also evolved in tandem with the evolution of working memory. The chapter also reviews the saltationist idea that something happened to language more recent than 100,000 years ago, and that is the release of the fifth pragmatic of speech, the subjunctive mood, which expresses wishes and ideas contrary to fact. The subjunctive mood required fully modern working memory capacity, sufficient phonological storage capacity, and an enhanced visuospatial sketchpad, which are also critically involved in episodic memory recall and simulation. The phenotypic result of this genotype meant that thought experiments could be conducted in a recursive manner. We propose that the fruits of Homo sapiens’s cultural explosion, cave art, creative figurines, and highly ritualized burials, were the direct result of the wishes and imaginings that arise from subjunctive thinking and subjunctive language.

Chapter 4 focuses in the methodological and instrumental contrasts between artificial economics and mainstream economics. It discusses the mathematical methods of mainstream economics (centered around the use of optimization methods and systems of equations representations) versus the computational methods of artificial economics (characterized by the use of algorithms, software, and computer hardware). Presents basic notions on algorithms, recursion, and Turing machines. And discusses the methodological and instrumental differences between artificial economics and mainstream economics as derived from differences between classical mathematics and constructive mathematics.

This conclusion weaves together the wide-ranging contributions of this volume by considering data-driven personalisation as an internally self-sustaining (autopoietic) system. It observes that like other self-sufficient social systems, personalisation incorporates and processes new data and thereby redefines itself. In doing so it redefines the persons who participate in it, transforming them into ‘digital’ components of this new systems, as well as influencing social arrangements more broadly. The control that elite corporate and governmental entities have over systems of personalisation – which have been diversely described by contributors to this volume – reveals challenges in the taming of personalisation, specifically the limits of traditional means by which free persons address new phenomena – through consent as individuals, and democratic process collectively.

This chapter looks at the cognitive correlates of consciousness, and how consciousness is related to the ideas of selection and limitation. It begins by looking at how cognitive processes such as attention, particularly visual attention, language, thought, mental imagery and inner speech involve consciousness. It looks at cross-cultural differences in cognition. We then look at the neuroscience of the default-mode network. The chapter then looks at a number of models of consciousness based in cognition, including the global workspace theory of Baars, and the multiple drafts model of Dennett. We consider the underlying neuroscience. The chapter then considers how cognition enables us to construct a model or representation of the world, and the way in which consciousness might emerge from that representation. We consider again emergence and complexity. Finally the chapter examines the possible role of quantum mechanics as a basis for understanding consciousness.

This chapter looks at animal consciousness. It begins by asking which animals are conscious, and how we might be able to tell which are and which are not. It moves on to look at the minds of animals, particularly animal intelligence. It then looks at the mirror test of self-recognition, asking whether it is a good guide to detecting consciousness. We consider then which animals feel pain. The chapter moves on to the evolutionary advantages of being conscious, and discusses the importance of possessing a theory of mind for social interaction. It then examines the importance of language and the concept of recursion for consciousness and self-awareness. It concludes by examining panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of all matter.

This chapter surveys what the ethological record reveals about the uniqueness of the human computational system, and explores how linguistic theories account for what ethology may determine to be human-specific. The core computational architecture of the language faculty is compared alongside existing accounts of non-human primates, songbirds and a number of other species, helping to delimit what computational processes electrophysiological models of language need to account for.

This chapter is dedicated to languages of the Americas, with the three main sections covering indigenous languages in North America, Meso-America, and South America. A brief outline of the major language families in the region is given, with the focus on the better-established language families. The last section discusses the issue surrounding Pirahã, a language controversially claimed to lack such basic grammatical mechanisms as recursion.