Dolphins as a model for alien intelligence
nautil.us
nautil.us
It's certainly interesting that their language has statistical properties closer to human languages than that of other animals tested.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/16/opinion/sunday...
The existence of sonar as a highly evolved sensory experience already tells us about scale of possibility within the creative repertoire of biology. Our brain design is clearly influenced a lot by the sensory and communication tasks that are important to us.
For example, human smell is something unimpressive, by mammalian standards. We have smell and it affects us occasionally. It says 'don't eat that!' or somemsuch, sometimes. We also have some pheromones that are a basic scent communication method. Many mammals make 90% of mating decisions based on smell. Some species can react to a 6 day old pee stain the way humans react to strippers. Some find food from long distances away. They use highly developed scent based communication to transmit information about themselves (mostly) to one another. Something can smell scary, in a "Shit, that gave me a fright!" kind of way. It's not a stretch to imagine they dream or think in smells the way we do in words, sort of.
We communicate with sound in amazing ways. Right now we are communicating using sight (most of us) in a way that piggybacks on our brain's special design to understand words, which are sound based. This is fairly common in our biological branch, words... or so it seems. Anyway, the design is flexible to be used in various ways. You can learn language without having hearing. There is obviously a lot of potential for nature to be novel.
They may not be projecting shapes of actual objects, but if they are projecting shapes at all, it would probably be easy to record and reconstruct them visually for us to see, no?
They may not be projecting shapes of actual objects, but if they are projecting shapes at all, it would probably be easy to record and reconstruct them visually for us to see, no?
I'm thinking if they so use 3-D sonar communication, they probably have a vocabulary of geometric symbols.
For instance, with our vocal apparatus, we can imitate sounds like "bark bark" or "buzz", but instead we say "dog" and "bee". This allows us to talk about things that don't make sound, including abstract ideas.
Perhaps they have 3-D geometric symbols, analogous to our words. Instead of imitating the sonar reflection of a school of fish, they might just have a shape that means "school of fish".
So failing to conform to Zipf's law doesn't prove a signal is not meaningful, but confirming to it is likely to be very strong evidence that a signal is a form of communication.
Then again, Zipf's law is known to describe many non-communicative, "natural" distributions like the sizes of grains of sand, the sizes of asteroids, and the populations of cities (one of Herbert Zipf's original objects of study). And conversely, many levels of representation of human communication have non-Zipfian distributions, like phoneme distributions. (See my comment history for references.)
Every "creature" will have to use energy. Conservation of the energy means a linear optimization to minimal bandwidth. The channels (chemical, sonar, infrared, etc) and patterns are the most varied parts as different conditions produce different optimal expression.
Now, if they were intelligent, they would (as we do) come up with highly compressed encoding schemes that would have no apparent patterns to an outsider, except perhaps control signals at the start and end. But if they wanted to be heard by aliens, they would avoid using obscuring mechanisms like compression.
Anyway, I would argue, that wanting to allways remain in the same state of being, is not very smart, since the enviroment is going to change anyway ... so you got to evolve to adopt to new enviroment changes (ultimately the collapying of our sun)
It would be interesting to combine that paper's idea of analyzing source code with your idea of peculiar modes of thought and see if zipf still holds under those peculiar mental models for large enough code samples. For example does intermediate OCR API code follow zipf the same way as numerical analysis code, or some weird string theory code?
Going into the hard sci fi (or weird fantasy) arena of fictional writing, I think an elaborate yarn along the lines of ye olde fortune teller or program correctness prover or traveling salesman router, based on zipf and compression algos would make an entertaining story... "So back in the 22nd century when they proved 11 dimensional string theory was true because it was the only geometry where the DSL describing it followed zipf-law statistics, and everyone knows only real things that are true follow zipf therefore the simulation must be accurate..." I suppose the plot twist would be something along the lines of outright falsehood documents also follow zipf...
Did you just describe a word in a foreign language?
Let's take string of letters:" t e r v e - m a a n - a s u k k a a t "
Let's assume that I can somehow quantize that signal into syllables: ter-ve-maan-a-suk-kaat. Then hash table lookup against vocabulary: terve = hello, maan = earths, asukkaat = inhabitants.
Yes it looks like pure noise if you can't separate words from each other and message length is short compared to complexity of message. Also if you only see a pitch graph of me saying that stuff, it's even more indistinguishable of random noise. Exactly the same problems as in the article.
Maybe one of the reasons we can't quite bridge the communication gap and "do inter-species communication" is that we feel that we are above the target species in question, evolution-wise.
Maybe this is a huge mistake to make to think that we have evolved to handle complexity, rather than devolved to avoid simplicity.. I don't know, but if I could talk to a dolphin about it, I really wonder what they'd say.
(Seriously, I've thought about this often, since I came to understand Zipfs Law in the 80's and listened to too many Devo lyrics..)
Its quite possible that we're surrounded by alien communication, but are too arrogant, as a species, to be able to recognize it. I'm fairly certain we have some significant evolutionary steps to take before we can 'work it out' ..
What are the odds then, that there may be a species not even insanely different from ourselves, which we simply cannot even observe or be cognisant of. If true, it'd make all our efforts to seek out, let alone communicate, with aliens, naively cute.
It's a fascinating idea, although I've never explored whether it has any merit. It may just be one of those ideas that sounds amazing but falls apart if more closely inspected.
A lot of animals are smart enough to at least get a pretty decent picture of us.
It could maybe follow that there are beings that we would be unable to really comprehend the way we comprehend other humans. But it would also be pretty likely that we could develop models, heuristics and statistical analysis to extract meaning about these theoretically confusing aliens.
We understand quite a bit about our society- which is basically a hyper complicated animal. We deal with the gaps in absolute knowledge pretty well.
If aliens visited us, we probably would not even recognize that they arrived, or we might see their arrival as some natural phenomena.
We best start with dogs, who at least, we can bond with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caenorhabditis_elegans#Researc...
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/c-elegans-connecto...
The majority of the aliens in Star Trek always fit into the humanoid model, treating them as basic re-skinned humans with the same motivations and ideas, which is a dangerous assumption out here in the real world.
Just to mine minerals and manufacture metal, computers, fuel, etc etc would mean co-operation on a massive scale -- millions of individuals.
Nan-bots sure, they would be talking alien wifi and machine code. Giant creatures (AIs?) that live slower than us and manufacture each component themselves without the need of help.... like spaceflight from first principles.
That we share so much DNA with primitive creatures is just another way of saying that amount of shared DNA is not closely related to functionality similarity.
Fantastic book, great hard sci fi.
His rifters trilogy was decent too, got a bit wacky in the last 2 books but still a fun read
The end result for me ends up being a much more intense feeling of the kinds of varieties of intelligence that may exist in the galaxy, or that we may end up creating ourselves.
Including this very thing I have sitting in my lap, which consumes energy like a living creature and responds dynamically to its environment in a way that keeps it around (it's my trusty laptop). I have opted to keep it around rather than throwing it in the trash (evolutionary selection).
Inheritance of knowledge separates animals from plants and microorganisms. [1]
Inheritance of capital separates humans from animals. [2]
In the same way DNA is an integral part of life, and in the same way the knowledge to live in a particular environment is an integral part of an animal, technology is an integral part of being human.
Raise a human in the wild among goats without human culture, without human technology. As long as that human is separated from culture and technology, would an alien be able to differentiate the human from animal? [3]
[1] Animal born in captivity can't be released to the wild because they didn't have the opportunity to learn from their wild parents.
[2] Hammer, houses, watches, factories, passed down from generation to generation.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2015/may...
DOI 10.1242/jeb.110908
Their mimicry skills stay sharp across generations because during breeding season, while the strong males are competing physically for access to females, the smaller males with better mimicry skills are mimicking females (!) and sneaking past the boxing ring for a quickie.
The female cuttlefish can also store lots of sperm and decide later whose to use. Gross.
http://www.londonwomensclinic.com/london/looking_for_donor_s...
"The London Sperm Bank is the largest sperm bank in the UK with donors recruited from a variety of cultures, religions and sections of the community"
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
I think crow intelligence is more interesting. They are very smart and capable of using tools. And they evolved brain structures independently from mammals that enable them to do those things.
Seems to me they just found a fact that was interesting and decided to wrap an article around it.
If we can't talk to dolphins then how would we communicate with octopi? If not even octopi then how aliens?
I think that was more the point rather than trying to find the most alien intelligent animal to attempt to communicate with.
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I would think dolphins and aliens may be more alien than Slavs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_...
The existence of the Babel Fish would make such questions much much simpler.
If the fittest die as well everything's dead, so no more life.
Not sure what you mean by evolution being slower without intelligence. I'd expect the opposite. Intelligence means you can adapt to your environment behaviourally and technologically, instead of biologically so natural selection becomes less of a factor.
Edit: I can't reply to your reply, but I can edit this post. Unless the form that mate selection takes radically diverges from evolved patterns I don;t see how that makes much difference. Since survival for intelligent species is much more loosely coupled to their biology I don't see why sexual selection strategies would mitigate against that. It seems to me they'd follow the same pattern in devaluing biological fitness criteria as not being as significant as they were pre-sentience.
Second, the chemistry of life balances on a particular set of characteristics:
1) Water is an extremely unusual molecule. It has much more varied reactions than just about any other solvent. This puts life in a particular temperature band.
2) Carbon chemistry is very energetically favorable relative to the other options. Binding energies are close enough that swapping around carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen atoms doesn't take excessive amounts of energy.
3) Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen, and Hydrogen are all relatively close to one another in size as well. While carbon chemistry does borrow from higher in the periodic table, that tends to be the exception.
While intelligent life will likely be completely different from us, it's very likely that the underlying chemistry is going to be very similar.
The interesting question will be whether we have exactly the same basis DNA pairs. There has been recent successful work to synthesize new "unnatural" base pairs which can then be replicated in organisms.
4) "Room temps" are really comfy for using enzymes to perform energetically infeasible reactions. Too cold and life is too slow to survive and much hotter and you get thermal decomposition faster than life can grow. Its chemically universal... we have the technology to do o-chem and biochem under much weirder conditions than where it actually works best.
5) Trace elements. Despite huge evolutionary pressure and no small amount of experimenting with blood chemistry we're still stuck with red iron based blood. Imagine if you could make blood out of pure protein or even just carbohydrates... But no, every red blooded animal on the planet is stuck refining bioavailable iron, no matter how much of a PITA that is. Would not be surprised if space aliens bleed red like us.
6) Water is awesome for buffer chemistry and this feeds back into your point #1 and my point #4 but homeostasis in the blood or innards in general would be nearly impossible under any other chemistry.
I would not be surprised at all if space aliens were quite familiar with hemoglobin, chlorophyll, some of the cycles like the Krebs cycle. Krebs is very complicated and PITA but most earth life depends on it because it works, if something better were possible, it would have gone extinct half a billion years ago... It would be a fun race, seeing if human and space alien physicists or biochemists start communicating first. My money is on the biochemists, more shared background.
I would still hazard a guess and say that I would expect carbon based life to be there basis of the lions share of life in the universe though.
Regarding the Krebs cycle and other biological feedback cycles, I strongly disagree.
It came to dominate at a point where it propagated through all the extant branches of life, but it is by no means the only way life could have decided to do the process of energy production. Once evolution evolves something, it is stuck with that system - no complex biochemical system will evolve into a Krebs replacement whilst Krebs occupies that niche, and evolution isn't going to spit it out of the way!
Careful, this isn't a given. Some tunicates actually concentrate vanadium for oxygen transport.
Now, iron is so much more plentiful in the universe that it's likely that it would be pressed into service for oxygen transport, but it isn't given.
In addition, life looked very different before the Oxygen Catastrophe, so we have lots of evidence for life without oxygen transport.
That said, have you every thought of how alien intelligence might look that does not adhere to the above chemistries?
There are some great science fiction speculations - life living in the ultra-high-gravity "crust" of a neutron star [0], intelligent Turing machines running in the convective layers of brown dwarf stars[1], just plain bootstrapping an AI environment on the substrate of the Universe.[2]
[0] Robert L. Foward, Alystaire Reynolds [1] Stephen Baxter [2] Greg Egan
Is there a firm distinction between "alive" and "dead" at all? I think not so much. What we call "dead" is a body whose micro-organisms no longer organise in a common human perceptual window of space and time. With a microscope, some people have been able to see that a "dead body" is actually buzzing with life. Many of the same organisms that live symbiotically with us survive the immediate death of the eukaryote body and pass memories of our memories on to future generations of micro-organisms. They are (usually) symbiotic with, but not dependent on, as the organelles of "human cells" have become, our larger organising bodies. What happens as these wild bacteria and fungi unpack and metabolise our memories on the deepest level? Is that not somehow part of the life cycle? Isn't it possible that "we" somehow experience that in a less integrated way? Poetically, as the inside members processes the death of its larger body, so do the exterior members of the human body, other people, animals and social organisations. The locus of stable control is released, the steering wheel disintegrates. But does life somehow "disappear"? Not at all. It only shifts in, out, to scales whose feedback mechanisms elude mainstream western mythology.
Eventually, over thousands of years, all membrane bound creatures deposit their bodies. What went in (the membrane) must go out(side of the membrane). Some parts are reused immediately. Others are left for deeper cycles (including by not limited to eventual metamorphosis in the high pressures of the deeper subterranean). This part of the life cycle is much more mysterious to me, as I haven't really studied it, and it really is so much more vast. The physics and chemistry of rocks and minerals, liquids, gasses is part of the life cycle. They are part of the evolutionary story as much as any being.
Why are many mystics attracted to crystals and rocks? Because they are mineral deposits of ancestral beings. They carry, literally, the energies accumulated in some ancient, swirling ecosystem. They are a memory of things our bodies had forgotten. Same reason why a lot of scientists are attracted to them.
As for the conversation about "intelligence". The Earth has 400 billion trees. Each is connected to the others by roots, by air, by micro-organisms, by water, by chemicals, by ecological relationships. How many neurons do we each have? Maybe 80 or 90 billion.
Just because plants can't move or talk in very specific human babble noises, it doesn't mean they aren't experiencing something substantial or contributing in dynamic "intelligent" ways to their ecologies.
Anyway, I need to take a break and eat lunch, because I'm "alive" in this certain kind of way where that my fire is burns for tasty food. I'm gonna stoke it with some soup.
I'm not sure what are you saying here. The "fittest" are the ones who don't die (before reproducing).
I'm quite certain that does not have anything to do with "speed of evolution".
I am not a biologist, so I can't come up with a better source, but I'd suggest that everyone would very carefully study at least the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution which looks like a reasonable summary.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/these-...
I imagine I won't have many common points in discussion with them.