Can we talk to whales?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I don't remember the article and anyway there wasn't much more detail but I always found this idea quite interesting. Could be that looking for words, sentences or grammar in a whale's song is a misguided and anthropocentric approach to the problem. They may instead have a visual language that just so happen to be transmitted by sound.
Like, do you see what I mean? But, literally.
But there is no reason we should expect other species to communicate and think in the same way we do.
The past to them is physically looking straight ahead, as that is what they can observe.
The future is conceptually and physically them looking over their shoulder behind them, as that is what they can’t see.
I might be mangling it somewhat! :-)
analogies develop further from there, such as events being passed at the moment moving very quickly, and large in one's field of view, and to some extent one js able to see around them and order their importance by size and speed with respect to one's own position. But they're moving fast and it's hard to take in all the detail at once, and being so close the more proximal ones obscure your view of the ones further away though the latter may actually be in fact larger or more significant. Only as they all recede into the distance of the past does their relative significance with respect to each other become more evident.
The reason is how far back their line diverged from ours. The nearer the point of divergence, the more reasonable it is to apply how things work for us.
I talk a Signed Language and I know how to give a 3d image, for example when asking for the location of the toilet, like this: go through this door, then you see the stairs to the left, go down there and then from your point of view return but just one leve lower and the door will be to the right (from your point of view of now).
When asking for directions I am sometimes frustrated by the inability of people to tell me detailed directions. I know their language has limits and they just can't.
Another example, when my boy got on a chairlift the first time, I could tell him in detail what will happen including the change in speed and could include even the typical rattling when taking off. He was then very confident in taking the chairlift.
But I have difficulty imaging how whales communicate 3d situations... Probably by imitating what they experience by sonar and simplifying to the essentials?
In Signed Language you can point into a 3D space. If you define a mapping of the world into the 3D space available to Signed Language then you have the world at your fingertips.
https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/108499/can-whale....
Given that that was all the way back in 2011 and didn't lead to any big world changing events I assume it was just cranks being cranky and a lot of people getting their hopes up.
I heard also that while the major part of our brain is dealing with semantics, dolphins brain is dealing with acoustics; some kind of study was sourced in the radiophonic show I was listening which was telling about the different eras of brain growth in the history of humans and dolphins, trying to find some comparison points to better explain how similar cerebral masses could be specialized into different operations and a lot of different things I don't remember.
In the thread of this thought, to search for intelligent life off-planet sort of misses the point, doesn't it? Here we have an intelligent species with a common ancestor, which we may assume to be easier to communicate with than an extra-terrestrial being. And we have hardly begun to attempt to communicate with our earthly neighbor in a meaningful way, but we have projects probing the cosmos for signals from space.
Given the limitations of their physical bodies, would they even be capable of developing any sophisticated instruments at all?
Point being, intelligence may not be the limiting factor for extraterrestrial communication at all.
Are you asking why I’d assume that they don’t have the biological ability to send electromagnetic communication signals?
If that’s not what you’re asking, I don’t understand how else they’d send signals through space without sophisticated instruments capable of transmitting powerful signals.
Please clarify.
Try and describe your chair or oddly shaped rock as a 3D object without referring to it by classification and ask yourself how many people would have used the same sounds in the same order. There’s no direct mapping between 3D objects and the sounds used to describe them,
No, but they are related to a naturally occurring medium of language, of which there are only two notable ones: the human voice, and signing. Written languages are simply codified representations of these forms of natural language. (Note: Sign languages are distinct unrelated languages from the local spoken languages with their own grammar and everything, not just signed representations of them.)
By using written language, you are merely encoding a representation of a spoken phrase into a graphical representation. This is what truly makes writing separate from other commonplace but more abstract symbols, such as arrows, crosses, checkmarks, bathroom/restaurant/exit indicators, warning signs, etc, which convey an idea quite effectively but do not have a clear reliable decoding into natural language (i.e. if you ask 100 people to explain what they indicate, you won't be given the exact same sentence 100 times).
I would argue the opposite. Language is an encoding of ideas. By speaking, we are merely using an auditory representation of a word and when we write we use a graphical representation of a word, but the word is entirely separate from both audible and graphical representation. And indeed, we see that we can create other representations of a word. We can create a mathematical representation, like in the case of LLMs, and use words in a way that is entirely separate from sound and visuals. As a species, we used sound to invent words, but the invention isn’t tied to sound in any way. If we, as a species, evolved further and lost our vocal cords and ears, we could still use words. We could also continue to use words if we lost our sight as well. Truly words are separate from our senses.
Buzz, growl, etc are obvious example where sound directly influenced what the word was and how it’s written. But the ability for kids to form specific sounds also influenced words like mom. The same is true of world complexity, natural languages always have some imperatives like stop and go that are short and simple rather than long complex utterances like sesquipedalian.
Further, comparisons between languages suggest that words evolved from sounds. “No” for example sounds similar in a shocking number of languages from Afro-Eurasia and the America’s despite very long term separation.
It’s super ironic to talk about how sounds and gestures are a part of language while using purely written communication to talk. We will never hear each other. You will never see my gestures. And yet…
As to abandoning words, we might abandon them for something better. When people use a whiteboard they tend to draw a great deal rather than simply writing words down. If we eventually move to say brain machine interfaces we could be sending more nuanced thoughts than words allow. Subtle degrees of emotion and perception that the written word simply can’t convey. The old a picture is worth a 1,000 words but taken even further to the point where the use of words atrophy and eventually disappear.
Beyond that there’s a complex predefined encoding between human words and sounds and sounds back to words. There isn’t for your “series of precise measurements” so a dozen young English speakers at the same high school might all come up with wildly different schemes.
A subtle example of this is how is error correction mechanisms are automatically used. You can understand someone talking though some surprisingly serious distortions and missing content. Even written languages include quite a bit of redundancy. Remove every forth letter from a sentence and it’s generally surprisingly understandable. “I lo_e to _alk _y do_ in t_e mo_nin_.”
So your ad hock scheme could work if everything was perfect and someone write it all down, and then say turned those measurements into a sketch, but it’s all quite useless day to day. Thus people default to using general classifications and pointing at stuff.
Some languages tend to have more onomatopoeic sounds than English, and signs in sign language (especially "young" sign languages, meaning sign languages that have been codified recently) are probably even more onomatopoeic.
But in general, your point is true: the vast majority of words do not sound like the thing they represent. "Knock" (as in a knock on the door) doesn't sound anything like a knock.
Nope! You're sounding the words out in your head (or out loud) when you read it.
That's how hearing people learn to read. But even then it does not follow that they continue to sound words out or play back the audio in their head after they become proficient. In fact, one of the hallmarks of a proficient reader vs a beginner is that the former no longer needs to sound words out. They can just look at a word and recognize it more or less immediately.
> Some estimates suggest that as much as 50% or more of the population subvocalizes when reading, especially during their early years of reading development. However, with practice and improved reading skills, many individuals can reduce the extent of subvocalization and increase their reading speed.
I was always under the impression that the internal narration used in visual media (e.g. the Dexter opening sequence comes to mind [1]) was taking a dramatic license, but it's apparently some people's lived experience.
One pretty astounding observation he makes, is that we humans and the planet earth, thought to be the centre of the universe until the telescope came along. Now it will be a similar moment, in which we think that our language is at the centre of intelligence, not realizing that many animals communicate just like us, but in an incomprehensible way to us.
In one of the episodes, the ship's computers get wipe so the boy has to rebuild the dictionary of the translation system by showing the dolphin flash cards.
I remember thinking that was an interesting way to build a translation layer between two different species with a BIG assumption that the dolphin could understand the symbols on the flashcards.
The internet, being what it is, even has a Wikia link about this: https://seaquest-dsv.fandom.com/wiki/Vocorder
A large part of the book is the human crew figuring out how to communicate with blind aliens who communicate with a sort of musical chirping. The humans eventually write a program to input English vocabulary and play a rudimentary form of the music.
The Memory Palace has done a moving episode on sperm whales.
https://thememorypalace.us/keyhole/
If you're not familiar with the podcast, the episodes are incredibly well written and narrated humanity-focused vignettes.
(or if that link doesn't work, try this one: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/09/ac/49/09ac494b1ff20a19812ea8ba0...)
Think someone like the High Evolutionary as portrayed in the third Guardians of the Galaxy movie, but limited to present day Earth technology and knowledge.
Suppose that villain took several human babies, gave them hearing aids or cochlear implants that pitch shift and compress whale/dolphin sounds down to where humans can hear them, and raised them in a mixed human/whale environment so that from their first weeks they were seeing whales and hearing while speech as much they were seeing humans and hearing human speech.
Would some of those human babies end up learning to understand whale the same way babies raised in bilingual extended families often end up learning both languages?
I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work either, but kids do learn the sounds of other animals and they love to reproduce them. Many kids can make dog or duck sounds before they can even speak like humans.
The problem is that of course, dogs, cats, ducks don't actually have a language, just a few different sounds, so that doesn't prove anything about kids' ability to understand a hypothetical actual animal language.
- Stanisław Lem, Solaris
I think about this quote a lot. Every time I look at a bug, go to the zoo or try to talk to a toddler. Solaris is the best.
I have been biting my hands since yesterday to prevent me from saying this. Then with your Solaris reference the defense crumbled.
My cat excepted.
https://pca.st/episode/3185257d-11b6-4d9a-ac9e-fea9531d491f
"If we meet extraterrestrials someday, how will we figure out what they're saying? We currently face this problem right here at home: we have 2 million species of animals on our planet... and we have no Google Translate for any of them. We’re not having conversations with (or listening to podcasts by) anyone but ourselves. Join Eagleman and his guest Aza Raskin to see the glimmer of a pathway that might get us to animal translation, and relatively soon."
There are just north of 8 billion humans, and something like 850k sperm whales. If even a relatively small percentage of the former wants to talk to the latter, that's pretty overwhelming. Do we open an embassy or something?
Non-human communication is common, but language is different, and requires syntax. Syntax (plus vocabulary) is what enables you to meaningfully say a sentence you've never spoken before, and for another person to understand a sentence they've never heard before.
If you look at the corpuses of non-human communication, they're incredibly small compared to humans. A meercat has a few distinct vocalizations to warn their group depending on the type of a predator, but they can be counted on one hand. A songbird's song is ballistic once learned; it will never vary, even if they go deaf.
We've yet to rule it out in dolphins/orcas/whales etc like we have in lots of other animals. That alone is a pretty big deal.
And there's research that dolphins understand syntax.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342706263_Language_...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001002...
The Herman study was published in 1984, which was already a few years after the collapse of most of the primate language efforts. So, the author tries to compensate for many of the flaws that spelled doom in the primate teaching efforts.
In particular, they do a decent job of focusing on comprehension rather than language generation, and wisely test primarily novel sentences.
On the other hand, they make the same error as the primate researchers in not fully addressing if, and to what extent if so, operant conditioning could also be the method of learning. The response to novel sentences and the 5-word sentences seems suggestive of language, but conditioning can also do a LOT. (E.g., look up rats trained to do Rube Goldberg-style mazes involving dozens of steps to see how complicated behaviors can be achieved by conditioning smaller subpieces and then chaining them.)
The novel sentence tests might still be explainable by conditioning as: the dolphins are rewarded for correct answers, and by combining operant conditioning with object identification, are able to infer the correct answer. E.g., they trained a dolphin to answer yes/no on whether a hoop was in the pool, and then asked the same question for items used in earlier studies. This could still be a generalization of a conditioning response from a smart animal receiving rewards for correct answers, and not a demonstration of syntactical understanding.
Sure there is.
1. We've yet to rule it out in dolphins/orcas/whales etc like we have in lots of other animals. That alone is a pretty big deal. That's reason for that.
And there's research that show pretty conclusively that dolphins understand syntax. One has to wonder why have a brain that understands syntax but doesn't use it naturally.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342706263_Language_...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001002...
And this one over here is saying "Hey, babe! Wanna make some eggs?"
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/crow-nec...
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Philosophical Investigations’ (1953)
>"I cannot know what is going on in him" is above all a picture. It is the convincing expression of a conviction. It does not give the reasons for the conviction. They are not readily accessible.
>If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
>It is possible to imagine a guessing of intentions like the guessing of thoughts, but also a guessing of what someone is actually going to do. To say "He alone can know what he intends" is nonsense: to say "He alone can know what he will do", wrong. For the prediction contained in my expression of intention (for example "When it strikes five I am going home") need not come true, and someone else may know what will really happen.
For folks who haven't seen the Star Trek episode, there are a race of aliens who communicate using referents to metaphors or historical events. The translator works fine on a basic level, but without more context communication is impossible.
https://libquotes.com/charles-babbage/quote/lbr2z8s
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...
Mice 0.5/25 g Human 1.3/70 kg Sperm whale. 8.0/60000 kg
We humans get to chose the allometric coefficient that makes us seem “smartest” but D Adams knew the truth ;-)
Also, are you sure you don't read the article? It contains lots of vital information that we all came here to read, such as
> Gero, who is forty-three, is tall and broad, with an eager smile and a pronounced Canadian accent
(Nothing against Gero, this just happened to be the part my scroll wheel broke)
We also know this is similar behavior (pod specific vocalizations) if not in sound or pitch to orcas that hunt whale calves.
https://kuow.org/stories/listen-to-the-last-song-toki-the-ca...
Also, language is defined as something only humans can have, which is a bit circular and silly to anyone who’s observed cetaceans for any period of time.
We can have a spanish speaker (or speakers) sit down, feed us with hours and hours of content (heck, that's already there) and then work with AI to try and create a black box interpreter that can turn spanish to english.
Has anyone done this? If the goal is universal translator why not start off with a simple case?
My worry with trying to do this first with whales or other animals is we don't know the answer. Nobody can look at the whale AI translation and say "You know what, this was a good translation". Sort of the "Mars attacks" problem.
All this said, I do recognize that this creates a "human bias". The way humans talk may not readily translate to animal speech (But perhaps it would for other simians?).
Or at least, you shoot for that and maybe discover that 99% is philosophizing you can’t understand. But maybe you can bootstrap from present tense to suggest they are reminiscing about previous fish seasons. And so on.
You can see some of the hunting strategy problems play out with sheep dogs. A well trained sheep herding dog can execute really impressive actions based only on specific whistles trained by the handler. [1]. It'd be wrong to conclude a specific element of language for all dogs based on the whistles.
This isn't a black box because the whalesong encodes some type of behavior that we could, in theory, observe and decode even if we didn't understand the atomic pieces of the whalesong. It's how you study any unknown language--you learn a few relations and then gradually build up a richer lexicon and grammar that gives finer-grained understanding.
I'm not sure what the dog whistle example is intended to demonstrate, as even human language has a significant learned component.
When you are asking someone to “pass the spoon, it’s to the left of the cup”, you don’t dip into a codebook and say “play 22, hut” even if you are a quarterback.
If we are to treat whalesong the same way then we can't immediately assume that they're just trying to communicate base concepts.
You need to start somewhere. Maybe you would never be able to decode the non-functional communication without a Rosetta Stone or common language root.
The point is that at least some of language needs to cash out into a description of the physical world. I’d argue almost all of it, even in modern societies.
Basically imagine them like some remote people eking out a survival but ten times more incompatible.
Kinda. As I recall this happened by accident with French in (GPT-2? Not confident which LLM) — even though it wasn't meant to be in the training set, there were phrases just lifted directly from the other language.
"Hasta la vista" et cetera have a certain je ne sais quoi, but I suggest a better Gedankenexperiment would be the language of the people of the North Sentinel Island — with whom you cannot interact by both law and them being homicidally xenophobic, and will therefore be limited to remote sensing with parabolic or laser microphones only.
North Sentinel island would be a good stress test, but not a good first step as we can't ask them if we got the language right.
I'm talking about something more akin to what these researchers are doing. Without feeding the AI information about the correct translation, can we make an AI that can translate spanish to english? That is, what the researchers are trying to do with this whale translation.
What I'm saying is that if an LLM is trained on English, French and Spanish and there is Eng to French data, you don't need Eng to Spa data to get Eng to Spa translations.
You'd have to be careful with the input data, though, as it would be easy to corrupt your dataset with translations if you try and do this fast.
It's those OTHER people doing bad things to animals & their environment, not you. Right? (wink wink)
Most whales would probably fall for that (or give you benefit of the doubt).. many humans do.
Maybe if we would have a mapping we could use that to train an LLM.
In the meantime you can try asking ChatGPT if a cow has buddha nature and ask for a one word reply. It have an idea what it might say.
>Not likely to be so lucky with whale songs
Maybe. Maybe not