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Years and years ago, there was an aol live chat with Koko, the gorilla who could sign. An early experimental cross species AMA. The crowd mostly asked questions like "is there a god?" The ape generally replied that she was bored and wanted food. Gray parrots and corvids and dolphins and squids are exceptionally fascinating and worth studying. They aren't the same as the mythologized first contact people are hoping fo…
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The first story though, in Exhalation, "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", is one of my favorites. It's also available standalone.
That is a really good story. I think I kind of downgraded "Exhalation" a bit because I'd read that story before so it wasn't new to me.
It's going straight to the top of my to-read list.
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We often miss all the ways animals right here on Earth try to get our or each other's attention. A truly alien species might communicate in ways we cannot even detect, or think of detecting, like say magnetic fields or some other medium that almost nothing on Earth uses. Furthermore, even if they used the same "channels" and frequencies as us, their minds may just be too different. Even fundamental concepts like time…
Dolphins seem particularly promising!
Shameless self-plug: we are working on it, combining citizen science and AI. Our plarform goes live in a few weeks.
Years and years ago, there was an aol live chat with Koko, the gorilla who could sign. An early experimental cross species AMA. The crowd mostly asked questions like "is there a god?" The ape generally replied that she was bored and wanted food. Gray parrots and corvids and dolphins and squids are exceptionally fascinating and worth studying. They aren't the same as the mythologized first contact people are hoping fo…
With Koko/many other talking apes the handler does a LOT of interpretation for the sign language, to the point that it starts to feel a bit like reading tea leaves. With Koko, I often feel that the handler goes way too far in this. For example:
Interviewer: Koko, do you feel love from the humans who have raised you and cared for you? Ely35150 asked that. We'll see what she says!
Dr. Patterson: She's reading a birthday card.
Koko: lips, apple give me
Dr. Patterson: People give her her favorite foods.
Koko: love, browse drink nipple
Dr. Patterson: Browse is like... the little foods/snacks we give them.
Koko: koko loves that nipple drink, go
Dr. Patterson: She's kissing her alligator.
Koko: lights off good
Many other scientists have approached the ape speaking thing through a bit more of a skeptical lens, and produced (IMHO) much better work. The work on Nim Chimpsky in particular is interesting - they found that while Nim could associate words with concepts (forming phrases like "give food me eat"), anything resembling syntax, creating new phrases, or a sustained conversation was simply out of his reach.
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I think we're hoping (even if it's a double edge sword) that the aliens are smart enough to communicate with us not the other way around. We have been unable to fully decipher the "language" of dogs beyond some body language. And they have lived with us for millennia. Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/638/
I doubt many dog owners would agree with you that we have not deciphered the language of dogs. We viscerally understand how they communicate, it’s simply hard to systematically describe it.
But that's a very superficial understanding of a language. Maybe we have different concepts of what understanding a language means.
Dogs are smart enough to grasp relatively advanced concepts, do you think you would understand the response if you asked "do you want food A, B, C, or D"? And I'm not talking about body language (them pointing at the thing) or training them to react in a specific way because that's actually you teaching them a language. Another example: listen to 2 dogs barking at each other. To what level can you understand what they are "saying"? Yes, you can say "aggressive" or "submissive". But is it fair to call that understanding the language? There has to be more to their language than just basic emotions.
Take this list of languages [0] (or any language that is completely foreign to you). If someone is speaking one of them to you and you can only guess things from body language or tone is it fair to say you understand that language?
The meaning of a lot of human languages or alphabets is completely lost even if they were conceived by humans almost identical to us biologically. Hoping to understand alien languages without the aliens helping us is a pipe dream.
[0] https://www.daytranslations.com/blog/2018/02/rare-languages-...
Years and years ago, there was an aol live chat with Koko, the gorilla who could sign. An early experimental cross species AMA. The crowd mostly asked questions like "is there a god?" The ape generally replied that she was bored and wanted food. Gray parrots and corvids and dolphins and squids are exceptionally fascinating and worth studying. They aren't the same as the mythologized first contact people are hoping fo…
On Koko... Koko's not all she's cracked up to be. Although there is a lot of non-scientific media that talks about her language abilities, there actually aren't very many scientific/peer reviewed articles on her, something that is the source of some contention. With Koko/many other talking apes the handler does a LOT of interpretation for the sign language, to the point that it starts to feel a bit like reading tea l…
A lot of researchers badly wanted to prove language in chimps back in the 70's, but it all amounted to naught, and other than a few holdouts, the field moved on.
People got excited about animal communication, but confused that with language. Language has a syntax, such that one can utter a sentence you've never spoken before and you can understand a sentence you've never heard before. Language is impossible under conditioning-based learning, but most of the chimp "utterances" could still be explained by conditioning. E.g., chimp Washoe infamously signed "water" and "bird" when a swan happened to be nearby, but that could be explained with operant conditioning: she associated signing "water" and "bird" in the presence of waters and birds with getting treats.
Eventually, researchers started taking a sober look at the "corpuses" generated by animals. When cherry-picking individual phrases, things looked impressive; but when they really started to analyze these statistically as a whole, the results were unimpressive, closer to random utterings designed to elicit treats, rather than communication.
Years and years ago, there was an aol live chat with Koko, the gorilla who could sign. An early experimental cross species AMA. The crowd mostly asked questions like "is there a god?" The ape generally replied that she was bored and wanted food. Gray parrots and corvids and dolphins and squids are exceptionally fascinating and worth studying. They aren't the same as the mythologized first contact people are hoping fo…