171–180 of 221 posts
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Now do dogs. Are they missing any anatomy for speech or is that also neural?
They did develop fine control in their eyebrows to appeal / communicate to humans. And cats developed mewling similar to human babies to draw their attention.
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>It is obviously not true. Different people tend to have differing levels of internal monologue. Mine is so constant that nearly all conscious thought filters through it, to the point that it would be very easy to mistake the monologue for the totality of consciousness. It's a theory that rings true with people who think like I do, but still assume that everyone else thinks the same way too.
And some people, like myself, have no monologue or internal dialogue. What then? I have no consciousness or intelligence?
Welcome to the short and dirty end of yet another dimension of human cognitive bias.
We've been building tech to translate dog barks to something meaningful for us to understand. A few things we observed: 1. Dogs are more communicative once they believe you are correctly responsive to their vocalizations 2. Their barks are more differentiated over time and they start to introduce new types of vocalizations or sequences of vocalizations 3. Dogs don't have a structured vocal language as it starts of sl…
> There was also a communications problem. Though they had an equivalent IQ of sixty, and could understand several hundred words of English, they were unable to talk. It had proved impossible to give useful vocal chords either to apes or monkeys, and they therefore had to express themselves in sign language - Rendezvous with Rama (1973) Guess it's more fiction than science fiction now.
Important note on context - IIR, the "they" in that story were a spare-no-expense domesticated hybrid "working breed" of apes. Designed to replace expensive human astronauts doing repetitive, menial "housekeeping" jobs on space ships. One can read this as creative and edgy in context (1973, Civil Rights, "race riots", etc.) - but having the story's housekeeping apes able to talk might have gotten a "too big a risk" veto from the author's editor.
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Came to say that. I've seen videos of huskies actually talking, in a much lesser capacity than parrots, but talking nonetheless.
That video where the husky literally says "Woof!" "Woof!"
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Koko's language skills were misrepresented in a pretty extreme way. Very few recordings of Koko communicating anything more than short phrases were ever released, and those that were never demonstrated much more than word association. I've met dogs and pigs that were able to go fetch the "carrot" versus the "bunny" stuffed animals based on verbal commands, but I'm not going to claim that constitutes mastery of langua…
Language has also been called the "operating system" of the brain. When we think about things, we think in terms of words and language.
"what language do you think in?"
"um... I think in pictures?"
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>It is obviously not true. Different people tend to have differing levels of internal monologue. Mine is so constant that nearly all conscious thought filters through it, to the point that it would be very easy to mistake the monologue for the totality of consciousness. It's a theory that rings true with people who think like I do, but still assume that everyone else thinks the same way too.
And some people, like myself, have no monologue or internal dialogue. What then? I have no consciousness or intelligence?
I don't have this either, but I would still say I think in language. It might be concepts that link together in hierarchies or graphs, but those concepts are described in words.
A very interesting read, which describes how for ~50 years the community was lead astray by a seemingly simple oversight: studying dead animals instead of living ones! >Charles Darwin theorized that monkeys had the vocal anatomy needed for speech, but lacked the necessary neural mechanisms. >This was the most popular hypothesis until 1969 [when] Lieberman studied the vocal anatomy of a monkey corpse and concluded tha…
Human exceptionalism has poisoned so many studies. My pet-theory why primates do not vocalize is that the neural difference is not even that cemented, it has to be some difference at the language acquiring stage as babys and children, were one human pattern matching center for sound fires constantly, acquiring the language "keys" and theirs dont. And it all cascades from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_…