Good lord this article and others about it are terrible, here is the source text everything seems to be drawing from: https://peerj.com/articles/16349/
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Scientists have 20-minute "conversation" with a humpback whale
41–48 of 48 posts
Re: Scientists have 20-minute "conversation" with a humpback whale
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s interesting for sure but ‘conversation’ seems like an oversell here. That implies some sort of exchange of information at the least which doesn’t seem like what happened?
I’m extremely interested as well but the article talks about so much other stuff than the headline. In decades of whale communication research no one has thought to play whale sounds at whales to see what happened, or is this just the first time one has responded? What does “matching intervals” mean? He matched their greeting, I’m meant to assume, which I guess could qualify as “conversation” but the researchers stil…
Simply matching a greeting is a lot of information. It conveys shared context, it conveys an acknowledgement by the party doing the matching that the party doing the original communication was recognized and understood, it conveys an acceptance by the matcher of the possibility of further interchange, and so on.
The fury at this article in the comments is puzzling to me
Re: Scientists have 20-minute "conversation" with a humpback whale
#43I’m missing how this is groundbreaking or even a “conversation”. They played audio recordings of other whales to the whale and it replied the way whales reply to one another. The scientists didn’t know what they were saying, other than since the target whale appeared to stick around it probably wasn’t completely gibberish.
Whether this is groundbreaking or not depends on what the whale thought of it. If it got the notion that humans are now actually trying to talk to it in its language, I'd call that a win.
Well said. It seems they got it excited, but what seems to us as exciting might be them being confused and dumbfounded. Or even laughing or mocking us.
Re: Scientists have 20-minute "conversation" with a humpback whale
#44I’m missing how this is groundbreaking or even a “conversation”. They played audio recordings of other whales to the whale and it replied the way whales reply to one another. The scientists didn’t know what they were saying, other than since the target whale appeared to stick around it probably wasn’t completely gibberish.
Did you watch Arrival or read "Story of Your Life"?
We're still in Act I. Have some popcorn and enjoy the show.
Re: Scientists have 20-minute "conversation" with a humpback whale
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read the article and can't come up with a way it is any different from you meowing back and forth with a cat. This experiment teaches us basically nothing and has no bearing on talking to extraterrestrials. I can't believe it was written up this way.
This experiment? You didn't read the paper about the experiment. Blame the crappy article, not the science, experiment or paper.
Read the "Results and Discussion" section of the actual paper[1] and tell me how it wouldn't apply to someone meowing to their cat. The authors even use the word "conversing" (in quotes), so the paper itself and the write-up posted here seem to be in agreement that this experiment should be wildly overblown.
This isn't bad science, but it's not exciting or any kind of breakthrough. It's some preliminary work that might lead to something more interesting in the future. It seems that the authors were desperate to make it seem more important than it was.
Re: Scientists have 20-minute "conversation" with a humpback whale
#46how is this different than me meowing at my cat and her meowing back? a “conversation” didn’t happen. Also, the scientific community is very resistant to the idea of categorizing any non-human communication as “language” (language is pretty much defined as being done only by humans) despite many cetaceans clearly showing signs of having this ability.
> the scientific community is very resistant to the idea of categorizing any non-human communication as “language” (language is pretty much defined as being done only by humans) despite many cetaceans clearly showing signs of having this ability.
Plenty of animals communicate, just not like we do. I’ve always found the self-righteousness of humans to not accept that to be ridiculous and indicative of how entitled we are as a species.
Re: Scientists have 20-minute "conversation" with a humpback whale
#47how is this different than me meowing at my cat and her meowing back? a “conversation” didn’t happen. Also, the scientific community is very resistant to the idea of categorizing any non-human communication as “language” (language is pretty much defined as being done only by humans) despite many cetaceans clearly showing signs of having this ability.
> the scientific community is very resistant to the idea of categorizing any non-human communication as “language” (language is pretty much defined as being done only by humans) despite many cetaceans clearly showing signs of having this ability. Plenty of animals communicate, just not like we do. I’ve always found the self-righteousness of humans to not accept that to be ridiculous and indicative of how entitled we…
Yeah, sure. We're the only entitled species. Do they have cats where you're from?
Re: Scientists have 20-minute "conversation" with a humpback whale
#48how is this different than me meowing at my cat and her meowing back? a “conversation” didn’t happen. Also, the scientific community is very resistant to the idea of categorizing any non-human communication as “language” (language is pretty much defined as being done only by humans) despite many cetaceans clearly showing signs of having this ability.
> the scientific community is very resistant to the idea of categorizing any non-human communication as “language” (language is pretty much defined as being done only by humans) despite many cetaceans clearly showing signs of having this ability. Plenty of animals communicate, just not like we do. I’ve always found the self-righteousness of humans to not accept that to be ridiculous and indicative of how entitled we…
What's really wild is how impenetrable animal languages are. We know they exist and have studied them for decades but they are still utterly opaque. I think this really shows how hard inter-species communication is. We even struggle to translate ancient human languages and we share the same mental architecture. Animal or alien languages are really going to stretch our minds to comprehend.