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Attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with AI, then talk back
121–130 of 138 posts
Re: Attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with AI, then talk back
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would expect the vast majority of their comms to be : Nice water over here Loads of food here I'm down to F, anyone else? Do we really have any evidence that suggests it'll be anything else?
The best example I know offhand is the custom hunting styles of different orca pods. Given that orcas also play I find it more likely that there is rich communication than not.
Orcas are mostly silent, especially when hunting, iirc.
Re: Attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with AI, then talk back
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct. I think we're entering an era where Star Trek is largely forgotten. As opposed to two decades ago (right column): https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/icq-2001
Aye, it's a 35 year old movie. Which is stunning for me. I recall going to the theater to see it with my parents. It was the last movie we all saw together.
"Would now be a good time for a colorful metaphor?"
Re: Attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with AI, then talk back
#124"If a lion could speak, we could not understand him" — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Using AI, or deep learning, or whatevers trendy this year, won't work, because we don't have any way of breaking into the whale corpus or of deciphering their logical grammar. The article says that the whales communicate at distance, in the dark, so there would be no behaviour that we could even tie to the clicks themselves to try and generate a meaning.
Re: Attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with AI, then talk back
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is because humans are the only living thing which feels inadequate enough to ask questions. No other creature feels like it lacks knowledge. And yes, I'll take it a step further: the reason science glorifies questions is because science is human beings systematically mass-hypnotising each other into greater and greater inadequacy. You ever notice how you never get enough answers in science? Every "answer" you ge…
To ask questions, you have to 1) understand that others have minds 2) understand that there are things you don't know 3) understand that others might know things you don't 4) understand that you may ask them and they will tell you. That's actually a lot of advanced cognition, even if it doesn't look that way to us.
1) This is universal. Everything understands this. I'd argue adult humans actually have the least developed (or, more accurately, the most diluted) understanding of this.
2) Irrelevant. You know everything you need to know at any given moment.
3) Irrelevant. Nobody knows anything you care about.
4) False. Yes, you may ask, but nobody can transfer their knowledge to you, because their knowledge is of no use to you. Your questions can only be answered with your knowledge. Which makes questioning obsolete (which is where I started).
Its not a lot of advanced cognition. It's a lot of misunderstanding of how life works.
Re: Attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with AI, then talk back
#126God I cannot wait to talk to whales. Their oral histories must be incredible. People have fantasized about communicating with extraterrestrials for ages. I don't understand why we haven't invested significant resources in trying to communicate with the other animals on our own planet. What an incredibly weird and non translatable experience it will be to (finally?!) start this adventure with whales. Tangent time. If…
> Lets get some whale engineers working on the hard problems please. Somehow I pictured whales as the engineers in this sentence. It makes it even better.
Re: Attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with AI, then talk back
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> God I cannot wait to talk to whales. Their oral histories must be incredible. What makes you think they'd have oral histories?
I think it's a decent enough guess and I'd give better then even odds on it. Whales have the capacity to communicate. Stories are more effective than unadorned facts at being remembered (for humans anyways). Remembering important facts is a huge advantage in almost any context. The biggest jump imo is the second one, but I find it unlikely that whales would have a radically different memory storage and retrieval mode…
There is nothing at all that hints to that though. It makes me think of people who believe their dogs can "smile" the same way humans do.
Humans are very good at two things, seeing patterns and projecting their own feelings/experiences on other living creatures (or inanimate objects even). We're the exception, not the norm.
You can't "guess" or rely on intuition for these topics, that's how we got religions, the geocentric system, &c.
Re: Attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with AI, then talk back
#128Sounds nice but they'll probably end up creating a psychological warfare weapon for use against whales. The whales will be confused and disoriented by non-sense sounds coming from a fake whale.
Re: Attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with AI, then talk back
#129Imagine talking and communicating with other whales through frequency waves is something. If this is quite possible, we should understand how they speak and have a language different from other animals and sea creatures.
Re: Attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with AI, then talk back
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's a decent enough guess and I'd give better then even odds on it. Whales have the capacity to communicate. Stories are more effective than unadorned facts at being remembered (for humans anyways). Remembering important facts is a huge advantage in almost any context. The biggest jump imo is the second one, but I find it unlikely that whales would have a radically different memory storage and retrieval mode…
There is nothing at all that hints to that though. It makes me think of people who believe their dogs can "smile" the same way humans do. Humans are very good at two things, seeing patterns and projecting their own feelings/experiences on other living creatures (or inanimate objects even). We're the exception, not the norm. You can't "guess" or rely on intuition for these topics, that's how we got religions, the geoc…
Of course you can guess and rely on intuition. The key aspect of science is the feedback loop with data to refine/reject those guesses and intuition.
Its also hilarious to me that you call out my guess and then make your own unsubstantiated claims, which I'm sure feel "intuitive" to you.