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Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

sciencemag.org

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Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#31

Post by pluma »

gdfasfklshg4 wrote: post #27
dmos62 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a relievingly admirable way to look at these creatures. I find the English "it" an exceptionally tiring feature. There are so many prejudices and world views embded in our languages. We call ourselves hackers, but where's a hackaday.io or hackathons for human language, the ubiquitous communication medium?

I already struggle to keep up with the politically correct term of the day. I don't want to offend anyone so I do do my best but our language is changing too fast to keep up.

Is it? What changed, exactly?

Singular "they" has been around for decades or more.

"People of color" as a general shorthand for non-whites is also not exactly new (though fairly recent).

The only thing I can think of that evolved rapidly over the past years is "transgender" and "nonbinary", mostly because our shared cultural understanding of those attributes has significantly improved.

If you think of these as "political correctness", you can just as well go ahead and use the "politically incorrect" language and at least be honest about your lack of empathy or interest.

Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#32

Post by twimbley »

subroutine wrote: post #20

Puts on critic hat The article is making a claim that can be summarized as... the cognitive capacity to share with conspecifics something learned more than 120 seconds ago, is unique to humans and orangutans They also inform you that bees have this capacity. That should be enough to make anyone skeptical. It seems like they identified a particular behavior unique among apes to Orangutans - suppressing vocalization in…

So you're idea is that lots of living things innately perform this sort of skill, and that choosing to look at from a certain perspective lends the impression that it's a hallmark of intellectual distinction, simply because they're choosing to look at things the wrong way?

I think the idea is that it takes a bit more abstract symbolic thought to look at rival predators, then look at peers of the same species, and make eye contact and include a gesture that expresses a suggestion to stay hidden and keep quiet.

If I hop a fence, hide from the cops, and then unexpectedly find you in the same place, also hiding, then for me to hold up my finger over my lips would represent my recognition of you as a fellow peer on the run also threatened with arrest and jail.

That's a certain sort of interesting cognitive leap that I would not expect to see in most apes. If orangutans can do it, it's notable.

I suspect you might see something like this in squid or octopoda.

In bees, signaling dances aren't precisely the same kind of symbolic thought, because they don't have capacity to select what they dance about. It's a somewhat inflexible, robotic gambit of flowers, nectar, hive, honey, and nothing that deviates from the program, as complex as the program may be in its own right.

Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#33

Post by dmos62 »

akiselev wrote: post #16
jerrre wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what usage of "it" are you referring to?

Its use when referring to animals. Many languages have features of grammatical gender in general which has a specially humanizing effect on discussions about animals, even when their biological gender has nothing to do with it.

I actually mean the even more general usage. The English vocabulary of objects is hierarchical: he, she, it are the major categories. Male and female humans fall under the first two. All other objects under "it". Not long ago even children were "it"s, I believe. Not certain about English, but certainly in some other languages.

That exerts a lot of ideology on communication, which has far-reaching effects. Simple examples:

- a human can only be talked about in the context of his gender; - humans are talked about differently than any other object. Human-centricity is just the most basic example of that.

You could come up with many examples, and that's just how we refer to objects without the context of their unique identifications. Then there's the whole nouns-verbs model of language, which has a far bigger effect on how we see the world and reason about it.

Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#34

Post by johnchristopher »

pluma wrote: post #31
gdfasfklshg4 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already struggle to keep up with the politically correct term of the day. I don't want to offend anyone so I do do my best but our language is changing too fast to keep up.

Is it? What changed, exactly? Singular "they" has been around for decades or more. "People of color" as a general shorthand for non-whites is also not exactly new (though fairly recent). The only thing I can think of that evolved rapidly over the past years is "transgender" and "nonbinary", mostly because our shared cultural understanding of those attributes has significantly improved. If you think of these as "polit…

> Singular "they" has been around for decades or more.

Funny you mention it, I only learned about it yesterday on the dead cells subreddit.

Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#35

Post by dmos62 »

yorwba wrote: post #13
dmos62 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a relievingly admirable way to look at these creatures. I find the English "it" an exceptionally tiring feature. There are so many prejudices and world views embded in our languages. We call ourselves hackers, but where's a hackaday.io or hackathons for human language, the ubiquitous communication medium?

What would one do at such an event? Maybe something like that already exists, just without "hack" in the name.

I think that we, as a civilization, don't really have the infrastructure (habit?) to talk about language i.e. look at it as technology, much less modify it. There's people creating artificial languages, which is really cool, but there's no obvious way to apply that in a mainstream way.

Then again, if someone were to start using English in a different way, it might catch on. He would just have to optimize his changes for acceptable backwards-compatibility. I guess the beauty about people as communicating devices is that they can adopt to changes in protocol, as opposed to some others (looking at you internet devices).

Edit: an artificial language is a bad term, there's no such thing, because it would imply that there's a natural language. It's just a new language, sometimes academic.

Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#36

Post by marsrover »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #26

Can we load them up with magic mushrooms and see if they become capable of abstract thought? [1]. For those that don't want to click on my link, there's a (not very scientific) hypothesis that human consciousness evolved from our ancestors eating magic mushrooms. [1] https://www.inverse.com/article/34186-stoned-ape-hypothesis

I really don’t understand why we don’t just do this.

Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#37

Post by Cybiote »

subroutine wrote: post #20

Puts on critic hat The article is making a claim that can be summarized as... the cognitive capacity to share with conspecifics something learned more than 120 seconds ago, is unique to humans and orangutans They also inform you that bees have this capacity. That should be enough to make anyone skeptical. It seems like they identified a particular behavior unique among apes to Orangutans - suppressing vocalization in…

I agree with the general call for skepticism against the idea that displaced reference is so unique in the animal kingdom. Where I do not agree, is the implicit argument of "if a bee can do it then it's trivial".

Within the animal kingdom, the sophistication of the honey bee's waggle dance, with predicates and combinable to a large number of phrases, is rare. The only other major example I can think of are primate calls.

Bees are also highly intelligent; on a watt for watt, pound for bound basis, their only other rival might be the portia spider. Bees can communicate angles, distance and adjust for the movement of the sun when relaying these. They can learn abstract patterns and generalize. If you asked me which was more intelligent, the honey bee or the chicken, I'd be hard pressed to give an answer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_learning_and_communication

Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#38

Post by liftbigweights »

dmos62 wrote: post #10
emerongi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The name "orangutan" (also written orang-utan, orang utan, orangutang, and ourang-outang) is derived from the Malay and Indonesian words orang meaning "person" and hutan meaning "forest",[10] thus "person of the forest".[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan

That's a relievingly admirable way to look at these creatures. I find the English "it" an exceptionally tiring feature. There are so many prejudices and world views embded in our languages. We call ourselves hackers, but where's a hackaday.io or hackathons for human language, the ubiquitous communication medium?

> That's a relievingly admirable way to look at these creatures.

What's "admirable" or not "admirable" about. It's just language. If you read about the way orangutans are treated in indonesia, I doubt you'd feel it was admirable.

> I find the English "it" an exceptionally tiring feature.

Then don't use it.

> We call ourselves hackers

Who is we? I haven't seen many hackers here. Just people with agendas, particular leftist social agendas.

> but where's a hackaday.io or hackathons for human language, the ubiquitous communication medium?

Are you saying english is the "human language"? Also, math is the closest thing to the ubiquitous communication medium.

Not sure what your complaining about. Orangutan is part of the english language as well. You don't have to use 'it'. And as for your "hacking the language", I don't care for your or anyone else Newspeak. Language is a tool and it should evolve as the need requires, not because people have a social agenda to push.

Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#39

Post by liftbigweights »

dmos62 wrote: post #33
akiselev wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its use when referring to animals. Many languages have features of grammatical gender in general which has a specially humanizing effect on discussions about animals, even when their biological gender has nothing to do with it.

I actually mean the even more general usage. The English vocabulary of objects is hierarchical: he, she, it are the major categories. Male and female humans fall under the first two. All other objects under "it". Not long ago even children were "it"s, I believe. Not certain about English, but certainly in some other languages. That exerts a lot of ideology on communication, which has far-reaching effects. Simple exam…

> Male and female humans fall under the first two.

No. Male and female anything fall under the first two. For example, when we talk about our dog, we say "He's a good boy". People use he or she for animals too.

> Not long ago even children were "it"s, I believe.

We use it for 'gender neutral'. For example, when my sister was pregnant, everyone used 'it' to refer to the baby. "I can't wait for it to be born". "I wonder what it's gender will be". Once people discovered the gender, we used he or she.

> - a human can only be talked about in the context of his gender;

This is simply not true. Ask anyone with a dog or a cat.

It's so funny how people with agendas are. Languages with gendered everything like spanish is attacked for gendering everything. And languages with a sensible gender system is attacked for not gendering everything. Seems like there are too many useless people with too much time on their hands.

Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#40

Post by atlantic »

dmos62 wrote: post #10
emerongi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The name "orangutan" (also written orang-utan, orang utan, orangutang, and ourang-outang) is derived from the Malay and Indonesian words orang meaning "person" and hutan meaning "forest",[10] thus "person of the forest".[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan

That's a relievingly admirable way to look at these creatures. I find the English "it" an exceptionally tiring feature. There are so many prejudices and world views embded in our languages. We call ourselves hackers, but where's a hackaday.io or hackathons for human language, the ubiquitous communication medium?

With 6500 languages to choose from, I'm sure there are more than a few incorporating a world-view which aligns with yours. Rather than create something entirely new, wouldn't it be more reasonable to delve into what is already on offer?
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