Fortunately bonobos have not yet learned to say "No".
Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
41–50 of 141 posts
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#42Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. We're a species distinguished from all others by our information-archival and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a librarian species. Homo archivum. In my o…
Why do you have a strongly held armchair belief about anthropology? Just research it for ten minutes.
Some beliefs should be lightly held.
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#43Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. We're a species distinguished from all others by our information-archival and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a librarian species. Homo archivum. In my o…
You’re directionally right, modern comparative mythology studies suggest that people were telling stories ~100 000 years ago when they went out of Africa, they had an “oral library”. We find many similar tropes alongside their migration roads.
The top specialist is Berezkin, he collected thousands of tropes and put it on a map http://www.mythologydatabase.com/bd/
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#44> One core block is syntax, where meaningful units are combined into longer sequences, like words into sentences.
I would think that syntax is a structure to the sequence of symbols, not just a sequence in any order. For example:
Thag ate Fish
Fish ate Thag
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about oral histories? Why does it need to be written if it can be memorized and shared verbally?
I think it's very possible there are other species that use "oral history" to convey information to their children, like whales, dolphins, etc., so it's not "safe" -- again just IMO -- to consider it uniquely human.
I guess it is hard to say… if you looked at humans in any random moment when we’ve been around, I suppose we’d look a lot like dolphins (not making much increments progress generation-to-generation).
But, it does feel like there’s something in our storytelling tendency, maybe just a quantitative difference (we do it a little bit more and some up with slightly better summaries) that creates a qualitative one (positive feedback loop in our ability to reason about the universe).
From that point of view, writing is just an iteration of the loop. A big one, though.
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#46> For example, the phrase “blonde dancer” has two independent units: a blonde person who is also a dancer.
This seems a rather odd "random" language example, especially coming from New Scientist. Being politically correct by then referring to the "blonde" as a "person" doesn't help much. May as well just use "brunette stripper" as an example - a brown haired person who takes their clothes off for money.
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#47It is funny how at least the press written about this sort of research seems to imply only humans have language and some new evidence might challenge that notion. Really if you ever own a pet, probably any pet I bet, you find that communication in a way that is arguably a language is pretty low level stuff in the animal kingdom. And it makes sense as it is quite useful for a species to communicate things about the wo…
The study of human language is linguistics. A related study is “human language” compared to some other “[animal] language”. Chomsky has argued that “human language” is categorically different from some, say, other primate “language”.
As soon as you have a scientific pursuit you need to define it. Somehow. And it isn’t gonna be close to some intuitive notion of “language”. Because that’s just, I dunno, any kind of semiotics to us average persons. (Is your pet jumping up on your leg and wagging its tail communicating meaning? Yeah)
So of course there’s gonna be some definition of language, and maybe even a scientific consensus one way or the other with regards to sundries questions, like if other animals have “language” similar to “human language”. And it’s gonna have very little overlap with people vibing with their pets.
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#48> One core block is syntax, where meaningful units are combined into longer sequences, like words into sentences. I would think that syntax is a structure to the sequence of symbols, not just a sequence in any order. For example: Thag ate Fish Fish ate Thag have different meanings.
Syntax is hierarchical, and not as much sequential as you may think. LLMs are based on these two facts.
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#49> For example, the phrase “blonde dancer” has two independent units: a blonde person who is also a dancer. This seems a rather odd "random" language example, especially coming from New Scientist. Being politically correct by then referring to the "blonde" as a "person" doesn't help much. May as well just use "brunette stripper" as an example - a brown haired person who takes their clothes off for money.
I think that you might be taking that example in bad faith.
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#50> They recorded over 300 of these observations, including what the caller was doing at the time, what was happening in the environment and the behaviour of the caller and audience after the vocalisation. > To reveal the meaning of each call, they used a technique from linguistics to create a cloud of utterance types, placing vocalisations that occurred in similar circumstances closer together. “We kind of established…
Making models of the physical world is a lot of work. Can’t they install cameras and record hundreds of thousands of hours of objects getting shot through cannons, birds flying and trees swaying in the wind? Maybe with some more nuclear power plants they could get close to approximating something like Newton’s Laws of Motion (kind of close is good enough, no need to be nerdy about it).