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A whale who tried to mimic human speech (2014)

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: A whale who tried to mimic human speech (2014)

#61

Post by steve_adams_86 »

jamiek88 wrote: post #48
jack9 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Occams razor tells me that other animals probably do have a concious experience just like ours. For most mammals, everything is so similar...including responses to stimuli like light, sound, temperature, pain, pleasure, even predictive behavior (knowing when they have done something to provoke a human response) that the same principle leads me to believe it's likely they have a very similar experience.

Everyone who has lived with a dog has seen the sheepish ‘I fucked up look’ when you’ve got home instead of the pure exuberance usually experienced You know immediately there’s a mess to clean up! I mean they clearly dream too. If dreaming isn’t evidence of an inner life I don’t know what is.

I personally loved having this realization. All these creatures of the earth are probably having very rich and significant experiences. If it’s not limited to humanity, then wow, the world really is so alive.

I still struggle to imagine a bug having a conscience that resembles mine. I’m not sure why. I tell myself they don’t have the brains for it or the sensory capabilities or whatever. I’m probably wrong.

Re: A whale who tried to mimic human speech (2014)

#62

Post by steve_adams_86 »

brutal_chaos_ wrote: post #59
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is part of why I don’t judge others for eating animals. Plus, I do still eat fish. If I’m to judge anyone, it should be me first. I also intended to some degree to be paradoxical, but I’m a terrible communicator so it wasn’t evident outside my mind. Like I said though, ultimately it all seems absurd to me. Digging deep into what is good or right or moral when it comes to these things is incredibly challenging. U…

If I may, what made you become pescatarian (is that the correct term)?

I can’t pin point it and I wish I could.

One significant contributor was when I began spearing my own fish and became intimately familiar with the moment of choosing if you shoot a fish or not. I realized that in that moment I’m deciding something based on a significant number of factors, but ultimately, I was deciding to take a life. I wondered how different that is from how I indirectly took the lives of fish by providing demand in a market which catches and sells fish, apart from the massive amounts of bycatch in the industry. But really, is my indirect demand different from pulling the trigger?

I know those thoughts and experiences, along with experiencing fish in their environment, caused me to begin to wonder a lot more about the consciousness of other animals. Fish are quite aware of me, my eyes, where I’m looking or pointing things. They certainly suffer.

It’s a good question though and I wish I understood better what really tipped the scale. Sometimes it feels very irrational, but my ‘gut’ insists it’s the right thing to do. I still question if I should be killing fish.

Re: A whale who tried to mimic human speech (2014)

#63

Post by r721 »

p1necone wrote: post #15
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely why I’ve transformed my eating habits. I realized that while I can’t prove these animals have a conscious experience like mine (or one I would value as I do the human conscience, I suppose), I also can’t prove that they don’t. We can all read and likely have many experiences indicating that animals, in many circumstances, actually behave much like humans do. And for all the arguments that animals do…

Occams razor tells me that other animals probably do have a concious experience just like ours. Sure, they could have all the same internal organs as us (at least with mammals, and reptiles/birds to a slightly lesser extent), a similarly structured brain, be evolved from the same common ancestors and exhibit all the same outward signs of being conscious and self aware but somehow be totally different from humans. But…

Interesting book on this topic:

>In The Gap, psychologist Thomas Suddendorf provides a definitive account of the mental qualities that separate humans from other animals, as well as how these differences arose. Drawing on two decades of research on apes, children, and human evolution, he surveys the abilities most often cited as uniquely human -- language, intelligence, morality, culture, theory of mind, and mental time travel -- and finds that two traits account for most of the ways in which our minds appear so distinct: Namely, our open-ended ability to imagine and reflect on scenarios, and our insatiable drive to link our minds together. These two traits explain how our species was able to amplify qualities that we inherited in parallel with our animal counterparts; transforming animal communication into language, memory into mental time travel, sociality into mind reading, problem solving into abstract reasoning, traditions into culture, and empathy into morality.

>Suddendorf concludes with the provocative suggestion that our unrivalled status may be our own creation -- and that the gap is growing wider not so much because we are becoming smarter but because we are killing off our closest intelligent animal relatives.

https://www.amazon.com/Gap-Science-Separates-Other-Animals/d...

Re: A whale who tried to mimic human speech (2014)

#64

Post by update »

masswerk wrote: post #50
TheGallopedHigh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure any skilled hunter would argue differently. Just watch Meat Eater on YouTube for use of animal sound mimicary ant it’s use in hunting.

Certainly, but isn't this more like a replay, is it actually suitable for interaction?

apparently, turkeys have a pretty understandable language. There's a documentary, My Life as a Turkey [1]; he was able to decipher what each call meant (e.g. which squawk meant "snake" and which one meant "eagle"). So, if you were walking with a turkey, and you saw a snake and wanted to warn it about it, you could, in theory, communicate with it.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/my-life-as-a-turkey-introduc...

Re: A whale who tried to mimic human speech (2014)

#65

Post by WalterBright »

warent wrote: post #53
masswerk wrote: post #24

What I find fascinating about this is that there are various species which have tackled human speech with at least some success (both actively and passively), while, conversely, we are apparently rather bad at participating in their communicative acts (like, imitating utterances in a meaningful way). Is it just for a lack of interest on our side, or are we lacking something else? Edit, regarding "something else": App…

> Is it just for a lack of interest on our side, or are we lacking something else? A combination of the two probably. I communicate with my pet cat by mimicking her different kinds of meows, hisses, and purrs. It makes it a lot easier because it's very obvious to me she understands that language, but of course it's not perfect It seems unlikely I'm the only person who does this. Probably a lot of people speak to thei…

There are dogs that have vocabularies of several hundred words. People should breed those together, rather than the incomprehensibly stupid existing breed characteristics.

Re: A whale who tried to mimic human speech (2014)

#66

Post by cgriswald »

chrischen wrote: post #41
axiolite wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as clear as case as we've been led to believe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYWSXRUGxDQ

Still miles ahead of a dog. Can you train a dog to understand “put the pine needles in the refrigerator?”

It’s hard to say what’s happening in the video. If the ape is given a command-object-location and must discern all three to correctly complete the task, that would be difficult for a dog. (However, I suspect with as many hours of training as the ape has had, a dog could probably do it. I speculate it would learn all possible trios and remember them as individual commands rather than reconstructing them.)

If the ape is instead given an object and already knows he’s supposed to put it in the fridge, yes, a dog can do that easily. Given a command-object or command-location, a dog can do that as well. A dog can discern “Go bed” or “go kennel” or “fetch ball” or “fetch toy”. “Put ball bed” would be tough. (Dogs won’t “hear” all the cruft words like “the”, they’ll focus in on words they know and puzzle away.)

In any case the degree to which the ape in the video “understands” isn’t clear. It’s possible even with command-object-location test, the ape is doing what I suspect the dog would do. The difference between them might be scale, rather than kind.

Re: A whale who tried to mimic human speech (2014)

#67

Post by neonological »

Look up the story woman who lived with a dolphin in a house for the specific goal of teaching the dolphin English.

Literally the house was made water proof and filled up to the waistline with water and the dolphin and the woman lived together. This wasn't a separate tank.

The two developed sort of a one sided sexual relationship where the woman would stimulate the dolphins genitalia before the lessons could commence as the dolphin wouldn't be able to concentrate otherwise.

Not even slightly joking. True story, the above actually happened. There's a podcast of it somewhere where they interviewed her.

Re: A whale who tried to mimic human speech (2014)

#68

Post by [deleted] »

_y5hn wrote: post #31
masswerk wrote: post #24

What I find fascinating about this is that there are various species which have tackled human speech with at least some success (both actively and passively), while, conversely, we are apparently rather bad at participating in their communicative acts (like, imitating utterances in a meaningful way). Is it just for a lack of interest on our side, or are we lacking something else? Edit, regarding "something else": App…

You can do dog language. Many people do. It's not about barking or asserting dominance.

[deleted]

Re: A whale who tried to mimic human speech (2014)

#69

Post by barrkel »

tomerico wrote: post #26
axiolite wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as clear as case as we've been led to believe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYWSXRUGxDQ

Interesting watch. TL;DW - Apes like Koko were raised by trainers who did not perform rigorous scientific measurements and were prone to bias. Research on Apes became immoral over time, hence less recent examples exist. The most recent and rigorous study is on a bonobo, where communication is done using touchscreen with buttons saying words (lexigrams). Even in this case interaction seems to be limited to “give me an…

Do you mean fewer recent examples exist?

"Less recent examples exist" is a positive assertion about the existence of even older examples. The 'less' attaches to the 'recent'. 'Less' can't attach to 'examples' because you can't have 'less examples', because 'examples' is countable.

"Fewer recent examples exist" is a negative assertion about the existence of newer examples. The 'fewer' attaches to the 'examples'.

Re: A whale who tried to mimic human speech (2014)

#70

Post by proc0 »

masswerk wrote: post #24

What I find fascinating about this is that there are various species which have tackled human speech with at least some success (both actively and passively), while, conversely, we are apparently rather bad at participating in their communicative acts (like, imitating utterances in a meaningful way). Is it just for a lack of interest on our side, or are we lacking something else? Edit, regarding "something else": App…

Yeah but there's something different about this. Given how smart whales are, this must also have some form of awareness as to what they're doing. Parrots mimic words and phrases and focus on the micro-pronunciations. This feels like the whale is doing an impression of humans in a conversation.
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