81–90 of 138 posts
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Wouldn't simple sentences with the structure subject-verb-object be universal to any rational speaker? A lion could say "I want food", or "I see dog", or "dog eats food". I don't see why a lion's worldview could be so different from ours that this wouldn't be possible.
SVO isn't even universal in human languages.
Guarantee they just want us to shut the fuck up.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly, and we're hoping for something different here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Wouldn't simple sentences with the structure subject-verb-object be universal to any rational speaker? A lion could say "I want food", or "I see dog", or "dog eats food". I don't see why a lion's worldview could be so different from ours that this wouldn't be possible.
Just to problems off the top of my head; In order to understand "I" you have to be able to understand there's an "other". Do lions understand others are also fully capable beings? Or are they kinda of "egotistical" the way a human baby is, where they just don't really understand the concept of "other people". And do they understand what "seeing" is, so that they can use it in a sentence like that? That's also abstrac…
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> Their oral histories must be incredible. Everything was idyllic in the before times. Then the human ships arrived and ruined everything. Some of them killed us. Others ignored us but polluted the ocean with noise so we couldn't hear each other's whale songs anymore.
Maybe! But I find that an awfully self centered view. I imagine humans (boats?) will play a (perhaps significant) aspect in their vision of the world. But I'd be surprised if it was any bigger than e.g. malaria is for humans.
Perhaps they're hungry. Perhaps they're pissed. No one knows.
Historically, orca attacks on humans - outside of captivity - have been very rare.
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TIL - I expected that the chimpanzee sign language experiments would be a counterexample, but apparently the (IMHO surprising) lack of question usage was one of their outcomes.
Yup. I knew it because I fell in a Wikipedia rabbit hole about animal intelligence not long ago. It was very intriguing to me, as someone with no previous knowledge, how this was assumed to be an only human trait yet the fact was pretty much glossed over. I find fascinating the idea of a step between being stuck with the information that others emit and being able to and request arbitrary information at will, being p…
There are two structural words in my language, "propose" and "tell". From these words you can build complicated ideas such as lying ("I propose to you: you propose to him: [malicious plan]. [real plan]."). Asking a question can be done with "I propose you tell me ...". Instead of saying "I think", you say something like "I tell myself".
The feature of language that seems the most surprisingly powerful is placeholder words. The words like "someone", "somewhere", "somehow". I call these the entropy words because they are the words for the information you don't have. They represent sets of possible things rather than a literal specific thing.
"someone moved to Silessia".
In fact you can generally substitute a set of things anywhere you would use a literal thing. Any set will do. For example
"John/George/Ringo/Paul played in the Beatles."
Adjectives can be understood as just specifying a set using set-builder notation. For example "short man" is "{x in Men such that short(x)}".
Just from set builder notation, first order logic comes along for free. I originally thought my language would need logic words, but this is not the case.
God 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…
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Please refrain from knee-jerk reactions to short comments containing "bad words". The comment is actually substantive if you think about it for a second. Heuristics are right most of the time until they aren't. Also see pg essay "Succinctness is Power": http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html
It has to do with comment quality, not bad words.
God 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…
Understood normally, the raw input also includes the software installed in the whale's brain. This limits the potential capability of whales.
If you were to overwrite that with software of your own design, you'd have a robot in the body of a whale, but not an actual whale.
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You can do it today with other species. We are lucky to still be surrounded by all kinds of animals: mammals, birds, and even insects. Of course, in order to talk, you have to spend a lot of time listening first. And what they say cannot often be translated to human talk. In order to make friends, you have to give first. Our society teaches us to stay away from nature and leave it be, so you have to break past that.…
Your point stands, but I want something wholly different from that. I want the equivalent of the LHC for cross species communication. You're telling me to go do some communing with physics, because we've already got some good textbooks on quantum mechanics.
This is not a valid concept. What would the "equivalent of the LHC for communication between ordinary Americans and the Twitter API" look like? What uses would it have?
There's nothing out there that can receive arbitrary messages. Communication -- of any kind, with anything -- is limited to messages that the other party is capable of receiving.
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We should probably pick “whoops, our bad” as one of the early translation goals.
Then the whales will learn not to trust anything we say. Happened to indigenous people in the Americas.