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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

#91

Post by dmos62 »

atlantic wrote: post #40
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?

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?

What is it about my post that summoned these mean, snickery comments? It's upsetting, but I'll respond anyway.

The idea is to actively influence how we communicate, not merely analyse it. Suppose I think Sanskrit had some good ideas. The question would be how to bring that use.

And it's not about my world-view, whatever you might think it is. I suppose you're implying that you don't have "world-view alignment" problems with the language you use. Do you think you're just lucky that way? The idea I'm putting forward is that the language in which you communicate (and think) actually shaped your world-view.

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

#92

Post by subroutine »

Cybiote wrote: post #80
subroutine wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I'll ask - is a bird or a honey bee more intelligent? Before you answer, let me just say a few things... Pound-for-pound honey bees are indeed impressive. I actually didn't know all of those things, so thank you for sharing. Since I am no bee expert, I can only offer general principles. But yeah, that's a lot of fancy behaviors crammed into just ~1 million neurons; great optimization. However, with so few neurons…

Indeed, I completely agree that some birds are very intelligent, managing to pack quite a lot of punch in such a small package. Parrots, corvids, even pigeons are examples of such intelligent birds. This is why I was careful to select Chickens as the example that I did. Near the 48th second of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exsrX6qsKkA , you can see the bumble bee actually hesitating to work out which op…

That video is really cool! Bees are the shit.

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

#93

Post by subroutine »

progressiveweb wrote: post #83
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…

Your argument that because bees display a similar behavior, that it's grounds to invalidate the credibility the people conducting this study of Orangutan's cognitive abilities is based on conjecture. You are conflating a reference to another intelligent species as evidence to support a counter view to a commonly agreed upon advanced cognitive capabilities of the Orangutan. A previous study shows Orangutans do indeed…

You've clearly mistaken my primary qualm. I'm not saying that Orangutans are not fully capable of the things these authors claim. Moreover, I'm not even saying bees aren't capable of conveying learned information. On the contrary, my position is that everything from bees to orangutans to humans have this capacity. In fact, I see this type of communication happening between lots of animals. It seems more like a ubiquitous capacity, than a uniquely human capacity. The authors of this paper don't agree though; instead they are promulgating the idea that "Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to 'talk' about the past".

This is FALSE

In this article...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4350813/

*Chimps used intentional gestures to coordinate with an experimentally-naïve human to retrieve hidden food. In each trial, Experimenter #1 hid a food item anywhere from 3 m to 26 m from the outdoor enclosure under natural cover (e.g. log, soil, leaves, branches) in a trial-unique location in the surrounding woodland, whilst the chimpanzee was watching. The experimenter hid the food and concealed any signs of the hiding place (e.g. breaking up of soil). The chimpanzee could not enter the woodland itself. In order to retrieve the food, the chimpanzee had to recruit the assistance of an uninformed person (Experimenter #2) and direct him to the food item.

The chimpanzees dynamically and flexibly modified their intentional gestures in relation to the naïve experimenter's search efforts towards the hidden food, and successfully guided experimenter #2 to the food item.

You can see in the supplementary videos that experimenter #1 finishes hiding the food at time 4:19...

Screenshot of timestamps: http://bit.ly/ChimpsCanToo

The chimp doesn't greet experimenter #2 until after 4:30 (see same screenshot above). If Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past, how the hell is this Chimp communicating with a human to retrieve food it saw buried at some time in the past?

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

#94

Post by atlantic »

dmos62 wrote: post #91
atlantic wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What is it about my post that summoned these mean, snickery comments? It's upsetting, but I'll respond anyway. The idea is to actively influence how we communicate, not merely analyse it. Suppose I think Sanskrit had some good ideas. The question would be how to bring that use. And it's not about my world-view, whatever you might think it is. I suppose you're implying that you don't have "world-view alignment" proble…

> The idea I'm putting forward is that the language in which you communicate (and think) actually shaped your world-view.

That's not a particularly original view. It's called the linguistic relativity or Benjamin-Whorf hypothesis, and it has a very long history. But so what? It's not even a problem. It's simply a feature of thought that it is inherently interconnected with language.

What I don't understand at all is your proposed solution. While entire communities have strived over millenia to create linguistic tools to suit their particular needs, you propose to do the same, and better, by yourself, in a few months or years, by "hacking" (whatever that means).

No offence, but it just sounds slightly juvenile.

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

#96

Post by gdfasfklshg4 »

nicoburns wrote: post #82
johnchristopher wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most likely I would try to dance around it or find a different way to convey my thoughts (like for any other thing I couldn't express clearly) or use `it` because in my first language (french) `il` is the default pronoun for a baby (`il a faim ton bébé ?`) while thinking something's off and ask the person to forgive my blunder. I would certainly not used something like `is they a boy ?` though.

In english there are two ways to refer to a person of unknown gender. "it" and "they". Of a baby you could say: "Is it a boy or a girl?" or "Are they are a boy or a girl?" Both are perfectly correct and common, but "it" sounds impersonal and as such can be a bit rude.

I have never heard anyone ask "Is they a boy or a girl?".

This is actually a problem for me. I can't see the difference between pink and blue baby clothes.

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

#97

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#98

Post by johnchristopher »

gdfasfklshg4 wrote: post #96
nicoburns wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In english there are two ways to refer to a person of unknown gender. "it" and "they". Of a baby you could say: "Is it a boy or a girl?" or "Are they are a boy or a girl?" Both are perfectly correct and common, but "it" sounds impersonal and as such can be a bit rude.

I have never heard anyone ask "Is they a boy or a girl?". This is actually a problem for me. I can't see the difference between pink and blue baby clothes.

I'd just ask the name, that should be a strong clue. If not then wait for someone to talk to or about the child.
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