[HN Gopher] A whale who tried to mimic human speech (2014)
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A whale who tried to mimic human speech (2014)
Author : awll
Score : 105 points
Date : 2021-05-01 18:48 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| haecceity wrote:
| I guess the emphasis is on tried
| IronWolve wrote:
| Don't forget Koko the Gorilla. She was able to sign, understand
| english and recount stories of her past.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4QQ8Mfjb_g
| axiolite wrote:
| Not as clear as case as we've been led to believe:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYWSXRUGxDQ
| dehrmann wrote:
| "Can Apes Really 'Talk' To Humans?"
|
| Nit: humans _are_ apes.
| tomerico wrote:
| 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 item" or "put item in box".
| chrischen wrote:
| Still miles ahead of a dog. Can you train a dog to understand
| "put the pine needles in the refrigerator?"
| suifbwish wrote:
| Worst mobile webpage of all time. Cant read anything because it
| constantly jumps around loading ads and pop ups. I would expect
| this from the daily news not something like the smithsonian.
| a3n wrote:
| Use an ad blocker. It viewed just fine for me.
|
| Your poor experience is justification enough for blocking.
|
| I await the day when internet ads are not resource sucking,
| malware vectoring, PII leaking surveillance systems. Until
| then, I block.
|
| Online venues say they need ads to survive. I say they need
| _benign_ ads to survive much longer.
|
| It could even be a form of competition, like Volvo marketing
| themselves as "safe."
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| The audio in question:
| https://m.soundcloud.com/smithsonianmag/noc-the-beluga-whale
| system2 wrote:
| Isn't there a single video of it?
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Audio: https://m.soundcloud.com/smithsonianmag/noc-the-beluga-
| whale
| tempestn wrote:
| There's an audio recording in the story.
| montenegrohugo wrote:
| It seems to me more and more like the biggest, only real
| difference between most animals and humans is their lack of
| sophisticated communication. Certainly they communicate; but they
| do not have access to our rich verbal symbols with which we can
| convey anything imaginable. Perhaps you could add the lack of a
| prehensile thumb and deft fingers to build tools with, but I
| think communication is even more fundamental for the recipe of
| civilization.
|
| Anyone can empirically recognize some form of intelligence in
| animals, whether it be your pet dog, a smart street crow or a
| beluga whale.
|
| Additionally, I've never found the relative brain size theory
| sufficiently satisfactory to explain our superiority. How can the
| brain of an elephant, or a blue whale (about 7 times the mass of
| our brain), be that much inferior? I don't think it is; I think
| it is just different, and that we are not capable to really
| empathize with it enough (unless we reach some absurd degree of
| anthropomorphizing it).
|
| If we accept these premises, what does it make to our worldview
| and the morality of how we treat animals?
| stormbrew wrote:
| > Certainly they communicate; but they do not have access to
| our rich verbal symbols with which we can convey anything
| imaginable.
|
| I mean, this whale seems to be doing about the same thing I do
| with my cats. I don't really see how you can derive any
| directionality here about how 'rich' their communication is
| from that. It's likely cats are intrigued and also baffled by
| what we're 'saying' when we do this.
|
| That's not to say I think cats have as rich of communication as
| we do, just that we can't even manage to make much sense of
| other species' vocal communication, let alone mimic any meaning
| present in it, _even when we are pretty sure it is actually
| simpler than ours_.
|
| From that it seems way overly confident to state that _all
| failure on our part to recognize depth_ is because of a lack of
| it.
| lrem wrote:
| There's been some research on coyotes or similar animals,
| can't remember. They managed to figure out about 30 "words".
| Interestingly one of that tiny budget was for a human and
| another one for a human with a gun.
| crooked-v wrote:
| You may be interested in this Youtube channel, wherein a dog
| owner has been teaching the dog to use a gradually expanding
| set of talking buttons:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXy7NTGHAyQ
|
| There's another channel where someone's been doing the same
| with some measure of success with a cat:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooCEYMaNL8I
| stormbrew wrote:
| You seem to have accidentally pasted the same youtube link
| twice? I'm definitely curious about the cat one and haven't
| seen that before :)
| crooked-v wrote:
| The duplicated link is now fixed.
| matz1 wrote:
| Not sure why my morality has to change, doesn't matter if pig
| turn out to have conscious experience like mine, I will still
| eat it.
| jonathanlb wrote:
| Ok, I'll bite (no pun intended): if it were socially
| acceptable to eat people, would you?
| [deleted]
| matz1 wrote:
| I wouldn't, like I wouldn't eat dog/monkey even though its
| socially acceptable in certain place, in my mind its
| disgusting. Pig on the other hand its delicious.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| That's what I don't get. Why are some animals acceptable
| to eat and some are aren't? I know people who get totally
| outraged over dog or horse meat at but have no problem
| with beef or pork. Pigs are very intelligent and
| emotional. Way more than horses who aren't that smart in
| comparison.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| There are a lot of components needed for civilization. In the
| case of humans, agriculture was a big one, as it led to the
| feasibility of cities and specialization of labor. Absent
| specific adaptations to agriculture, tool making is essential
| for it. Advanced civilization is greatly helped by written
| communication (although human history shows we can get pretty
| far without it), which again depends on tool making. Without
| the ability to make tools there is only so far a species can
| get.
|
| Human superiority also depended on non-intelligent traits.
| Without evolving the ability to sweat, we might never have had
| the opportunity to develop civilization.
|
| Regarding brain size, larger animals need larger brains just
| control their bodily functions, so looking at brain size
| without controling for body size does not tell you much.
|
| If you look at brain:body ratio, humans are pretty high up, but
| not a crazy outlier [0] (figure 7.13), and not the best [1].
|
| A simple ratio probably not the best test, and seems to favor
| small animals. A more advanced measure exists [2], but suffers
| from a bit of a fine tuning problem.
|
| There is also an implicit assumption that "intelligence" is a
| single dimensional value, which is simply not the case. For
| instance, beyond being a tool for communication, language seems
| to be a tool for thinking as well, but is clearly not a result
| of a general "intelligence" we have. Our overall intelligence
| is likely the result of a bunch of specialized systems within
| the brain
|
| [0]
| https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/do...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-
| body_mass_ratio#Compa...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient
| jamesgreenleaf wrote:
| Environmental conditions are a big factor as well. We've
| existed as humans for ~300k years, but it was only ~10k years
| ago that we learned agriculture and civilization-building.
| That coincided with the beginning of the Holocene Epoch, when
| the world got warmer, the glaciers melted, and the sea level
| rose by 400 feet. We must have had those capabilities all
| along, but it was only when the conditions were right that
| they were able to be fully expressed.
| firebaze wrote:
| Another point of view could be intelligent animals like whales
| see another dimension of existence we simply cannot understand.
|
| Maybe they just think further, they deeply understand the
| fractal nature of the laws of the universe and they came to the
| conclusion, that nothing they'll ever do will have an influence
| to improve anything at all, since nothing is really bad, so
| they just sing their songs and propagate reasonably? :)
|
| /semi-sarcastic viewpoint
|
| Maybe this comes across as an emo-anti-intelligence-nature-
| knows-it-best post. It wasn't intended to, at all. It even
| isn't meant to.
| bmitc wrote:
| > It seems to me more and more like the biggest, only real
| difference between most animals and humans is their lack of
| sophisticated communication. Certainly they communicate; but
| they do not have access to our rich verbal symbols with which
| we can convey anything imaginable.
|
| How do you know all that? There is ample evidence that whales,
| and in particular orcas, have complex intelligence and
| communication. If you can't understand what a whale is talking
| about, I'm not sure how you can make these claims.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| Actually, I think many animals might communicate better than
| humans, but we don't know how they do it.
|
| I wouldn't completely suprise me if their are certain animals
| using telepathic thought? Or, some way if communicitating we
| haven't a clue existed.
|
| (And yes I know telepathic thought has been completely debunked
| in humans. Actually, there's a million sitting stomewhere if
| any person can successfully pass a institutes telepathic
| ability test. To date the money is still there, or a higher
| amount? My point is we know so little about other species.)
| [deleted]
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| 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 x or y
| because they're responding to stimulus, well... So are we.
|
| It really clicked a while back and since then, I just can't go
| back. I no longer feel sufficiently different from a cow or a
| pig in order to feel comfortable eating them.
|
| I certainly don't judge others for disagreeing either though.
| Just as I don't judge wolves for eating caribou or fish for
| eating fish. Humans operate under the illusion that they have
| free or stronger will than these animals, but I'm not sure
| that's true anymore. I'm not even clear on why I had this
| revelation or why it matters enough to me to act on it! It's
| all very absurd in a way.
| p1necone wrote:
| 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 that would be much more complicated than the simple
| explanation that they are just like us, but less intelligent.
| jack9 wrote:
| > 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.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The arguments around this seem paradoxical.
|
| "Animal have a strong commonality with us, so we shouldn't
| eat them in the fashion that we don't eat each other.
|
| But
|
| "Animal has a strong commonality with us, and one species of
| animal will eat another species of animal. Even species
| considered herbivores will eat some meat when it comes to
| them (deer, etc). If we're like animals, what is wrong with
| behaving like them?"
|
| At which point, the argument skews to look at what's
| _different_ about humans (most often "we can choose good
| versus evil" etc)
|
| That said, for all I know, some different, intelligent,
| omnivorous animal species has had a group or subculture that
| also decided to stop eating meat. Of course we actually know
| little about these things.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| 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. Ultimately
| I wonder why I'm trying to figure it out. What a strange
| exercise.
|
| I definitely don't subscribe to any naturalistic ideas
| about how people should behave. I do believe we are much
| like the animals around us - far more than we'd like to
| believe or acknowledge at times. I don't believe that means
| what happens in nature and among other species is
| inherently good though. I don't believe what humans do is
| inherently good either. I just don't judge people for doing
| what animals, or humans, overwhelmingly tend to do.
| Hopefully that makes a bit more sense.
| masswerk wrote:
| 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": Apparently, we are able to
| recognize individuals of other primate species by face at a very
| early age, but lose this ability soon (even before we acquire
| speech), probably in favor of other social abilities. Which may
| be an indication for a high degree of intraspecies specialication
| regarding our communicative abilities.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| I always wondered if we would try to bridge the gap what would
| happen? Imagine a whale ambassador, driving around in a huge
| half-tracked aquarium, holding speeches about what the fishing
| fleets currently are doing is murder.
| TheGallopedHigh wrote:
| 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.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| We can do some bird calls decently.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Maybe a bit off-topic, but here are some examples of humans
| communicating with animals
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child
| 867-5309 wrote:
| those are quite specific and questionable cases, usually
| involving neglect
|
| perhaps more pertinent:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human%E2%80%93animal_communica.
| ..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_animal#Possibility_of_.
| ..
| loopz wrote:
| You can do dog language. Many people do. It's not about barking
| or asserting dominance.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| > Apparently, we are able to recognize individuals of other
| primate species by face at a very early age,
|
| Something very simmilar happens with language. Babies are able
| to distinguish speach sounds of all languages, but quickly lose
| the ability to percieve distinctions that are not present in
| their "native" language (native in quotes because this happens
| before they have made a single utterence)
| a3n wrote:
| Fascinating, hopeful and yet saddening.
|
| I would like to have seen something about Inuit experience with
| Belugans speaking HSL, Human as a Second Language.
| Igelau wrote:
| Pha loves Pa.
| ggm wrote:
| "The day of the dolphins" is both nearer and further away.
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