[HN Gopher] Elephants use namelike calls
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Elephants use namelike calls
Author : peutetre
Score : 93 points
Date : 2024-07-18 23:53 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| tomrod wrote:
| https://archive.ph/9gvHZ
| mannyv wrote:
| One 'deeply human' behavior is feeding other, unrelated animals.
| dboreham wrote:
| My cats will happily feed raccoons.
| The_Blade wrote:
| My cats will happily eat raccoons.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| Humans will happily feed and then eat their farm animals.
| ziggyzecat wrote:
| until no things grow no more, that our farm animals could
| eat
| azemetre wrote:
| Really? Can you explain what they do? Do they watch the
| raccoons take it? Do they look at you while they feed them?
| Sounds fascinating.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| > The thought of someday being able to address an elephant in a
| way it can understand is downright magical. To say, "Hello, I'm
| Tove. Please tell me your name."
|
| I truly believe that thinking other species are "less
| intelligent" than us comes down to our own inability to have a
| complex dialogue with them. Time and again, we have a pioneer who
| is somehow able to break this barrier through sheer perseverance.
| Then we get Kokos of the world. Now we've noticed traits
| resembling true human toddler like understanding in dogs and even
| some birds.
|
| Perhaps one day, brain interface devices and machine learning
| will help us cross that barrier for good, and unlock a new age of
| learning from our peers in the animal kingdom.
| geuis wrote:
| There's a brief scene in Heavens River, book 4 of the Bobiverse
| series, where some characters spend some time with the
| equivalent of alien dolphins. The "dolphins" have a very
| limited language that main consists of names and one word
| inquiries and warnings.
|
| For example, the local replicant who they know introduces his
| fellows. The dolphin speech is essentially "who? Marvin! Marvin
| friends?"
|
| Which is basically "Who are the strangers? Oh it's Marvin!
| Marvin, are these your friends?"
|
| I imagine most animal languages are at this level. And nothing
| wrong with that. For their lifestyles, many intelligent animals
| with a language like this are served perfectly well. Personal
| identifiers to call out friendly individuals, names for
| threats, maybe even general welcomes for fellow groups like
| elephants and whales that generally live in family groups and
| occasionally meet up for mating or due to resource constraints
| like grazing and seasonal water construction.
| dgfitz wrote:
| These posts make me wish there was a heart emoji button. I
| really need to go read those again, it's been too long.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| This is cool, thanks for sharing it with us!
|
| Also to those downvoting my comment - would you be kind
| enough to also leave a comment? I'd like to know what part
| did you disagree with.
| underlipton wrote:
| I think you can transliterate that sentence directly into
| Japanese, and it would be perfectly acceptable, save a
| missing particle/honorific.
|
| Original: Who? Marvin! Marvin friends? Transliterated:
| dare?mavuinsan!mavuinsannoYou Ren ? Google Translate: Who's
| that? Marvin! Are you Marvin's friend?
| someuser2345 wrote:
| Regarding Koko, it isn't really clear if she really was able to
| have complex dialogues, or if that was wishful thinking on the
| part of her trainers.
|
| In general, I don't think there are any animals that are as
| intelligent as adult humans. After all, if there's nothing
| special about human intelligence, why are we the most dominant
| species on the planet? It's not like other animals had the
| opportunity to take over and rejected it.
| advael wrote:
| Love to hear stuff like this, both because it's interesting in
| its own right, and because the fact that it gets published and
| taken seriously gives me hope that we're finally getting our
| heads out of our collective asses with regards to the
| consciousness and moral weight of non-human animals. I think
| there's a natural tendency for humans to anthropomorphize, to
| project human behaviors and motivations onto other animals, which
| can get pretty extreme and silly in some cases, like how we
| project this assumption onto non-living phenomena, like a
| rainstorm or machine learning model. However, I think in the case
| of animals, especially complex charismatic megafauna, and
| especially especially things like highly social mammals, it's
| actually a better assumption that their internal experience and
| motivations may resemble ours than this ridiculous contrarian
| backlash against it we got in the last few hundred years, where
| now we're supposed to treat "These tiny variations on what we are
| are somehow so fundamentally ontologically different that we
| should assume we can understand nothing about how they think, or
| whether they even do at all, without doing a zillion RCTs" (and
| this dovetails conveniently with immiserating them to an unheard-
| of degree at an unfathomable scale by modern industry).
| Similarly-shaped contrarianisms are unfortunately still much of
| the dominant culture of institutions, but it's nice that some of
| them are losing their grip
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Agree with you wrt the millennia-old problem of:
|
| >the consciousness and moral weight of non-human animals
|
| The modern low-point was the period of extreme reductionist
| behaviorism (e.g. John Watson
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson). Good news is
| that very few have taken that point of view seriously for well
| over 50 years.
|
| Maturana and Valera's classic book Autopoieses and Cognition
| came out in 1970 and greatly broadened the definition of
| cognition in a way that makes good sense to me. And that
| highlights what all our LLMs are missing.
|
| Not sure that randomized control trials (RCTs) are a problem in
| animal research. We have effectively done a zillion RCTs going
| back to Edward Tolman and his rats. Even in the 1930s he
| clearly demonstrated what most scientist accept as cognition,
| and even as a form of consciousness.
|
| Self-consciousness in the way we experience this phenomenon is
| more controversial, and many still think self-consciousness the
| way we mean it as recursive inner monolog--is coupled strongly
| to language.
|
| Granted that many argue that the distinction is artificial
| and/or just a quantitative matter of degree. Even Heidegger
| gets very close to this position. But at some point a
| quantitative discontinuity is so marked that it is labeled as a
| qualitative difference. Our language use is qualitatively
| different and our linguistic resources for self-appraisal seem
| to me to be "unusual" to say the least compared to other
| species. (I watched the great movie "Arrival" again last
| night.)
|
| My guess is that most of us will concede that the evolutionary
| and developmental steps and stages and level of awareness are
| open to inspection. Watching this blooming process as infants
| grow up to become kids and then adults is definitely one of the
| greatest of joys.
| advael wrote:
| Thanks for the reading recommendations, that stuff sounds
| fascinating, and I'll admit that my reference to RCTs was
| perhaps an overly mean dig at overcorrection for
| methodological rigor, a tic I likely developed from my
| exposure to the pharmacological research world, which is in
| practice greatly stymied by hidebound institutional policies
| about what hypotheses can be considered and what experimental
| framings are considered evidence at all. Probably not an
| appropriate thing to apply to ethology, which I know a lot
| less about
| pvaldes wrote:
| This is politicizing science, that is unfortunately a fashion
| trend currently, and a big problem in itself.
|
| "Science is good if it coincides with my ideology or is only
| focused in cherry-picking facts that I like" is a very
| dangerous path.
| advael wrote:
| It really isn't. I am making a claim about a pervasive bias
| in scientific institutions I view to be course-correcting.
| I'll acknowledge plenty of scientific results I dislike as
| being true. Like I really dislike that every room-temperature
| superconductor thus far hasn't worked, and it really sucks
| that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne and damages the immune system
|
| It's not completely possible to separate questions like "what
| is true about the world?" from questions like "how should we
| behave?", because the former must inform the latter, and the
| latter intrinsically informs what we choose to look at,
| whether we acknowledge it or not. Pretending you have no
| opinions is disingenuous and counterproductive to the
| endeavor of objectivity, because that's simply not true of
| anyone, and acknowledging one's biases is strictly necessary
| for mitigating them. Nonetheless, it is not "politicizing
| science" inherently to like or dislike certain results, or to
| think institutional biases exist
| grecy wrote:
| I was lucky to spend _a lot_ of time with elephants during my
| three years around Africa.
|
| I feel certain future generations will look on us as barbarians
| for keeping elephants and other intelligent animals in concrete
| cells. They are magnificent, and care deeply for each other. One
| day when we speak to them I feel certain they'll say humans suck
| and every animal knows it.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> I feel certain they'll say humans suck and every animal
| knows it._
|
| I don't know. Growing up with cattle, they regularly stood
| free, but then always waited around to let them back into their
| "concrete cells". They had every chance to escape, but never
| wanted to. They clearly preferred being there. Same goes for
| the farm dogs and cats. In fact, the cat population
| "mysteriously" kept growing without a corresponding number of
| kittens (in other words, foreign cats would voluntarily find
| their way into those "concrete cells").
|
| It very well may have been a case of Stockholm syndrome, but
| regardless of the exact mechanics it is doubtful that they know
| that to be the case.
| grecy wrote:
| They've been bred for that for hundreds of generations.
|
| Go find a wild bison and see how it behaves. I've chased
| herds of wild bison on many occasions - they are NOT like
| domestic cows.
|
| Same story for mountain lions and lynx, etc. They are a far
| cry from cats.
|
| Having our tiny falling down cabin surrounded by wolves in
| the Yukon at -44 degrees makes you appreciate how far THOSE
| are from house dogs.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> They 've been bred for that for hundreds of
| generations._
|
| What is significant about this specific mechanism that
| makes it noteworthy enough to violate what was already
| established?
| freejazz wrote:
| Are you genuinely asking this question because you can't
| fathom how?
| fastball wrote:
| I'm genuinely interested in the distinction. Humans
| "breeding" animals is the same as any other environmental
| factor that affects evolution of a species.
| freejazz wrote:
| I'm sorry, are you saying something like french bulldogs
| would have evolved just the same without human
| intervention? It seems like you are reforming the idea in
| a really obtuse manner in order to paper over the obvious
| distinction.
| randomdata wrote:
| Where do you dream this stuff up? What continues to be
| asked is of what relevance the topic of breeding is to
| the subject at hand. Nobody is surprised that selective
| breeding is a thing, denies that it happens, or pretends
| that it hasn't shaped the animals. What nobody seems to
| want to answer is why it was brought to the discussion,
| especially when it was already, and explicitly,
| established that the exact mechanism for the animal's
| behaviour is irrelevant to said discussion.
|
| No doubt it was posted for good reason, but so far nobody
| has been able to figure out what that reason is. To the
| rest of us laymen, an environmental factor is an
| environmental factor is an environmental factor. What
| makes breeding so different that it justifies violating
| the discussion that was taking place?
| freejazz wrote:
| >What nobody seems to want to answer is why it was
| brought to the discussion, especially when it was
| already, and explicitly, established that the exact
| mechanism for the animal's behaviour is irrelevant to
| said discussion.
|
| Who said that? As far as I can tell the discussion was
| the difference between domesticated cows and bison, and I
| didn't see anyone say breeding is irrelevant except you.
|
| > What makes breeding so different that it justifies
| violating the discussion that was taking place?
|
| What exactly are you talking about? You are being
| obtusely vague
|
| >Where do you dream this stuff up?
|
| No need to be rude, it's not helping anything. You are
| being rude to the other poster too, when it's your fault
| for not communicating clearly and just insisting everyone
| made the same assumptions as you when it's clear they
| didn't. Rather than make things clear, you just keep
| insulting people on top of things.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> As far as I can tell the discussion was the difference
| between domesticated cows and bison_
|
| The discussion was about how domesticated animals prefer
| to stick around humans even when they don't need to,
| negating the idea that all animals are of the opinion
| that "humans suck". It was established that the exact
| reason for why these animals behave that way is
| irrelevant to the topic, but then the comment about bison
| introduced the idea that it is relevant. After all, why
| would we see a post that is irrelevant? But there is no
| indication of where the relevance lies. Is selective
| breeding not an environment pressure like any other? What
| is noteworthy about it that justifies the violation?
|
| _> No need to be rude, it 's not helping anything._
|
| Intriguing. It would be interesting to hear the logic
| behind considering text spit out by a piece of software
| to be rude. Does rudeness not require human intent?
| Indeed, a human giving another human the middle finger
| might be considered rude (human intent) by a human
| observer, but a monkey giving the middle finger (non-
| human intent) is not traditionally considered so despite
| being an identical act. This seems to imply that you
| assign human-like qualities to software. But at the same
| time software is well understood to not be human-like. It
| operates using very different mechanisms. Which, then,
| seems like software should be treated more like the
| monkey than like the human, but clearly that is not the
| case.
|
| Tell us more about your take! The other commenter does
| not seem to recall why he posted the comment about the
| bison, leaving that topic to be a dead-end, so let's
| entertain your tangent.
| freejazz wrote:
| Why would I have any reason to believe your post was
| written by a piece of software? What a horrible
| "conversation" this has been. The point is to give fair
| readings to other posters here. Not whatever it is you
| are doing here.
| randomdata wrote:
| To ensure that we are on the same page, describe for me
| what you are looking at. Does it appear to be a human, or
| does it appear to be software?
| freejazz wrote:
| Humans can communicate through software, what is your
| point? People can be rude in person, over the phone, in
| writing via pen or computer.
| randomdata wrote:
| I'll take that to mean that you see software, but okay,
| let's agree that appearances are not always what they
| seem.
|
| What ultimately sets humans apart from the monkeys, to
| make the difference between human intent and non-human
| intent significant, is identity. Indeed, a human in a
| costume that is unrecognizable from an actual monkey,
| thus having no identity, would not conjure rudeness
| feelings when giving the middle finger any more than an
| actual monkey would. It is fair to say that identity is
| not necessarily one's outer appearance. Signing one's
| name is another way humans confer identity, for example.
|
| Do you recognize a human identity here? If so, describe
| it for us.
| randomdata wrote:
| I genuinely ask what is noteworthy about breeding that
| separates it from any other mechanism with respect to the
| topic at hand. There is no indication in the comment of
| how breeding actually violates the unnecessariness of the
| exact mechanics. I suspect it was posted without having
| read the thread that came before it, but we shall see
| when clarification is revealed, if the original commenter
| ever follows up.
| grecy wrote:
| I've read your comment above and the one above that
| multiple times.
|
| I still don't understand what you are asking.
|
| If you don't understand that breeding something for a
| certain trait will impact that animal, I suggest you go
| look at pugs or dash-hounds and the medical problems they
| now have as a result of very specific breeding.
| randomdata wrote:
| It was established that the exact mechanics don't matter.
| But then you introduced an exact mechanic. This means
| that there must be something incredibly interesting or
| noteworthy about said mechanic to violate the notion that
| the exact mechanics don't matter.
|
| But you have not yet shared what is notable about it.
| Breeding for a certain trait is farming 101. There is
| absolutely nothing interesting about that. So what have
| we missed?
| grecy wrote:
| I am still not following you at all. I honestly feel like
| either you or I are replying to the wrong comment chain.
|
| > _It was established that the exact mechanics don 't
| matter_
|
| Please show me what was established and where. I
| genuinely don't know what you are talking about.
|
| > _But then you introduced an exact mechanic_
|
| Again, please show what I introduced and where.
|
| > _This means that there must be something incredibly
| interesting or noteworthy about said mechanic to violate
| the notion that the exact mechanics don 't matter_
|
| Ahhh, really lost now.
|
| > _But you have not yet shared what is notable about it._
|
| Notable about what?
|
| Either one of us is staggeringly confused, or I'm having
| this conversation with an AI in training.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Either one of us is staggeringly confused_
|
| Yes, I am the one who is confused, which is why I started
| asking questions all those comments ago in a hopeful
| effort to try and become unconfused. But at this point
| you don't seem to even be aware of why you posted the
| comment, so I suppose we'll just chalk it up to an
| arbitrary thought crafted while in the middle of a
| somnambulism.
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| >I feel certain future genre will look on us as barbarians for
| keeping elephants and other intelligent animals in concrete
| cells.
|
| Not to worry, seems more and more likely they will look on us
| as barbarians for killing off the elephants and other
| intelligent animals.
| hackeraccount wrote:
| I imagine they'll look at us the way we look at people a
| hundred years ago. There's some anger, some pity, some
| amazement at the people who bucked the trend. There's even some
| empathy for people who made bad choices.
|
| That's if learn that elephants are like us. Maybe we'll find
| out their better then way we are or worse. Getting to know that
| answer over time will be amazing.
| geuis wrote:
| I kinda wish HN had a rule against submissions to sites with
| login walls related to news, articles, etc. Basically, content
| sites. It's constant these days and the only way to read the
| articles is via archival sites like this.
|
| My guess is the sites don't benefit from the traffic being
| directed to them. The signup rate for this strategy is in the
| single digit percentage at most. Meanwhile, at least if you're
| like me, the user just immediately navigated back to HN. Out time
| is wasted and the "front page" of HN is being somewhat diluted by
| unreadable content.
| elphinstone wrote:
| Maybe a tiny lock icon? Submitter checks a box: reg/subwalled
| Y/N?
| nerevarthelame wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html:
|
| "Are paywalls ok?
|
| It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have
| workarounds.
|
| In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help
| other users do so. But please don't post complaints about
| paywalls. Those are off topic."
| tomrod wrote:
| Complaint: "This article has a paywall! Ugh!"
|
| Solutioning: "You know, paywalls are awful. Is there any
| technology tweak we can apply to make the situation better?"
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Also please don't post complaints about complaints about
| paywalls. Those are off-topic twice.
| qarl wrote:
| There are browser extensions that let you bypass the paywall
| pretty easily.
|
| I would agree with you if it weren't so easy to dodge. But it
| is.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41000880.
| brettermeier wrote:
| Nonetheless it can be an interesting article, and if it's
| interesting enough people can navigate around paywalls
| (archive...). Otherwise I wouldn't have heard of this article
| and that would be sad. It's a nice read.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Decades ago, I was in Thailand at a safari park with a coconut
| cracked open from the refreshment stand, sipping the milk through
| a plastic straw.
|
| An elephant did something deeply human and thugged that coconut
| right out of my hand, and into its mouth it went. Those trunks
| are quick and I, a dumb tourist, was not on guard.
|
| Best thing I could do was pluck the straw from its maw, as that
| probably would not have been healthy.
| leshokunin wrote:
| They mourn, they can paint, they save people from drowning, they
| take the trash out. I've seen so many videos of elephants
| behaving in a way that shows some form of consciousness and
| reflection on the world. They are clearly intelligent beings.
|
| Last century saw us enter the age of information, where logic and
| manipulating data became our main way of creating value.
|
| Maybe this century will be about understanding the shape of our
| intelligence. We've clearly already got a machine intelligence
| that we don't understand well. (see Chess, Go, LLMs). Now there
| are hundreds of species that are likely to have intelligence
| close enough that we could communicate with. Hopefully we will
| come up with ways to get there.
| treme wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1qQOGCyRbY
|
| my fav elephant behavior: appreciating music
| leshokunin wrote:
| Oh thanks for reminding me!
| complaintdept wrote:
| There's a video I saw a while back of these Indian women who
| knitted sweaters for the elephants because there was a very
| cold winter that year. The elephants, normally aloof, heard
| them singing at the edge of the woods, saw the elephant sized
| clothes, came up and let the women put giant sweaters on them
| and left.
| hosh wrote:
| I guess my view of consciousness is different -- all living
| beings having consciousness, but perhaps not specifically in
| the form of the human mind or intellect.
|
| These are ancient ideas. Maybe this century will validate some
| of those.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| If you're looking for a specific word: umwelt.
| hosh wrote:
| I know that word, and it is one way of describing what I
| was talking about, but it is not what I meant. My actual
| worldview is a superset of "all living beings are
| conscious". For example, I don't necessarily think that
| consciousness emerges from biology or complex interaction
| of matter.
|
| Umwelt is a good step outside of anthropocentric view of
| consciousness and the world though.
| ziggyzecat wrote:
| for everything our logic is, it's not our main way of creating
| value. it's the one way we survive, hand in hand with a lot of
| ignorance. this planet has far more patience for us than we
| have for ourselves.
| explaingarlic wrote:
| If they can paint, then so can I. And it took me years to learn
| how to do decent stickmen!
|
| Either way, we are not going to see intelligent computers in
| our lifetime, let alone elephants. Don't mean to condemn them
| but sapio-genesis is often oversold as being too easy. We are
| nowhere near being capable of ourselves, we have just learned
| how to process things similarly to how brains do it, at a
| fraction of the efficacy and ten trillion times the cost.
| nokun7 wrote:
| How long before they have collisions and start using last names!?
| tetris11 wrote:
| (nah, the hash function of the vocalization mappings easily
| exceeds 512bits...)
|
| I do wonder of they're _actually_ naming themselves, or if they
| 're _being named_ by others.
|
| Is there a handshaking protocol, where a bird says "hi I'm
| Fred" followed up by "greetings Fred!" "hiya Fred!"
|
| or if it's more akin to schoolboy nicknames that stick. e.g. a
| bird yells at another bird "hey wifepooper, you're pooping on
| my wife!" and that target bird will never refer to themselves
| as 'wifepooper' but merely 'I'/'me', though other birds will
| refer to that singular bird as 'wifepooper'
| purpleblue wrote:
| Shouldn't machine learning be easily able to decipher animal
| communication at this point?
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