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I have been thinking for a while that if you want to practice communicating with aliens, try octopi. If you can actually have a reasonable conversation with som
by bjelkeman-again 8y ago
I have been thinking for a while that if you want to practice communicating with aliens, try octopi. If you can actually have a reasonable conversation with some of them, like you can with a house trained dog, then you are making some kind of progress.
- oneeyedpigeon 8y agoThis is almost literally the plot of Arrival :-)
- shostack 8y agoWhich is particularly relevant given their similarities to an octopus, albeit a 4th dimensional version of one.
- mrfusion 8y agoI’d be happy with dolphins or whales.
- ufmace 8y agoThat makes me wonder - do they have what we would consider reasonable conversations with each other?
- kevinmchugh 8y agoChimp communication is complicated enough that it can probably be called conservation, but I think they're one of the only species for which that is true. I think most animals lack a wide enough range of responses to have a conversation.
- jacobolus 8y agoIn most cases humans have not yet figured out anywhere near the full range of particular animals’ communication, so this is hard to judge. For example, prarie dogs https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/magazine/can-prairie-dogs-talk.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/magazine/can-prairie-dogs...
- toasterlovin 8y agoI don't think dogs are a great example of an intelligent species just because we can communicate with them reasonably well. They have evolved to be able to participate in human society. With the exception of some breeds of herding dogs, they're probably stupider than (to pick one example) raccoons. But dogs possess a key trait that raccoons lack: they can understand human emotion reasonably well.
- zepearl 8y agoMy parent's dog makes them indirectly do what she wants => direct communication is potentially overvalued.