6 ms·
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'
by Misdicorl 5y ago
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 you do a cursory search of how smart whales are, you'll get nonsense about how humans are much smarter because the size of the brain isn't relevant, its the ratio of the brain size to the body size. But somehow that argument doesn't apply to squirrels. Or to a 7 foot human vs. a 4.5 foot human. Whales probably aren't as smart as humans, but its due to the environmental pressures selecting for intelligence, not raw capability. Whales have the capability to far outstrip humans in intelligence (if you accept that neuron count and neuron connections are the raw inputs). Lets get some whale engineers working on the hard problems please.
- WalterBright 5y agoBrain size may not necessarily correlate with intelligence because it isn't the number of neurons, it's the organization and optimization of them. Just like we make much more powerful CPU chips in the same volume of silicon as before. And it could be that it just isn't necessary for whales to optimize brain density, like it is for humans and crows.
- Misdicorl 5y agoAgreed! But afaik the neuron process "node" across species is not so different. The relevant metaphor I would think is humans have pcie and a large register count while many (all?) others are still on pata and register starved. Maybe a real biologist can come in with more facts and less bad metaphors
- stubish 5y agoSo far it is looking like the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex is the best indicator of intelligence. http://mitp.nautil.us/feature/227/the-paradox-of-the-elephant-brain http://mitp.nautil.us/feature/227/the-paradox-of-the-elephan... We started as basic primates, started cooking our food, getting more nutrition, allowing our guts to shrink, allowing us to spend more energy on our brains, growing more and more neurons in the important bits, at which point things spiraled away using our new language and technology to make better technology. (Not a real biologist)
- taneq 5y agoI’ve read various stats about the human brain using a surprising percentage of our overall energy budget. I wonder how much energy a whale brain uses (overall and per kg)? While it’s not the only relevant stat, TDP does provide a clue as to processing power.
- tablespoon 5y ago> God I cannot wait to talk to whales. Their oral histories must be incredible. What makes you think they'd have oral histories?
- Misdicorl 5y agoI think it's a decent enough guess and I'd give better then even odds on it. Whales have the capacity to communicate. Stories are more effective than unadorned facts at being remembered (for humans anyways). Remembering important facts is a huge advantage in almost any context. The biggest jump imo is the second one, but I find it unlikely that whales would have a radically different memory storage and retrieval model than humans
- lm28469 5y agoThere is nothing at all that hints to that though. It makes me think of people who believe their dogs can "smile" the same way humans do. Humans are very good at two things, seeing patterns and projecting their own feelings/experiences on other living creatures (or inanimate objects even). We're the exception, not the norm. You can't "guess" or rely on intuition for these topics, that's how we got religions, the geocentric system, &c.
- Misdicorl 5y agoOf course you can guess and rely on intuition. The key aspect of science is the feedback loop with data to refine/reject those guesses and intuition. Its also hilarious to me that you call out my guess and then make your own unsubstantiated claims, which I'm sure feel "intuitive" to you.
- klipt 5y ago> 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.
- Misdicorl 5y agoMaybe! 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.
- blacksmith_tb 5y agoI would say that's lowballing it considerably[1]. Whaling nearly drove sperm whales to extinction until they were protected in the 1970s. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_whale#Relationship_with_humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_whale#Relationship_with_...
- Misdicorl 5y agoFair enough
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoThere have been a number of Orca attacks on yachts in the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Cadiz/Portugal area recently. Perhaps they're hungry. Perhaps they're pissed. No one knows. Historically, orca attacks on humans - outside of captivity - have been very rare.
- forgotmypw17 5y agoYou 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. The rewards are breathtaking and totally worth the effort.
- Misdicorl 5y agoYour 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.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> I want the equivalent of the LHC for cross species communication. 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.
- azeirah 5y agoThis is Wittgenstein's argument about why we'll never communicate with lions (iirc) right?
- Misdicorl 5y agoI'm not sure I understand your complaint or why you've caught the Twitter API into it? I imagine a center for cross species communication research would coordinate scientists across a couple important fields also interested in the question and allocate their resources to the research which seems most promising to make progress. Just like any other institute. I imagine the fields would be biology zoology linguistics computation and probably since experts for the specific target species.
- PicassoCTs 5y agoThey will sing us the song of the great holocaust of the 1800s, of the day the metal surface whales turned the skies red and nothing could save them.
- lovecg 5y agoPersonally I want to know if they still tell tales of the hero whale who killed one of the ships in 1820: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_(whaleship) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_(whaleship)
- franky47 5y ago> Lets get some whale engineers working on the hard problems please. Somehow I pictured whales as the engineers in this sentence. It makes it even better.
- tsol 5y agoI mean.. hate to be a party pooper, but just because we created a the equivalent of gpt3 for whales, does that mean we can do anything useful? Like talking to whales.. we haven't even established how their language works. What language even is, is a good question. I read it once demonstrated as this; some species of monkey has a specific call they do when they see a panther, and it results in all the monkeys who hear it to run up their trees. Now what does this call mean? It could mean "jaguar alert!", pointing to a very specific concept-- a certain animal is here and we all know they're dangerous. It could also mean "I'm scared!", and maybe it's just monkey see monkey do. It could also mean something more abstract, like a blood curdling scream-- there's no one thing that it means, but as humans we instinctively know that people don't scream like that unless something legitimately awful is happening. So maybe the call communicates emotion rather than an intellectual concept-- it's a call of fear that makes other monkeys who hear it also scared. Just breaking down what animal language even _is_, is a challenge. I'm not optimistic on hearing any oral histories of whales, or even that they record history. I mean humans only started recording history for its own sake like 2000 years ago with herodotus. Before then we have tablets to keep track of stock, letters, and murals which were often made to depict the strength of the reigning emperor and the foes he vanquished. So maybe if we talk to whales it'll be a little like if aliens came to ancient Egypt to talk to the pharaoh; we'll just get a dictator whale telling us about all the other whales he's killed and how he's the greatest.. haha probably not that, though.
- Misdicorl 5y agoI think your entire post is hugely optimistic despite the negative overtone! The fact that other people see there are these important and fundamental questions that can be addressed by this nascent field gives me hope that this won't be another one off attempt like so many before. I'm very hopeful that it can snowball due to the hype around machine learning even if I'm personally skeptical that machine learning is a particularly fruitful avenue.
- senectus1 5y agoI would expect the vast majority of their comms to be : Nice water over here Loads of food here I'm down to F, anyone else? Do we really have any evidence that suggests it'll be anything else?
- aahortwwy 5y ago> If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> Whales have the capability to far outstrip humans in intelligence (if you accept that neuron count and neuron connections are the raw inputs). 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.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoThere's no software in a whale's brain, or in a human's brain. As has been discussed in a couple of articles linked on HN recently, it might not even be useful to think about brain function as computation.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> There's no software in a whale's brain, or in a human's brain. Sure, and man is the only animal with no instincts, ensouled cells are metaphysically different from soulless cells, and fossils were placed in the ground as a test of your faith.
- 01100011 5y agoDo we even know that whales communicate with conscious intent? What if the sounds they make were mere reflexes driven by some internal state like adrenaline, sex or hunger hormones?
- cetalingua 5y agoWe do, actually, for dolphins at least. Researchers did an experiment where dolphins had to coordinate their actions (push 2 buttons together) without seeing each other. So they coordinated their actions acoustically by communicating when they should push the buttons.
- HamburgerEmoji 5y agoAre you sure you communicate with conscious intent? I don't want to make assumptions about you, but I bet your vocal cords have always been controlled via electrical signals from your brain, which in turn is just doing stuff according to physics.
- kevinmchugh 5y agoWe've invested quite a lot in trying to communicate with other ape species. There's very little to show for it. Koko the signing gorilla is the biggest success and 1) that was conducted hugely unethically 2) had a closely-involved researcher/caretaker/interpreter. Without the lead researcher communication was very limited.
- Misdicorl 5y agoI think the actual investment is shockingly little. Even compared to a moderately sized zoo the investment is tiny. It's like a dozen individual people trying over the past five decades.