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Can we talk to whales?
- gizajob 3y ago"If a lion could speak, we could not understand him" - Wittgenstein
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xg15 3y agoFollowup question, do we want to talk to whales, given what we're currently doing to the oceans?
- ketanmaheshwari 3y agoYes. We want some good scolding from whales.
- thereisnojesus 3y agoNo you scold the whales. More of a sear actually
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- LegitShady 3y agoThere is no we. Both are different groups of people. And also yes, they're almost unrelated.
- xg15 3y agoFeel free to explain that to the whales.
- wizofaus 3y agoControversially my suspicion is what we're doing to the oceans and the rest of the planet will cause more suffering to humans than any other species, which will mostly just die out without really understanding what's happening to them. We all know what human suffering feels like, and we're all able to communicate with other humans one way or another, yet none of us seem able to accept we might have to change our lifestyles or reevaluate our priorities to help minimise that suffering in others. Still, I'd be fascinated whether whales actually had any interesting (and comprehensible!) thoughts to share about human behaviour, and whether we might learn at least something from them.
- RetroTechie 3y agoYes, certainly! It's those OTHER people doing bad things to animals & their environment, not you. Right? (wink wink) Most whales would probably fall for that (or give you benefit of the doubt).. many humans do.
- cogman10 3y agoMy question, why focus on "can we talk with whales" when we already have the problem of "can we talk with humans" that has a known right answer? We can have a spanish speaker (or speakers) sit down, feed us with hours and hours of content (heck, that's already there) and then work with AI to try and create a black box interpreter that can turn spanish to english. Has anyone done this? If the goal is universal translator why not start off with a simple case? My worry with trying to do this first with whales or other animals is we don't know the answer. Nobody can look at the whale AI translation and say "You know what, this was a good translation". Sort of the "Mars attacks" problem. All this said, I do recognize that this creates a "human bias". The way humans talk may not readily translate to animal speech (But perhaps it would for other simians?).
- ethanbond 3y agoI’m pretty sure there are dozens of startups doing AI-based translation, including just general LLMs which seem to be extremely good at this already.
- vasco 3y agoThose are trained differently, being exposed to translations in the training. My understanding of the person you are replying to is proposing "discovering the meaning" of Spanish by just using audio without any translations in the training. Pretending we don't know Spanish as if it were an animal/alien language.
- ethanbond 3y agoAh I see now! Thanks for the clarification.
- cogman10 3y agoThey are solving a different problem. They are doing the "white box" translation, that is knowing good inputs and outputs. I'm talking about something more akin to what these researchers are doing. Without feeding the AI information about the correct translation, can we make an AI that can translate spanish to english? That is, what the researchers are trying to do with this whale translation.
- mnd999 3y agoStart with laboratory mice, and then move on to dolphins I reckon.
- jonathanoliver 3y agoWhy would you start with the two-smartest species on the planet? [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...
- robwwilliams 3y agoBrainiest by brain/body ratio: Mice 0.5/25 g Human 1.3/70 kg Sperm whale. 8.0/60000 kg We humans get to chose the allometric coefficient that makes us seem “smartest” but D Adams knew the truth ;-)
- mnd999 3y agoCongrats you got the reference. I figured most folks here would.
- twoWhlsGud 3y agoCrazy but intriguing stuff. Surprising (to me) thing to note - the first goal is to be able to construct "sentences" in Sperm Whalish not necessarily understand them. The next step is to figure out what they mean.
- beardyw 3y agoWell, we can recognise danger calls in birds, usually repeated sharp "chip" sounds. Going beyond that we start assuming that some organised signals correspond to our ideas of communication. I tend to doubt it. If there is something more complex it may be very different to what we are used to.
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- KaiserPro 3y agoWell, if you spend enough time on duo lingo, and get past the "I fucking love the rrrrugby" stage, then you can totally talk to all sorts of people from whales in their native language.
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- plusfour 3y agoDo whales forgive? The Memory Palace has done a moving episode on sperm whales. https://thememorypalace.us/keyhole/ https://thememorypalace.us/keyhole/ If you're not familiar with the podcast, the episodes are incredibly well written and narrated humanity-focused vignettes.
- owlninja 3y ago+1 for The Memory Palace. Not sure how I found it, but it is very relaxing and informative.
- Traubenfuchs 3y agoI wish we could talk to orcas and explain to them at which level of overkill we could retaliate and exterminate them if they don‘t stop attacking our boats.
- RetroTechie 3y agoIf I would ever find myself in that situation (chance is slim but has increased to non-zero for me), I'd be tempted to pull out a skippy ball & see if they're up for a game of water polo.
- micromacrofoot 3y agowe’ve stolen babies from their mothers and enslaved them for entertainment, maybe they know now…
- Tommstein 3y agoAnd have decided to explore the higher echelons of FAFO?
- qprofyeh 3y agoCan we talk to any animals using LLM translation?
- NERD_ALERT 3y agoWhat does that mean?
- quonn 3y agoNo? I mean it seems like a stretch. Where would the LLM learn the initial English-to-Moo mapping for cows? Maybe if we would have a mapping we could use that to train an LLM. In the meantime you can try asking ChatGPT if a cow has buddha nature and ask for a one word reply. It have an idea what it might say.
- famouswaffles 3y agoYou don't need Parallel corpora for all language pairs in a "predict the next token" LLM. What I'm saying is that if an LLM is trained on English, French and Spanish and there is Eng to French data, you don't need Eng to Spa data to get Eng to Spa translations.
- goatlover 3y agoHow would an LLM figure out what words to translate animal sounds to? Where does it learn that information? We don't know what animals are communicating if they do have a language of sorts. There's no mapping.
- famouswaffles 3y agoPotentially the same way it knows how to translate concepts with no mappings in that language pair in the dataset. Like i said, not every language in an LLM's corpus has something in another language to map to.
- nathanfig 3y agoSpanish and French are both romance languages and will have massive token overlap. Not likely to be so lucky with whale songs.
- blaze33 3y agoI once read that whale's songs could be used to transmit a 3d image from one whale to another which doesn't sound so crazy considering that echolocation can activate the visual cortex. I don't remember the article and anyway there wasn't much more detail but I always found this idea quite interesting. Could be that looking for words, sentences or grammar in a whale's song is a misguided and anthropocentric approach to the problem. They may instead have a visual language that just so happen to be transmitted by sound. Like, do you see what I mean? But, literally.
- pyinstallwoes 3y agoCymatics is very interesting.
- dinkleberg 3y agoThat is a fascinating idea. We do have a tendency (understandably) to try and understand the universe through our own lens. Our thinking is heavily tied to our sensory input, so it is challenging to imagine what having echolocation or magnetic senses might be like. But there is no reason we should expect other species to communicate and think in the same way we do.
- totetsu 3y agoIt’s hard even to imagine how other humans, from another time or culture think. While we have similar sensory apparatus we the world we experience is constructed within our own consciousness, with all kinds of emotions and memories mixed in with the senses. If you think about your own mammalian physiological and emotional .. affective experience .. how it feels to run fast, be surprised, see something you want to eat.. then I think we can start to appreciate what it is like to think like a whale or a bat. Even though their sensory input is vastly different to use, they still construct their world with the same kind of equipment that we do
- glandium 3y agoIt's hard even to imagine how other humans, from our time and culture think. I have no clue how people experience life with aphantasia or no inner monologue. Yet these people exist, right now, among us.
- alexpotato 3y agoIn the 1990s show seaQuest DSV, there was a "talking" dolphin that spoke to the humans via a computer interface that the boy genius character had created. In one of the episodes, the ship's computers get wipe so the boy has to rebuild the dictionary of the translation system by showing the dolphin flash cards. I remember thinking that was an interesting way to build a translation layer between two different species with a BIG assumption that the dolphin could understand the symbols on the flashcards. The internet, being what it is, even has a Wikia link about this: https://seaquest-dsv.fandom.com/wiki/Vocorder https://seaquest-dsv.fandom.com/wiki/Vocorder
- greesil 3y agoBridger!
- dharmab 3y agoSpoiler for Project Hail Mary A large part of the book is the human crew figuring out how to communicate with blind aliens who communicate with a sort of musical chirping. The humans eventually write a program to input English vocabulary and play a rudimentary form of the music.
- bookofjoe 3y ago>If a lion could speak, we could not understand him. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Philosophical Investigations’ (1953)
- calderknight 3y agoIf a lion could speak, we could understand him.
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- p1mrx 3y agoOh no, I don't know what to believe anymore.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoHow many human languages do you know?
- calderknight 3y agoIf the claim is just that the lion wouldn't speak English the OK I agree
- chimineycricket 3y agoThat's not what parent means. Parent means there are humans that speak, why can't you understand some of them.
- calderknight 3y agoI think I can understand all of them as long as I have time to learn the language they're speaking
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- tzs 3y agoSuppose some villain had an eventual need to be able to understand whales (or dolphins) communications, but has several years solve the problem. I'm talking about the kind of villain who does not care if what and how they do this is ethical so all that matters to them is whether or not it works. Think someone like the High Evolutionary as portrayed in the third Guardians of the Galaxy movie, but limited to present day Earth technology and knowledge. Suppose that villain took several human babies, gave them hearing aids or cochlear implants that pitch shift and compress whale/dolphin sounds down to where humans can hear them, and raised them in a mixed human/whale environment so that from their first weeks they were seeing whales and hearing while speech as much they were seeing humans and hearing human speech. Would some of those human babies end up learning to understand whale the same way babies raised in bilingual extended families often end up learning both languages?
- dools 3y agoSocial interaction plays a major role in language development. If you take away the reinforcement of everyone being really excited when the baby goes "da-da" instead of "gur-gur" you would lose the learning. It's also much more difficult for blind babies to learn to speak because they can't see the mouth shapes being made by their parents which is a deliberate training exercise. I don't think they'd learn to speak whale any more than kids learn to speak other sounds in their natural environment. IANAL (Linguist), IANAB.
- seszett 3y ago> I don't think they'd learn to speak whale any more than kids learn to speak other sounds in their natural environment. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work either, but kids do learn the sounds of other animals and they love to reproduce them. Many kids can make dog or duck sounds before they can even speak like humans. The problem is that of course, dogs, cats, ducks don't actually have a language, just a few different sounds, so that doesn't prove anything about kids' ability to understand a hypothetical actual animal language.
- LectronPusher 3y agoI'm quite unsure of myself here and might be mistaken, but there's also the chomskyist argument that much of the structure of human language is derived from the structure of our brain itself. Our brain is flexible enough to generate many types of human language, but different species could have entirely different structures that might be impossible to learn as a human. A machine translation layer -- LLMs or such -- could be designed around this flaw, and will likely be our best bet.
- WesSouza 3y agoIs the answer yes or no?
- dools 3y ago[flagged]
- lucb1e 3y agoSimilar to asking whether we can do nuclear fusion: probably yes, you just have to tell me how. So basically no(t yet). Also, are you sure you don't read the article? It contains lots of vital information that we all came here to read, such as > Gero, who is forty-three, is tall and broad, with an eager smile and a pronounced Canadian accent (Nothing against Gero, this just happened to be the part my scroll wheel broke)
- stevenwoo 3y agoNo. The one group the reporter embedded with studied sperm whales and after years of recording and study the researchers know that the whales use a series of clicks at each other and that different family groups use different series of clicks, and to human ears, it is very repetitive in all cases. It could depend upon almost anything else that could be relevant to cetaceans, like current direction or speaker depth. :) That research group has private funding for two more years. It was actually believed that sperm whales were silent until about seventy years ago. We also know this is similar behavior (pod specific vocalizations) if not in sound or pitch to orcas that hunt whale calves. https://kuow.org/stories/listen-to-the-last-song-toki-the-captive-orca-sang-which-her-mother-taught-her https://kuow.org/stories/listen-to-the-last-song-toki-the-ca...
- jccalhoun 3y agoYes. You can talk to whales. Will they understand us or will we understand them? That's a different question.
- nelsontodd 3y ago[dead]
- dfee 3y agoI thought this article was going to be about selling enterprises. /s
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoInstead of jumping straight to mathematical abstractions, perhaps SETI could warm up by learning how to communicate with non-human sentience on Earth.
- RecycledEle 3y agoSETI is looking for technological aliens. Non-technological aliens would not send radio transmissions. Technological aliens must understand math a science to be technological.
- getcrunk 3y agoUnless they have a weird biology that lets them send radio signals naturally?
- RecycledEle 3y agoGood point.
- mcswell 3y agoThat presumes that there is non-human sentience on Earth, which is not a given. Given that it's been impossible to teach apes anything like real language (they have been taught a few signed words), my guess is there are not any truly sentient non-human beings on this planet, where "sentient" means you can communicate with words and a grammar. My cat excepted.
- postalrat 3y agoWho could disagree when your are the person defining sentience.
- themagician 3y agoWe know many animals (and even plants) communicate without language. There is no reason to suspect that whales even use language.
- mcswell 3y ago"Communicate" is a vague word. I guess I could communicate with you by hitting you upside the head, which is way more than I can say for plants communicating with each other, and for that matter about as much as I can say for most animals communicating with others of their species.
- KingMob 3y agoThat's partly the point. Communication is broad and can apply in a lot of ways, but language requires syntax. If it can be learned by conditioning, or inherited by instinct, it's not language.
- KingMob 3y agoThis is most accurate top-level comment on the page. I once TAed an animal cognition class for Herb Terrace of Nim Chimpsky fame (or infamy), and I can say, we have yet to demonstrate any non-human language use. Non-human communication is common, but language is different, and requires syntax. Syntax (plus vocabulary) is what enables you to meaningfully say a sentence you've never spoken before, and for another person to understand a sentence they've never heard before. If you look at the corpuses of non-human communication, they're incredibly small compared to humans. A meercat has a few distinct vocalizations to warn their group depending on the type of a predator, but they can be counted on one hand. A songbird's song is ballistic once learned; it will never vary, even if they go deaf.
- famouswaffles 3y agoYou can't demonstrate what you don't understand. We've yet to rule it out in dolphins/orcas/whales etc like we have in lots of other animals. That alone is a pretty big deal. And there's research that dolphins understand syntax. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342706263_Language_Research_Dolphins https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342706263_Language_... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0010027784900039 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001002...
- feedsmgmt 3y agoIf you listen to a flock of crows there is clearly some form of communication happening. It is amazing that nobody has figured out how to translate it. I wonder how many different languages or dialects crows have developed.
- mcswell 3y agoThat one says "Food! Food!" That one over there is saying "Predator! Predator! Predator!" And this one over here is saying "Hey, babe! Wanna make some eggs?"
- troyvit 3y agoDon't forget: "Hey guys, Alvin died, let's have sex with him!"[1] [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/crow-necrophilia/565442/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/crow-nec...
- emporas 3y agoThat guy right here[1], states that we will start to decode animal languages within one or two years. There is a story in the video, where he describes he and his team recording whale's words, playing the recorded audio back to the whale, and the surprising reaction of the leviathan. One pretty astounding observation he makes, is that we humans and the planet earth, thought to be the centre of the universe until the telescope came along. Now it will be a similar moment, in which we think that our language is at the centre of intelligence, not realizing that many animals communicate just like us, but in an incomprehensible way to us. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tUXbbbMhvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tUXbbbMhvk
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- postscapes1 3y agoJust listened to a podcast episode where they discussed this David Eagleman and Aza Raskin https://pca.st/episode/3185257d-11b6-4d9a-ac9e-fea9531d491f https://pca.st/episode/3185257d-11b6-4d9a-ac9e-fea9531d491f "If we meet extraterrestrials someday, how will we figure out what they're saying? We currently face this problem right here at home: we have 2 million species of animals on our planet... and we have no Google Translate for any of them. We’re not having conversations with (or listening to podcasts by) anyone but ourselves. Join Eagleman and his guest Aza Raskin to see the glimmer of a pathway that might get us to animal translation, and relatively soon."
- mcswell 3y agoI think FarSide beat us to the punchline: https://ifunny.co/picture/donning-his-new-canine-decoder-professo-schwartzman-becomes-the-first-j2KFZJag8 https://ifunny.co/picture/donning-his-new-canine-decoder-pro... (or if that link doesn't work, try this one: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/09/ac/49/09ac494b1ff20a19812ea8ba0d9bc311.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/09/ac/49/09ac494b1ff20a19812ea8ba0...)
- D-Coder 3y agohttps://laughlearnlinks.home.blog/2020/04/02/cat-translator/ https://laughlearnlinks.home.blog/2020/04/02/cat-translator/
- Saigonautica 3y agoI wonder what would happen next, if we could communicate with whales, and the language ended up having more than 25 words? There are just north of 8 billion humans, and something like 850k sperm whales. If even a relatively small percentage of the former wants to talk to the latter, that's pretty overwhelming. Do we open an embassy or something?
- pkdpic 3y ago> How do you expect to communicate with the ocean [the maybe-conscious alien ocean] when you can’t even understand one another? - Stanisław Lem, Solaris I think about this quote a lot. Every time I look at a bug, go to the zoo or try to talk to a toddler. Solaris is the best.
- srean 3y ago"If a lion could speak, we would not understand him." -- Ludwig Wittgenstein I have been biting my hands since yesterday to prevent me from saying this. Then with your Solaris reference the defense crumbled.
- riwsky 3y agoI cried
- Simon_O_Rourke 3y agoI remember reading some spurious response to a similar question about dolphins, and it speculated that all their vocalizations were simply variations on a single sentence like "hey buddy, did you check out that krill".
- simonjgreen 3y agoTaking a moment to recognise the 54 minute audio recording attached to this article. Very useful, and well read, way to consume the content!
- iamthejuan 3y agoI have been pondering about this, hopefully it becomes a possibility.
- JohnMakin 3y agoTLDR; no, we can’t. Also, language is defined as something only humans can have, which is a bit circular and silly to anyone who’s observed cetaceans for any period of time.
- FreshStart 3y agoCommunication established: "sorry for the genocide, but we needed the candles and BTW, those stomache cramps come from microplastic. Oh and we caused a global warming, so.. Good luck?" if any sea life had a fully conscious society it would wage guerrilla war against humanity.