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Perhaps, though I could see there being issues like "I see fish on our left" "well, you're always wrong so we are going right" being an issue. There's even the
by cogman10 3y ago
Perhaps, though I could see there being issues like "I see fish on our left" "well, you're always wrong so we are going right" being an issue. There's even the issue with "shorthand" that might not be universalizable. For example, with a hunting strategy you could imagine "Execute the Janeway protocol" being an issue for translation.
You can see some of the hunting strategy problems play out with sheep dogs. A well trained sheep herding dog can execute really impressive actions based only on specific whistles trained by the handler. [1]. It'd be wrong to conclude a specific element of language for all dogs based on the whistles.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YKAOMqZENo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YKAOMqZENo
- ramblenode 3y ago> Perhaps, though I could see there being issues like "I see fish on our left" "well, you're always wrong so we are going right" being an issue. This isn't a black box because the whalesong encodes some type of behavior that we could, in theory, observe and decode even if we didn't understand the atomic pieces of the whalesong. It's how you study any unknown language--you learn a few relations and then gradually build up a richer lexicon and grammar that gives finer-grained understanding. I'm not sure what the dog whistle example is intended to demonstrate, as even human language has a significant learned component.
- theptip 3y agoI agree you could find higher-order concepts, but I don’t see any reason to assume they would be remotely as common as object-level world-descriptions. When you are asking someone to “pass the spoon, it’s to the left of the cup”, you don’t dip into a codebook and say “play 22, hut” even if you are a quarterback.