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Can a powerful model become a fantastic autocomplete for dolphins ? Sure. Someday soon that's very likely to happen. But that alone would tell us almost nothing

by srean 2y ago

Can a powerful model become a fantastic autocomplete for dolphins ? Sure. Someday soon that's very likely to happen. But that alone would tell us almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means. To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds. Observation of dolphin-dolphin interaction would help but to a limited degree. It would help if the dolphins are also interested in teaching us. Dolphins or we could say to the other '... that is how we pronounce sea-cucumber'. Shared nouns would be the easiest. The next level, a far harder level, would be to reach the stage where we can say 'the emotion that you are feeling now, that we call "anger"'. We will no quite have the right word for "anxiety that I feel when my baby's blood flow doesn't sound right in Doppler". Teaching or learning 'ennui' and 'schadenfreude' would be a whole lot harder. This begs a question can one fully feel and understand an emotion we do not have a word for ? Perhaps Wittgenstein has an answer. Postscript: I seem to have triggered quite a few of you and that has me surprised. I thought this would be neither controversial nor unpopular. It's ironic in a way. If we can't understand each other, understanding dolphin "speech" would be a tough hill to climb.

ruthvik947 2y ago
Indeed! As Witt once said, "if a lion could speak, we would not understand it." (https://iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#H5 https://iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#H5)
- finnh 2y ago
  Is it common to abbreviate Wittgenstein to "Witt"? Don't recall seeing/hearing that before, but it's been awhile since undergrad.
  - ruthvik947 2y ago
    Sorry, it's not really, just a personal nickname for him. Although I think I recall that Austin would call him Witters (very much to this annoyance).
weard_beard 2y ago
I think you are describing more of an edge case than you might think for a vertebrate, mammal, social, warm blooded, air breathing, earth living, pack hunter.
- srean 2y ago
  Yes there is a lot we have common, especially the social part. But our worlds and primary senses are really very different. Even a limited success would gladden my heart.
charcircuit 2y ago
>To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds Why? With modern AI there exists unsupervised learning for translation where you don't have to explicitly make translation pairs between the 2 languages. It seems possible to eventually create a way to translate without having to have a teaching process for individual words like you describe.
- srean 2y ago
  Teach the meaning and understanding of 'chrome red' to a chilf blind from birth.
  - charcircuit 2y ago
    This can easily be done by giving that prompt to chatgpt and allowing the child to ask it follow up questions.
    - srean 2y ago
      That might only get to a point that there is an understanding that something called "chrome red" exists. But for a blind child who isn't exposed to the concept of vision, let alone color. It's just a name and relations with other names. That lacks semantics. Without grounding in some form of experience one can learn grammar and syntax but not understanding. "Chrome red" is a whole lot easier to teach than say the concept of "jealousy" when that's not part of a shared world of experience. It's possible to learn a dictionary without understanding any of what those words mean. Dictionary just gives relations among the dictionary words themselves. That's it. It takes a sensory or emotional experience to ground those words for learning. Nouns are easy because you can point and teach, that there is a correspondence with the word 'apple' and the physical object that you are experiencing now. Abstract concepts emotions are much harder. There the need for shared experience is much stronger. There's quite a bit of recorded knowledge for these things. Experiences of Hellen Keller. There's a story of a deaf man who could use sign language, but had an overwhelming and tearful experience in his thirties when it finally clicked that the sign for a 'door' has a correspondence for a door that his teacher was pointing at. Till that point, signing was just some meaningless ritualistic ceremony that needed to be mastered for social acceptance.
Mystery-Machine 2y ago
The fact that you cannot wrap your head around something doesn't mean that it's not possible. I do not claim that it is surely possible nor that it isn't. But it sure as hell looks possible. You also probably don't have kids. For example: how do you teach a child to speak? Or someone a new language? You show them some objects and their pronunciation. The same with the seagrass and/or a scarf. That's one way. Dolphins can also see (divers with) some objects and name them. We can also guess what they are saying from the sounds plus the actions they do. That's probably how we got "seagrass" in the first place. For all the word that they don't have in their language, we/they can invent them. Just like we do all the time: artificial intelligence, social network, skyscraper, surfboard, tuxedo, black hole, whatever... It might also be possible that dolphins' language uses the same patterns as our language(s) and that an LLM that knows both can manage to translate between the two. I suggest a bit more optimistic look on the world, especially on something that's pretty-much impossible to have any negative consequences for humanity.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- srean 2y ago
  Calm down. No need to be rude and condescending and throw personal insults. If you had read this part -- "But that alone would tell us almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means. To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds. Observation of dolphin-dolphin interaction would help but to a limited degree." it ought to have been clear that what I am arguing is a corpus of dolphin communication fed to an LLM alone will not suffice. A lot of investments have to be made in this part -- To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds. I am sure both you and me would be very happy the day we can have some conversation with dolphins.
  - Mystery-Machine 2y ago
    That's exactly the argument here. You do not think this is possible. I think it _might be_. You believe we cannot understand their language because we don't have "shared experiences" (etc). I believe we can. That's the disagreement. AI can learn/predict/invent new things. It already is inventing new materials, new protein structures, etc. We don't need to understand the exact mechanism 100% for it to be able to do it. Let's give it a shot. There are tons of shared experiences and shared emotions. It's not like there's some hidden organism that we discovered are making noise from within the dark matter. These are animals in the oceans. Plenty of shared experiences and emotions. Dolphins have feelings. Anyway... let's agree to disagree. I fully support this project and am optimistic about its outcomes.

by srean 2y ago

ruthvik947 2y ago

Indeed! As Witt once said, "if a lion could speak, we would not understand it." (https://iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#H5 https://iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#H5)

finnh 2y ago
Is it common to abbreviate Wittgenstein to "Witt"? Don't recall seeing/hearing that before, but it's been awhile since undergrad.
- ruthvik947 2y ago
  Sorry, it's not really, just a personal nickname for him. Although I think I recall that Austin would call him Witters (very much to this annoyance).

weard_beard 2y ago

I think you are describing more of an edge case than you might think for a vertebrate, mammal, social, warm blooded, air breathing, earth living, pack hunter.

srean 2y ago
Yes there is a lot we have common, especially the social part. But our worlds and primary senses are really very different. Even a limited success would gladden my heart.

charcircuit 2y ago

>To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds Why? With modern AI there exists unsupervised learning for translation where you don't have to explicitly make translation pairs between the 2 languages. It seems possible to eventually create a way to translate without having to have a teaching process for individual words like you describe.

srean 2y ago
Teach the meaning and understanding of 'chrome red' to a chilf blind from birth.
- charcircuit 2y ago
  This can easily be done by giving that prompt to chatgpt and allowing the child to ask it follow up questions.
  - srean 2y ago
    That might only get to a point that there is an understanding that something called "chrome red" exists. But for a blind child who isn't exposed to the concept of vision, let alone color. It's just a name and relations with other names. That lacks semantics. Without grounding in some form of experience one can learn grammar and syntax but not understanding. "Chrome red" is a whole lot easier to teach than say the concept of "jealousy" when that's not part of a shared world of experience. It's possible to learn a dictionary without understanding any of what those words mean. Dictionary just gives relations among the dictionary words themselves. That's it. It takes a sensory or emotional experience to ground those words for learning. Nouns are easy because you can point and teach, that there is a correspondence with the word 'apple' and the physical object that you are experiencing now. Abstract concepts emotions are much harder. There the need for shared experience is much stronger. There's quite a bit of recorded knowledge for these things. Experiences of Hellen Keller. There's a story of a deaf man who could use sign language, but had an overwhelming and tearful experience in his thirties when it finally clicked that the sign for a 'door' has a correspondence for a door that his teacher was pointing at. Till that point, signing was just some meaningless ritualistic ceremony that needed to be mastered for social acceptance.

Mystery-Machine 2y ago

The fact that you cannot wrap your head around something doesn't mean that it's not possible. I do not claim that it is surely possible nor that it isn't. But it sure as hell looks possible. You also probably don't have kids. For example: how do you teach a child to speak? Or someone a new language? You show them some objects and their pronunciation. The same with the seagrass and/or a scarf. That's one way. Dolphins can also see (divers with) some objects and name them. We can also guess what they are saying from the sounds plus the actions they do. That's probably how we got "seagrass" in the first place. For all the word that they don't have in their language, we/they can invent them. Just like we do all the time: artificial intelligence, social network, skyscraper, surfboard, tuxedo, black hole, whatever... It might also be possible that dolphins' language uses the same patterns as our language(s) and that an LLM that knows both can manage to translate between the two. I suggest a bit more optimistic look on the world, especially on something that's pretty-much impossible to have any negative consequences for humanity.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
srean 2y ago
Calm down. No need to be rude and condescending and throw personal insults. If you had read this part -- "But that alone would tell us almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means. To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds. Observation of dolphin-dolphin interaction would help but to a limited degree." it ought to have been clear that what I am arguing is a corpus of dolphin communication fed to an LLM alone will not suffice. A lot of investments have to be made in this part -- To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds. I am sure both you and me would be very happy the day we can have some conversation with dolphins.
- Mystery-Machine 2y ago
  That's exactly the argument here. You do not think this is possible. I think it _might be_. You believe we cannot understand their language because we don't have "shared experiences" (etc). I believe we can. That's the disagreement. AI can learn/predict/invent new things. It already is inventing new materials, new protein structures, etc. We don't need to understand the exact mechanism 100% for it to be able to do it. Let's give it a shot. There are tons of shared experiences and shared emotions. It's not like there's some hidden organism that we discovered are making noise from within the dark matter. These are animals in the oceans. Plenty of shared experiences and emotions. Dolphins have feelings. Anyway... let's agree to disagree. I fully support this project and am optimistic about its outcomes.