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Comment by brownbat | Hacker News Reader

Years and years ago, there was an aol live chat with Koko, the gorilla who could sign. An early experimental cross species AMA.

The crowd mostly asked questions like "is there a god?"

The ape generally replied that she was bored and wanted food.

Gray parrots and corvids and dolphins and squids are exceptionally fascinating and worth studying. They aren't the same as the mythologized first contact people are hoping for. The precise expectations we have for such an exchange may say something about the Fermi paradox. Very similar intelligences can still be so different as to render communication, a real exchange of ideas, impossible.

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On Koko... Koko's not all she's cracked up to be. Although there is a lot of non-scientific media that talks about her language abilities, there actually aren't very many scientific/peer reviewed articles on her, something that is the source of some contention.

With Koko/many other talking apes the handler does a LOT of interpretation for the sign language, to the point that it starts to feel a bit like reading tea leaves. With Koko, I often feel that the handler goes way too far in this. For example:

    Interviewer: Koko, do you feel love from the humans who have raised you and cared for you? Ely35150 asked that. We'll see what she says!

    Dr. Patterson: She's reading a birthday card.

    Koko: lips, apple give me

    Dr. Patterson: People give her her favorite foods.

    Koko: love, browse drink nipple

    Dr. Patterson: Browse is like... the little foods/snacks we give them.

    Koko: koko loves that nipple drink, go

    Dr. Patterson: She's kissing her alligator.

    Koko: lights off good

At one point Koko signs "nipple", which her handler interprets as "people" since they rhyme. Seeing as how Koko can't speak english, the idea that she understands english rhymes feels like more than a bit of a stretch to me.

Many other scientists have approached the ape speaking thing through a bit more of a skeptical lens, and produced (IMHO) much better work. The work on Nim Chimpsky in particular is interesting - they found that while Nim could associate words with concepts (forming phrases like "give food me eat"), anything resembling syntax, creating new phrases, or a sustained conversation was simply out of his reach.

how koto speaks reminds me of how I would speak to my cousins in Mandarin when my other cousins had taught me a bunch of words

I don't think the researcher means to imply Koko understands rhymes. Rather her hearing is not fine-tuned enough to hear the subtle difference between the sounds "nipple" and "people". So she uses them interchangeably.

What about new words? I remember reading an account online of someone who owned an African Grey parrot, who claimed that they called apples some word that was half banana, half cherry, because it looked like a combination of them (to the parrot).

Why would anyone expect an ape to be thinking about anything that's not food or, you know, ape-level? I mean come on, if you asked a random human you wouldn't get an insightful answer to "is there a God." If you wired up a fish to a computer so it could talk you would find out it was thinking about fish stuff.

Stanisław Lem's Sci-Fi focused on that concept a lot - that yes, we might find intelligent life in the universe, but it might be so completely different, so alien to us, that any form of communication is not as much impossible, but simply pointless.

Stanislaw Lem 1921-2006

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/stanislaw...

> Lem's IQ, as he mentioned in passing in an autobiographical essay (it was measured when he was in high school), was above 180, but no one who read many of his books needed that datum to conclude that here was an unusually powerful and wide-ranging intelligence. The son of a physician, Lem was trained in the sciences. Biology was his field, but in his mid-twenties he became a research assistant at what he described as a "kind of clearinghouse for scientific literature" in many disciplines coming into Poland from around the world.

Examples, I think especially are

- "Eden" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden_%28Lem_novel%29

Not as extreme as the other two in highlighting the impossibility of meaningful contact. Lem becomes much more skeptical later in his career. Because they actually do make contact to one individual alien and communicate with it. In Fiasco there is some communication but it turn out to be all completely different than expected base don human assumptions (and it all ends in the humans destroying everything, of course all from good intentions). In "Solaris" there is no meaningful communication at all, one can't even say there are misunderstandings.

- "The Invincible" -- "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible"

This is about non-biological self-replicating swarming alien micro-robotic life forms.

- "Solaris" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%28novel%29

> Solaris chronicles the ultimate futility of attempted communications with the extraterrestrial life inhabiting a distant alien planet named Solaris. The planet is almost completely covered with an ocean of gel that is revealed to be a single, planet-encompassing organism. Terran scientists conclude it is a sentient being and attempt to communicate with it.

- "His Master's Voice" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_%28novel%...

> The novel is written as a first-person narrative, the memoir of a mathematician named Peter Hogarth, who becomes involved in a Pentagon-directed project (code-named "His Master's Voice", or HMV for short[2]) in the Nevada desert, where scientists are working to decode what seems to be a message from outer space (specifically, a neutrino signal from the Canis Minor constellation)

- "Fiasco" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_%28novel%29

> The book is a further elaboration of Lem's skepticism: in Lem's opinion, the difficulty in communication with alien civilizations is cultural disparity rather than spatial distance. The failure to communicate with an alien civilization is the main theme of the book.

I remembered one more, just a very short story, nothing as exciting as the books:

EDIT (Thanks @yeellow): Pilot Pirx => Ijon Tichy (how could I mix them up? Well, it's been two decades or so since I last read them)

- ~~Pilot Pirx~~ Ijon Tichy series: I remember a short story from the "Ijon Tichy" series of stories (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Diaries): It started with a microphone being lowered to onto the surface of an extremely hot planet (hotter than Venus) and a conversation was recorded, I think it was a student and a teacher, or it was between scholars of that alien race. Of course, already it is clear that this wasn't about any reality-based-fiction, the whole setup was just to show human thought in a mirror by letting the conversation come from aliens. In the conversation the rogue (student? scientist? I don't remember) proposes that there could be life on planets that are much colder than their own. This obviously preposterous idea (haha) is shot down by the other party in the conversation and exposed as silly nonsense contradicting science (of that hot world).

By the way, unrelated to the current subject but possibly one of the best stories ever written, is the Ijon Tichy story where he is alone in his space shit and a tiny meteor destroys the controls. It takes two people to repair the damage though, one inside, one outside the space ship - simultaneously. He knows about some time altering vortexes and manages to fiddle with the engines to fly through them. Each time he flies through one of those vortexes there are multiple versions of himself on the space ship, for example his Wednesday and his Saturday version. The story is about his difficulty recruiting himself for the repairs. It's hilarious! It starts with him waking in the middle of deep sleep because somebody who looks like him is shaking him. In his sleepy state he forgot all about the time vortexes and he thinks he's dreaming. So he refuses to move because "damage repaired during a dream is not really repaired, so I may as well just keep sleeping". The next day he has the exact opposite problem: He finds himself sleeping and tries to convince his previous-day version to do the repairs together, without success of course. That's just the start though, more and more versions of himself appear and disappear...

EDIT:

Found the time vortex story (in full): https://english.lem.pl/works/novels/the-star-diaries/154-the...

Lem's books are great but the hero you refer to is Ijon Tichy. Pilot Pirx is also Lem's character but stories on him are classical sf. Pirx is also a main character in Fiasco, Lem's last sf book.

> Ijon Tichy

So, if you write it Lastname Firstname, do you (almost) get Tachyon?

(I suspect Lem of always pulling legs ...)

Wow, indeed. Lem is my favourite author and I read most of the books on him and his works and I am not sure I saw this. I will check if it is a well known fact but I doubt it is a coincidence.

As much as I would like this to be true, I think it's unlikely - Tachyons were first suggested in a scientific paper in 1967, while Tichy first appeared in Star Diaries in 1957, 10 years prior.

This is something that the later books in the enders game series starts to look at, with the natives of a planet, their origins and even the Formica. They're not quite like the first two books in the series which is why I've seen a number of people not like them (if you want more of that, the bean side series is better) but they're really good still.

Thanks for your post. Reading about the Fermi paradox brightened my morning.

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