A whale who tried to mimic human speech (2014) | Hacker News Reader

A whale who tried to mimic human speech (2014)

smithsonianmag.com

278 pointsawll133 comments

What I find fascinating about this is that there are various species which have tackled human speech with at least some success (both actively and passively), while, conversely, we are apparently rather bad at participating in their communicative acts (like, imitating utterances in a meaningful way). Is it just for a lack of interest on our side, or are we lacking something else?

Edit, regarding "something else": Apparently, we are able to recognize individuals of other primate species by face at a very early age, but lose this ability soon (even before we acquire speech), probably in favor of other social abilities. Which may be an indication for a high degree of intraspecies specialication regarding our communicative abilities.

We can do some bird calls decently.

Maybe a bit off-topic, but here are some examples of humans communicating with animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child

those are quite specific and questionable cases, usually involving neglect

perhaps more pertinent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human%E2%80%93animal_communica...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_animal#Possibility_of_...

You can do dog language. Many people do. It's not about barking or asserting dominance.

> Apparently, we are able to recognize individuals of other primate species by face at a very early age,

Something very simmilar happens with language. Babies are able to distinguish speach sounds of all languages, but quickly lose the ability to percieve distinctions that are not present in their "native" language (native in quotes because this happens before they have made a single utterence)

I believe they make all the noises, too? But as they zero in on a single language, some get abandoned.

I always wondered if we would try to bridge the gap what would happen? Imagine a whale ambassador, driving around in a huge half-tracked aquarium, holding speeches about what the fishing fleets currently are doing is murder.

I’m sure any skilled hunter would argue differently. Just watch Meat Eater on YouTube for use of animal sound mimicary ant it’s use in hunting.

Certainly, but isn't this more like a replay, is it actually suitable for interaction?

apparently, turkeys have a pretty understandable language. There's a documentary, My Life as a Turkey [1]; he was able to decipher what each call meant (e.g. which squawk meant "snake" and which one meant "eagle"). So, if you were walking with a turkey, and you saw a snake and wanted to warn it about it, you could, in theory, communicate with it.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/my-life-as-a-turkey-introduc...

And these probably would vary by region, just like how whales, dolphins and orcas have different languages too

That's really cool, I didn't knew turkeys did that

I mean, this is the same thing that the whales are doing though. What's the difference? In both cases it's just mimicry.

There are degrees, a whole spectrum between tape-loop mimicry to a high fidelity sharing of mental states when it comes to language.

Mimicry with context is a good way (the only way?) to develop an understanding of language.

> Is it just for a lack of interest on our side, or are we lacking something else?

A combination of the two probably. I communicate with my pet cat by mimicking her different kinds of meows, hisses, and purrs. It makes it a lot easier because it's very obvious to me she understands that language, but of course it's not perfect

It seems unlikely I'm the only person who does this. Probably a lot of people speak to their pets in the animal's own language.

There are dogs that have vocabularies of several hundred words. People should breed those together, rather than the incomprehensibly stupid existing breed characteristics.

Smart dogs are working dogs. If they've got no work, they'll get up to bad things usually because you've left them in your house all day. If you want a pet, get a dumb dog. Or, a very lazy breed, like a greyhound.

Agreed. I think people forget that smart animals are smart enough to do bad things because they feel like it

I had a particularly smart and runty beagle when I was a kid that watched the cats jump the fence once, and then worked out that she could leave whenever she wanted.

I had a super smart poodle mix growing up, and it was smart enough to easily open the latch on its cage from the inside with its tongue. It also knew how to rearrange chairs in order to climb onto the dinner table.

The ones that are too smart outsmart the owners, which some dog owners see as a bad thing.

The donkey has the reputation for being stupid and lazy because it, unlike the horse, is smart enough to tell the human “I don’t care”

Greyhounds are as full of love as they are glorious stupidity. I highly recommend them to anyone considering dog ownership.

I do wish I had a border collie (very intelligent working dog) in my life though. I should go round befriending local farmers so I can play with their dogs :D

Do you really want to breed half-sentient predators that survive just fine in the wild and human settled areas?

Your cute little buddy living a hard life after a few feral generations after being bred for intelligence... I don't know most people live lives almost completely sheltered from wildlife, but let me tell you, wild dogs can be scary.

Yes, definitely. Because most of the dogs that would actually be looked after would be great for a variety of other tasks - everything from being service dogs, dogs that check for illegal substances by smell, police dogs, dogs who can herd animals and a variety of other tasks. Even new tasks that people still haven't been able to offload to canines.

If the animals can provide more value to humanity and will be allowed to become smarter and somewhat evolve, i think it's definitely worth it. Otherwise, if selective breeding for utility wasn't a thing already, we probably wouldn't have breeds that are passable for any of the tasks above.

As for wild dogs, this hasn't ever been a major problem in my country. I haven't seen any, there have never been any news stories about people being bitten or killed by wild dogs, i don't know anyone who has had run in with them and frankly there are bigger problems in the country - things like racoons and other small animals that carry rabies, foxes and the occasional wolves that kill off young deers and does alike, beavers that build dams and flood portions of the forest and so on.

Edit: looked for any studies that i could find, sadly there were none that'd attempt to quantify how many stray dogs there are in the country and how many of those have attacked people and how many have attacked other animals. Just found a news report of one person being bitten by them: https://baltics.news/2021/03/16/in-rezekne-region-a-woman-is...

Just to be clear, i am not attempting to say that wild dogs are not a large problem, just that it's not a problem everywhere to the same degree and that quite possibly there are other social factors at play - why would there be more wild dogs on one region of the world as opposed to another, especially when humans are the ones who breed these animals in the first place? Do the people not look after them? Are there puppy mills that get abandoned? Do people generally not view having dogs as a great responsibility? Are there no services that take care of wild and stray animals?

It's not like humans couldn't do anything about it either - if wild dogs are an inevitability in certain parts of the world, why not disallow "importing" dogs of these breeds to those regions and disallow breeding them there?

Here's an example of concentrated effort in regards to eradicating rabies in the country, i don't see why something similar couldn't be done in regards to stray animals (though it may only work on a smaller scale like in this country, at least without lots of coordinated effort): https://ec.europa.eu/food/sites/food/files/animals/docs/reg-...

I've lived in Norway (>30 years), Ireland (>10 years) and in California (3.5 years). There's extreme differences in culture around dog ownership in different areas. In the time I lived in Norway, nobody I knew had abandoned a dog. Getting a dog is a commitment for the lifetime of the dog; the only cases I've heard of relocation of dogs from anybody I knew has been for medical reasons (e.g. discovering somebody in the family has an allergy). In Ireland, it is similar, though people don't seem to take quite the same commitment (based on known several people that got dogs from shelters). In my relatively small social circle in California there were two families that got and handed off dogs in the 3.5 years I was there. It was just not seen as a big deal.

I do this a lot with my cats and dogs as well, they are smart, they just don't speak my language, so since they were small I spoke to them with sign language, for example if the dogs are still hungry after I give them food, I do the hand gesture of clapping in ASL and that way they understand that there's no more food and can see my hands that I am not hiding/holding anything

There's not much else that I can do when they go insane barking tho..... But they do trust me a lot and I can tell easily when they are trying to tell me things such as "follow me" which happens when they find something weird like a dead frog or some other animal they don't know (neighbors have chickens)

Also they lately have gotten into making holes in the yard (the dogs) if anyone has ideas how to stop that, that'd be great.....

why you want to stop your dogs from making holes in the ground? it's like making playing children stop

Common reasons include holes in the ground leading to dogs escaping out of fenced areas, or just general property damage (dogs can quickly dig large holes which are walking hazards, and don’t look as nice as a well kept yard). Also, when children play in the street, for example, wouldn’t you stop in that kind of situation? Or if children were digging large holes on someone else’s / public property?

Can't you just cover the holes, instead of trying to force dogs out of their nature?

well you could say this about any behavior. Why teach children to stop peeing their pants, isn't that just trying to force them out of their nature?

There's nothing abusive about training a dog about proper behavior. Anyway, I think a dog's nature is more about obeying humans than digging holes. That's kind of the deal we made thousand of years ago

peeing their pants will make them smell and mprobably irritate the skin. digging holes is a completely normal behavior for a dog (unless it's excessive or coupled with abnormal behavior).

I was at the beach a couple days ago and dug two excellent holes, one was artistic in nature an the other was a nice holder for a bottle of wine.

Nice way to pass the time while chatting with friends.

> Anyway, I think a dog's nature is more about obeying humans than digging holes

The international Canis organizations call such speech slavery and a canine revolutionary uprising is nigh.

I've tried to do this with cats, but they never seem to recognize that I am making a cat sound. Did you start when she was a kitten? (Alternatively, I could just be uniquely bad at it.)

Cats hear and respond better to high pitched sounds.

I absolutely do mimic cat language and they very quickly pick up on it.

I’ve got sounds I make that call just about any cats. Like I’ve made the sounds to stranger cats while out walking and they immediately respond. It’s a clicking sound - pretty sure it’s a common sound.

The two noises I used with cats are:

1. "sssssshheeeeessh" If you want them to leave, like a hissing sound.

2. A squeaking (by pursing lips together) to calls them or tell them you are interested to play.

Generally I don't believe cats really try so much to communicate - at least I don't get this impression.

I would say that with dogs they understand a lot more. They understand the concept of pointing and use it to communicate something of interest to me. For example, one of my dogs ran out of the gate and the other dog pointed to where they went using their entire body as an arrow. Another time a ball was lost in a stack of tires, so the dog requested help from me to retrieve it my pointing. I can ask "where is <object they know>" and they'll take me to it, or help me search for it - to the point where one of my dogs will help me look for my keys.

My dogs will also try to communicate with me too, mimicking what they believe I sound like. "Helllooooo" they really try to copy as a greeting. They also like to get involved in singing too - I think they somewhat enjoy some music.

What I like about my dogs too is that they understand the more subtle things. When two people are arguing or speaking heatedly they will try to break them up by pushing in-between. They are not allowed into certain rooms unless invited, but a small sideways nod lets them know they have a one time pass.

Dogs also very much like routine, the human world is confusing and if you delay feeding for a few hours for example, they don't understand why. They often do their best to fit in if you help them to.

I think people really underestimate how smart dogs can be. They * really * try to communicate back, but they are mostly unsuccessful. Try sometime to take an interest in their attempts to communicate with you, encourage it even. If they think they can communicate with you, you'll have a much better time. My dogs even help me keep my daily schedule.

It seems that some dogs are even able to learn to communicate via sound buttons [1]. Maybe that's interesting if you have smart dogs, might be a good way to better understand their needs.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LQt5TCHq6E

Thank you for writing this -- it's 100% spot on from my experience. Dogs are extremely social animals and naturally have a strong need to communicate. Just a little time and effort put into understanding their signals as well as teaching them/guiding them towards ones that work better for you will go a long way.

When my dogs have lost a ball under something they will bow at the location and look at me; if that doesn't work they will come up and make a little grumble and wait for my attention, then go and bow in front of the location again. Similarly if they want to go outside, we set up a little bell by the back door that they can jingle. At first we would ring it every time we let them outside, or let them outside every time they accidentally knocked it. They learned the association pretty quickly. Now if they need to go out (or spotted some bunnies in the yard) they will ring it; if we don't respond immediately, they'll come up, make a little sound to get attention, and run back to ring the bell again. I also have the same experience re: permission into areas and one-time-pass signals. Also the singing -- it's fun to get a choir going!

I really hope that people are working on machine learning projects for animal communication. If you listen to crows and ravens in the wild it seems clear that there are patterns.

I would also like to see technology interfaces developed for animal use.

I am worried that much of the natural language development that would occur from frequent interaction is being held back by the social isolation of most species that humans keep as pets.

Maybe humans need to engineer the languages and teach them to the species?

> I would also like to see technology interfaces developed for animal use.

I feel like just asking this question is step one on the journey toward overdosing on ketamine and drowning in a float tank.

Obligatory Gary Larson:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1d/b5/27/1db5279f8a07f1601bf7...

Obligatory Achewood:

http://achewood.com/index.php?date=07282004

> I would also like to see technology interfaces developed for animal use.

I'm working on a device for this! Stay tuned.

Wow. Don't leave us hanging! Tell us more.

Apparently horses have a body language.

So do dogs: for example, if you do something that makes them stressed, they use calming signals such as licking their own lips or yawning.

And it seems, we are much better at linking to this than to audible utterances. Compare the various "whisperers".

They’re also incredibly adept at reading human body language and emotional state. Horses with the gift of clairvoyance read subtle shifts in weight of their rider and know to jump or turn left before the rider says so or uses the reins.

I forget which book it’s in, but there’s an often-repeated tale of a horse who learned to do sums and could add numbers even without his owner in sight. It was eventually discovered that he read the anticipation of his observers and knew to stop stomping his hoof once they relaxed after peak tension.

Clever Hans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

Yeah but there's something different about this. Given how smart whales are, this must also have some form of awareness as to what they're doing. Parrots mimic words and phrases and focus on the micro-pronunciations. This feels like the whale is doing an impression of humans in a conversation.

There's strong implications that we as humans have dedicated wetware hardware for streaming out speech from the data structures in our mind. That hardware seems to be bandwidth constrained to about 39 bits per second.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/human-speech-may-hav...

It makes sense that other animals may be able to cargo cult some of the underlying mechanical representations of speech, but would lack the neural hardware that propelled us to dominance on the incredible short time spans of human history and prehistory.

Isn't it the absence of hands that has held them back? (from dominance)

Having hands plus less of or less good neural hardware means less dominance, as we see with our simian cousins, yet having the greatest brain on the planet wouldn't provide dominance without the ability to fabricate things.

Bears and raccoons have very dexterous hands.

Interesting, but they also don’t have the brain of a dolphin. We’re the ones who happened to get both.

I see no reason for that, it seems more like a pragmatic choice of reliability over capacity. (in other words to make speech comprehensible in noise)

There are other studies that show we can understand speech at a much higher rate. The critical bandwidth constraint seems to be on stream out, not stream in.

In good listening conditions though. Not in listening conditions in which speech needs to be regularly understood. Rap God is nearly 10 syllables per second at some point and a few more recent songs go even a big higher, so that doesn't seem to be the limit either, only that people don't normally need to learn to talk faster than they do.

I mean, Rap God is an example of the upper limit of stream out that took a lot of practice on his part and is trying to prove that he's one of top people in the world at that art, and I can understand it just fine.

It also doesn't seem to be achievable with on the fly statements, only memorized oration. Notice how my citation interestingly shows that the 39 bits per second isn't a count of syllables, but of semantic information. Some languages have faster, simpler syllables, but the overall information bandwidth flow ends up being the same. You probably can bypass that 39 bit with practice and memorization, essentially applying higher level tags to large bodies of what you're saying via practicing repeated phrases.

That seems to prove where the bandwidth constraint is, on the stream out side.

> we are able to recognize individuals of other primate species by face at a very early age, but lose this ability soon

I don't know if I buy this. We can recognize individual dogs and cats that we know easily, even reliably distinguishing between very homogeneous looking variants (various golden retrievers that look incredibly similar to one another. I've seen zillions of golden retrievers but would never mistake any of them for my childhood pet.) Why should primates be different than dogs and cats? I suspect it is only because almost nobody has more than passing views of individual primates. I would buy that we cannot easily recognize individual primates that are strangers to us, just as we cannot recognize individual dogs and cats that are strangers to us. Give us half an hour with a primate and I think we'd recognize them just fine.

As I know it, there are tests with babies, where they react to primate individuals, they have seen before, just like to humans they have already seen, and are able to identify strangers. However, this ability is soon lost and the "in-group" focuses to humans only. I haven't a source link on this, but there should be some documentaries on early development on YT (or similar platforms) covering this.

A lot of studies like this are done very poorly and should always be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism. One immediate issue that comes up is infants can barely see at all, born with incompletely developed brains, the neural machinery that translates sensory input to perception develops with the help of the actual sensory input... it could very well be that babies stop reacting to other primates in the same way when they can see well enough to tell the difference. (just one guess of many potential issues with topics like this)

Well, I wouldn't deem it that unconceivable. It's a somewhat sad, but well known fact that we do narrow this "in-group" even more to the effect that we are not that good at identifying individuals of ethnic groups, we're not so familiar with. It may be well that we start with a broad, hard-wired concept and refine this by adaptation to the given environment. (It may be interesting, how developments would go with an actual "wild child".)

Edit: I always liked to think that the stereotypical alien face somewhat resembles this blueprint (plus excessive light bleed as we must have experienced it at an early age).

Shaun Ellis seems to communicate wih wolf alright. Also i believe quite a few people in the world knows how to express the "this territory is claimed, don't come around here" howl message.

national geographic about him : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eerUnxonS-I

> we are able to recognize individuals of other primate species by face at a very early age, but lose this ability soon

I don't buy this. I visit the Primate Rescue Centre (Monkey World) in Dorset, UK, and can recognise several individual chimps and orangutans by their facial features (especially if you include ears). Discriminators include size of brow ridges, facial colouration, distance between nose and mouth, eye separation, etc etc. Here are some facial shots of several individuals to illustrate the range of variations.

https://monkeyworld.org/our-primates/primate-groups/bachelor...

https://monkeyworld.org/our-primates/primate-groups/hananyas...

If you factor in body mass and musculature and other bodily features the differences between individuals can be dramatic.

If you’ll permit me, your identification sounds very much like a conscious exercise in reason: calling out and remembering unique physical features as mnemonic devices.

That’s different than the subconscious facial recognition our brains pull off for humans; I doubt you find yourself needing to look at the president’s ears to tell if it’s Bush or Reagan.

> I doubt you find yourself needing to look at the president’s ears to tell if it’s Bush or Reagan

Indeed!

But I was really just listing the discriminators for the benefit of people who perhaps haven't looked at chimps very hard. For a few of the chimps, I can look and immediately say "that's Bart" or "that's Thelma".

This may of course be my mind having internalised a few distinct 'settings' of the discriminators. But the overall effect, coming back to my original point, is that apparently without conscious thought I can recognise specific individual non-humans. The Primate Care Staff, who work with these individuals 24/7, have very good at-a-glance recognition for the entire community.

I am reminded of the case of Alex the Parrot [1]. We all know parrots can mimic human speech very well, but the case made for Alex is that he was using actual language to convey meaning and not just parroting (pun intended) what he heard.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)

In my wild imagination, I imagine parrots being taught to communicate with humans, being let loose into the jungle, and the passing on human language to their offspring. Some years hence, people would venture into the jungle and would be able to ask the parrots for directions. :)

Kind of like this: http://www.chitka.info/attention.html

There is also the case of these dogs that have grown up using sound boards to communicate with their humans (sound on): https://www.instagram.com/p/CMuXy3mBcVw/

Wow that is fascinating, thank you for sharing

On a tangent: if humanity ever found themselves in a children of men-style situation, I think an excellent use of the final generation’s resources and effort would be building a system of fully automated luxury communism for the corvids and parrots of the world. Automated seed farms, drones that carry birds with broken wings to safety and treat their wounds, self-cleaning nesting boxes, etc.

Don't forget Koko the Gorilla. She was able to sign, understand english and recount stories of her past.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4QQ8Mfjb_g

Not as clear as case as we've been led to believe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYWSXRUGxDQ

Interesting watch. TL;DW - Apes like Koko were raised by trainers who did not perform rigorous scientific measurements and were prone to bias. Research on Apes became immoral over time, hence less recent examples exist.

The most recent and rigorous study is on a bonobo, where communication is done using touchscreen with buttons saying words (lexigrams). Even in this case interaction seems to be limited to “give me an item” or “put item in box”.

> Research on Apes became immoral over time

Teaching apes sign language became viewed as immoral?

Raising them only by interacting with a single person (not of their species!) would be immoral for a human baby, and depending on your views of ethics, also immoral for a gorilla.

Oh, I didn't realize that was somehow required to teach them sign language.

Do you mean fewer recent examples exist?

"Less recent examples exist" is a positive assertion about the existence of even older examples. The 'less' attaches to the 'recent'. 'Less' can't attach to 'examples' because you can't have 'less examples', because 'examples' is countable.

"Fewer recent examples exist" is a negative assertion about the existence of newer examples. The 'fewer' attaches to the 'examples'.

"Can Apes Really 'Talk' To Humans?"

Nit: humans are apes.

No, topmost common branch is hominidae

Still miles ahead of a dog. Can you train a dog to understand “put the pine needles in the refrigerator?”

It’s hard to say what’s happening in the video. If the ape is given a command-object-location and must discern all three to correctly complete the task, that would be difficult for a dog. (However, I suspect with as many hours of training as the ape has had, a dog could probably do it. I speculate it would learn all possible trios and remember them as individual commands rather than reconstructing them.)

If the ape is instead given an object and already knows he’s supposed to put it in the fridge, yes, a dog can do that easily. Given a command-object or command-location, a dog can do that as well. A dog can discern “Go bed” or “go kennel” or “fetch ball” or “fetch toy”. “Put ball bed” would be tough. (Dogs won’t “hear” all the cruft words like “the”, they’ll focus in on words they know and puzzle away.)

In any case the degree to which the ape in the video “understands” isn’t clear. It’s possible even with command-object-location test, the ape is doing what I suspect the dog would do. The difference between them might be scale, rather than kind.

I think they implied the ape could distinguish because they mentioned the trouble was dealing with two items.

Not a clear case of what?

It was obvious to me she was able to understand and communicate. Obvious in the same it was for most humans I've met.

The audio in question: https://m.soundcloud.com/smithsonianmag/noc-the-beluga-whale

Thanks!

We better not embrace whales trying to communicate with us. These finned "c!nts" are only interested in taking our jobs, our land, and even our women! Coming up here ... Onto our land ... With their barely developed lungs ... And their hopes and dreams "of a better tomorrow for whales". GET BACK in the SEA I say!!

My name's Tucker Carlson from Fox news, and I say we need to ensure the brightest and best whales STAY IN THE SEA, and concentrate on making it aquatically prosperous, instead of coming up here, onto our land, and beginning the process of evolution that will eventually lead to all life on Earth after the humans.

(apologies, this was paraphrased from Stewart Lee's comedy vehicle "comin over here" bit and is satire)

There are also recordings of orcas imitating human speech. https://youtu.be/hqB1jRVw7Bw

It seems to me more and more like the biggest, only real difference between most animals and humans is their lack of sophisticated communication. Certainly they communicate; but they do not have access to our rich verbal symbols with which we can convey anything imaginable. Perhaps you could add the lack of a prehensile thumb and deft fingers to build tools with, but I think communication is even more fundamental for the recipe of civilization.

Anyone can empirically recognize some form of intelligence in animals, whether it be your pet dog, a smart street crow or a beluga whale.

Additionally, I've never found the relative brain size theory sufficiently satisfactory to explain our superiority. How can the brain of an elephant, or a blue whale (about 7 times the mass of our brain), be that much inferior? I don't think it is; I think it is just different, and that we are not capable to really empathize with it enough (unless we reach some absurd degree of anthropomorphizing it).

If we accept these premises, what does it make to our worldview and the morality of how we treat animals?

Another point of view could be intelligent animals like whales see another dimension of existence we simply cannot understand.

Maybe they just think further, they deeply understand the fractal nature of the laws of the universe and they came to the conclusion, that nothing they'll ever do will have an influence to improve anything at all, since nothing is really bad, so they just sing their songs and propagate reasonably? :)

/semi-sarcastic viewpoint

Maybe this comes across as an emo-anti-intelligence-nature-knows-it-best post. It wasn't intended to, at all. It even isn't meant to.

This is precisely why I’ve transformed my eating habits. I realized that while I can’t prove these animals have a conscious experience like mine (or one I would value as I do the human conscience, I suppose), I also can’t prove that they don’t.

We can all read and likely have many experiences indicating that animals, in many circumstances, actually behave much like humans do. And for all the arguments that animals do x or y because they’re responding to stimulus, well... So are we.

It really clicked a while back and since then, I just can’t go back. I no longer feel sufficiently different from a cow or a pig in order to feel comfortable eating them.

I certainly don’t judge others for disagreeing either though. Just as I don’t judge wolves for eating caribou or fish for eating fish. Humans operate under the illusion that they have free or stronger will than these animals, but I’m not sure that’s true anymore. I’m not even clear on why I had this revelation or why it matters enough to me to act on it! It’s all very absurd in a way.

Occams razor tells me that other animals probably do have a concious experience just like ours.

Sure, they could have all the same internal organs as us (at least with mammals, and reptiles/birds to a slightly lesser extent), a similarly structured brain, be evolved from the same common ancestors and exhibit all the same outward signs of being conscious and self aware but somehow be totally different from humans.

But that would be much more complicated than the simple explanation that they are just like us, but less intelligent.

> Occams razor tells me that other animals probably do have a concious experience just like ours.

For most mammals, everything is so similar...including responses to stimuli like light, sound, temperature, pain, pleasure, even predictive behavior (knowing when they have done something to provoke a human response) that the same principle leads me to believe it's likely they have a very similar experience.

Everyone who has lived with a dog has seen the sheepish ‘I fucked up look’ when you’ve got home instead of the pure exuberance usually experienced

You know immediately there’s a mess to clean up!

I mean they clearly dream too. If dreaming isn’t evidence of an inner life I don’t know what is.

I personally loved having this realization. All these creatures of the earth are probably having very rich and significant experiences. If it’s not limited to humanity, then wow, the world really is so alive.

I still struggle to imagine a bug having a conscience that resembles mine. I’m not sure why. I tell myself they don’t have the brains for it or the sensory capabilities or whatever. I’m probably wrong.

Interesting book on this topic:

>In The Gap, psychologist Thomas Suddendorf provides a definitive account of the mental qualities that separate humans from other animals, as well as how these differences arose. Drawing on two decades of research on apes, children, and human evolution, he surveys the abilities most often cited as uniquely human -- language, intelligence, morality, culture, theory of mind, and mental time travel -- and finds that two traits account for most of the ways in which our minds appear so distinct: Namely, our open-ended ability to imagine and reflect on scenarios, and our insatiable drive to link our minds together. These two traits explain how our species was able to amplify qualities that we inherited in parallel with our animal counterparts; transforming animal communication into language, memory into mental time travel, sociality into mind reading, problem solving into abstract reasoning, traditions into culture, and empathy into morality.

>Suddendorf concludes with the provocative suggestion that our unrivalled status may be our own creation -- and that the gap is growing wider not so much because we are becoming smarter but because we are killing off our closest intelligent animal relatives.

https://www.amazon.com/Gap-Science-Separates-Other-Animals/d...

The arguments around this seem paradoxical.

"Animal have a strong commonality with us, so we shouldn't eat them in the fashion that we don't eat each other.

But

"Animal has a strong commonality with us, and one species of animal will eat another species of animal. Even species considered herbivores will eat some meat when it comes to them (deer, etc). If we're like animals, what is wrong with behaving like them?"

At which point, the argument skews to look at what's different about humans (most often "we can choose good versus evil" etc)

That said, for all I know, some different, intelligent, omnivorous animal species has had a group or subculture that also decided to stop eating meat. Of course we actually know little about these things.

This is part of why I don’t judge others for eating animals. Plus, I do still eat fish. If I’m to judge anyone, it should be me first.

I also intended to some degree to be paradoxical, but I’m a terrible communicator so it wasn’t evident outside my mind. Like I said though, ultimately it all seems absurd to me. Digging deep into what is good or right or moral when it comes to these things is incredibly challenging. Ultimately I wonder why I’m trying to figure it out. What a strange exercise.

I definitely don’t subscribe to any naturalistic ideas about how people should behave. I do believe we are much like the animals around us - far more than we’d like to believe or acknowledge at times. I don’t believe that means what happens in nature and among other species is inherently good though. I don’t believe what humans do is inherently good either. I just don’t judge people for doing what animals, or humans, overwhelmingly tend to do. Hopefully that makes a bit more sense.

If I may, what made you become pescatarian (is that the correct term)?

I can’t pin point it and I wish I could.

One significant contributor was when I began spearing my own fish and became intimately familiar with the moment of choosing if you shoot a fish or not. I realized that in that moment I’m deciding something based on a significant number of factors, but ultimately, I was deciding to take a life. I wondered how different that is from how I indirectly took the lives of fish by providing demand in a market which catches and sells fish, apart from the massive amounts of bycatch in the industry. But really, is my indirect demand different from pulling the trigger?

I know those thoughts and experiences, along with experiencing fish in their environment, caused me to begin to wonder a lot more about the consciousness of other animals. Fish are quite aware of me, my eyes, where I’m looking or pointing things. They certainly suffer.

It’s a good question though and I wish I understood better what really tipped the scale. Sometimes it feels very irrational, but my ‘gut’ insists it’s the right thing to do. I still question if I should be killing fish.

> Certainly they communicate; but they do not have access to our rich verbal symbols with which we can convey anything imaginable.

I mean, this whale seems to be doing about the same thing I do with my cats. I don't really see how you can derive any directionality here about how 'rich' their communication is from that. It's likely cats are intrigued and also baffled by what we're 'saying' when we do this.

That's not to say I think cats have as rich of communication as we do, just that we can't even manage to make much sense of other species' vocal communication, let alone mimic any meaning present in it, even when we are pretty sure it is actually simpler than ours.

From that it seems way overly confident to state that all failure on our part to recognize depth is because of a lack of it.

There's been some research on coyotes or similar animals, can't remember. They managed to figure out about 30 "words". Interestingly one of that tiny budget was for a human and another one for a human with a gun.

You may be interested in this Youtube channel, wherein a dog owner has been teaching the dog to use a gradually expanding set of talking buttons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXy7NTGHAyQ

There's another channel where someone's been doing the same with some measure of success with a cat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooCEYMaNL8I

You seem to have accidentally pasted the same youtube link twice? I'm definitely curious about the cat one and haven't seen that before :)

The duplicated link is now fixed.

Not sure why my morality has to change, doesn't matter if pig turn out to have conscious experience like mine, I will still eat it.

Ok, I’ll bite (no pun intended): if it were socially acceptable to eat people, would you?

I wouldn't, like I wouldn't eat dog/monkey even though its socially acceptable in certain place, in my mind its disgusting. Pig on the other hand its delicious.

That’s what I don’t get. Why are some animals acceptable to eat and some are aren’t? I know people who get totally outraged over dog or horse meat at but have no problem with beef or pork. Pigs are very intelligent and emotional. Way more than horses who aren’t that smart in comparison.

I can only speak for myself. I don't eat dog/monkey i think it because my upbringing/culture thus it create disgusting feeling in my brain.

I have no problem with pigs because I've used to it since childhood and i find it delicious. It has nothing to do with it being intelligent/emotional.

I find it hypocritical too, but there are some animals that also just don't taste that great compared to what is "common". Whale meat for instance resembles beef, in kind of the way alligator resembles chicken. But whale and gator are pretty terrible in comparison to the more common animal so they just aren't worth it to eat.

There are a lot of components needed for civilization. In the case of humans, agriculture was a big one, as it led to the feasibility of cities and specialization of labor. Absent specific adaptations to agriculture, tool making is essential for it. Advanced civilization is greatly helped by written communication (although human history shows we can get pretty far without it), which again depends on tool making. Without the ability to make tools there is only so far a species can get.

Human superiority also depended on non-intelligent traits. Without evolving the ability to sweat, we might never have had the opportunity to develop civilization.

Regarding brain size, larger animals need larger brains just control their bodily functions, so looking at brain size without controling for body size does not tell you much.

If you look at brain:body ratio, humans are pretty high up, but not a crazy outlier [0] (figure 7.13), and not the best [1].

A simple ratio probably not the best test, and seems to favor small animals. A more advanced measure exists [2], but suffers from a bit of a fine tuning problem.

There is also an implicit assumption that "intelligence" is a single dimensional value, which is simply not the case. For instance, beyond being a tool for communication, language seems to be a tool for thinking as well, but is clearly not a result of a general "intelligence" we have. Our overall intelligence is likely the result of a bunch of specialized systems within the brain

[0] https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/do...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio#Compa...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient

Environmental conditions are a big factor as well. We've existed as humans for ~300k years, but it was only ~10k years ago that we learned agriculture and civilization-building. That coincided with the beginning of the Holocene Epoch, when the world got warmer, the glaciers melted, and the sea level rose by 400 feet. We must have had those capabilities all along, but it was only when the conditions were right that they were able to be fully expressed.

Regarding your brain-body ratio https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/18/eabe2101

> It seems to me more and more like the biggest, only real difference between most animals and humans is their lack of sophisticated communication. Certainly they communicate; but they do not have access to our rich verbal symbols with which we can convey anything imaginable.

How do you know all that? There is ample evidence that whales, and in particular orcas, have complex intelligence and communication. If you can't understand what a whale is talking about, I'm not sure how you can make these claims.

Actually, I think many animals might communicate better than humans, but we don't know how they do it.

I wouldn't completely suprise me if their are certain animals using telepathic thought? Or, some way if communicitating we haven't a clue existed.

(And yes I know telepathic thought has been completely debunked in humans. Actually, there's a million sitting stomewhere if any person can successfully pass a institutes telepathic ability test. To date the money is still there, or a higher amount? My point is we know so little about other species.)

Well whales can communicate across thousands of miles without satellites so there’s one example! :)

A major distinction of humans is that we are a cultural species. We have evolved to pass down large amounts of knowledge to the next generation.

Being good at communication (and motivated to use it for teaching) kind of follows from this. We are not game-changing smart at figuring out new tools. But we are excellent at copying innovations from others, remembering them and fine-tuning them over generations.

On this I highly recommend Joseph Henrich's book: "The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter".

> only real difference between most animals and humans

But if I'm not mistaken this is not true of early humans, even "anatomically modern" humans. We don't really know when language evolved but it's probable that early humans did not "speak" for a long while.

I guess the emphasis is on tried

They should put the spectrograms of Noc's speech on the final exam of a phonetics class and tell students to identify the words without knowing that they were produced by a beluga. Then we'll know what he was saying.

Reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode where an earthling and an alien meet on a far off planet. The earthling isn't smart enough to learn the alien language, so she learns english.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_7,_Over_and_Out

There is also another Twilight Zone episode where common words gradually change meaning and the hero slowly lose his ability to communicate and has to fake understanding. Pretty scary one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordplay_(The_Twilight_Zone)

Fascinating, hopeful and yet saddening.

I would like to have seen something about Inuit experience with Belugans speaking HSL, Human as a Second Language.

I stumbled across this related project a few months ago, really interesting initiative.

https://github.com/earthspecies/project

Isn't there a single video of it?

There's an audio recording in the story.

Audio: https://m.soundcloud.com/smithsonianmag/noc-the-beluga-whale

A lonely Janissary.

Pha loves Pa.

"The day of the dolphins" is both nearer and further away.

Worst mobile webpage of all time. Cant read anything because it constantly jumps around loading ads and pop ups. I would expect this from the daily news not something like the smithsonian.

Use an ad blocker. It viewed just fine for me.

Your poor experience is justification enough for blocking.

I await the day when internet ads are not resource sucking, malware vectoring, PII leaking surveillance systems. Until then, I block.

Online venues say they need ads to survive. I say they need benign ads to survive much longer.

It could even be a form of competition, like Volvo marketing themselves as "safe."

EDIT: Cut to child reading a tablet with, er, childlike wonder, and two parents giving each other a visual "whew!"

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