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Comment by theptip | Hacker News Reader

But the problem is not a black box. Presumably at least some (likely most) of whale conversation is things like “I see some fish to our left” where you can measure a result, ie does the pod go left. (Some whales perform highly complex coordinated hunting strategies, which you’d think includes some verbal coordination.)

Or at least, you shoot for that and maybe discover that 99% is philosophizing you can’t understand. But maybe you can bootstrap from present tense to suggest they are reminiscing about previous fish seasons. And so on.

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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 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

> 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.

I 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.

The problem with this type of thinking is that it undervalues the role that non-vital communication has in social species. Look at uncontacted peoples around the world. They've had music and dance even though their tribes consisted of a couple hundred people. These forms of communication serve a role in their communities but it isn't "there are fish in the pond over there" it's more special and abstract.

If we are to treat whalesong the same way then we can't immediately assume that they're just trying to communicate base concepts.

In any given human language, at least, most vocabulary tends to be concrete objects or physical processes. The parent is suggesting that we begin by looking for that subset of the language by correlating the speech sounds of whales with their behavior to objects in their environment.

Not sure exactly what you're saying, but: Bible translators regularly translate the Bible into other languages, including the kind of "tribal" languages you refer to. The people they translate for are fine with saying "there are fish in the pond over there", and they can also talk about abstract concepts. They may not have vocabulary for all the same concepts we have, whether abstract ("justification") or concrete (the Inuit didn't have words for sheep), but they have plenty of words for things for which we don't have individual words, and those other concepts can be described in phrases. And of course they have grammars.

I think that if you were trying to decode one of those languages you would take the same approach and observe coordination behavior, “there is a deer to our left” -> tribe goes left.

You need to start somewhere. Maybe you would never be able to decode the non-functional communication without a Rosetta Stone or common language root.

The point is that at least some of language needs to cash out into a description of the physical world. I’d argue almost all of it, even in modern societies.

It's easy to start learning another language without an interpreter or dictionary, you just start with concrete objects and actions. The hard part is representing the sounds (phonemes), which are often quite different from the language the learner knows. It helps that there is a way of writing all the known sounds of all the studied languages (the IPA, which Wikipedia uses), and it's pretty rare these days that a "new" sound is found.

I also see a problem with "talking" to whales being: "Hello, I am human who learned your click-language." "I don't care one bit, now where are the squid..."

Basically imagine them like some remote people eking out a survival but ten times more incompatible.

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