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Comment by blaze33 | Hacker News Reader

I once read that whale's songs could be used to transmit a 3d image from one whale to another which doesn't sound so crazy considering that echolocation can activate the visual cortex.

I don't remember the article and anyway there wasn't much more detail but I always found this idea quite interesting. Could be that looking for words, sentences or grammar in a whale's song is a misguided and anthropocentric approach to the problem. They may instead have a visual language that just so happen to be transmitted by sound.

Like, do you see what I mean? But, literally.

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That is a fascinating idea. We do have a tendency (understandably) to try and understand the universe through our own lens. Our thinking is heavily tied to our sensory input, so it is challenging to imagine what having echolocation or magnetic senses might be like.

But there is no reason we should expect other species to communicate and think in the same way we do.

It’s hard even to imagine how other humans, from another time or culture think. While we have similar sensory apparatus we the world we experience is constructed within our own consciousness, with all kinds of emotions and memories mixed in with the senses. If you think about your own mammalian physiological and emotional .. affective experience .. how it feels to run fast, be surprised, see something you want to eat.. then I think we can start to appreciate what it is like to think like a whale or a bat. Even though their sensory input is vastly different to use, they still construct their world with the same kind of equipment that we do

It's hard even to imagine how other humans, from our time and culture think. I have no clue how people experience life with aphantasia or no inner monologue. Yet these people exist, right now, among us.

I think the 'no inner monologue' thing is overblown. I often don't have one as I go about my business because thinking in words would slow me down at ${task}. But if I'm driving or walking, then I will converse with myself at length. I'd be more likely to describe it as a dialogue though, because the way I perceive it, I'm talking to an imagined second party. It's still obviously me, but therf's a back-and-forth between different personalities.

I don't think parent is talking about you then? You have an inner monologue.

> But there is no reason we should expect other species to communicate and think in the same way we do.

The reason is how far back their line diverged from ours. The nearer the point of divergence, the more reasonable it is to apply how things work for us.

Which reminds that I once read there is a tribe in of people who conceptualise the future and past differently to western society…

The past to them is physically looking straight ahead, as that is what they can observe.

The future is conceptually and physically them looking over their shoulder behind them, as that is what they can’t see.

I might be mangling it somewhat! :-)

They conceptualize the past and future exactly the same as you do; the past is something they remember (some of), the future is something they can only guess about. Their language talks about it differently, that's all.

Although it is not built into the grammar of our language I've come across a description very similar to this, by CS Lewis, describing his perception of time as that of a passenger on a train who's riding with their back to the engine.

analogies develop further from there, such as events being passed at the moment moving very quickly, and large in one's field of view, and to some extent one js able to see around them and order their importance by size and speed with respect to one's own position. But they're moving fast and it's hard to take in all the detail at once, and being so close the more proximal ones obscure your view of the ones further away though the latter may actually be in fact larger or more significant. Only as they all recede into the distance of the past does their relative significance with respect to each other become more evident.

Interesting.

I talk a Signed Language and I know how to give a 3d image, for example when asking for the location of the toilet, like this: go through this door, then you see the stairs to the left, go down there and then from your point of view return but just one leve lower and the door will be to the right (from your point of view of now).

When asking for directions I am sometimes frustrated by the inability of people to tell me detailed directions. I know their language has limits and they just can't.

Another example, when my boy got on a chairlift the first time, I could tell him in detail what will happen including the change in speed and could include even the typical rattling when taking off. He was then very confident in taking the chairlift.

But I have difficulty imaging how whales communicate 3d situations... Probably by imitating what they experience by sonar and simplifying to the essentials?

We convey meaning using words, but it doesn't have to be that way. They may have sounds that map directly into spacial descriptions in a way that light works for us.

Yeah, for whales by mimicking sonar (caveat emptor).

In Signed Language you can point into a 3D space. If you define a mapping of the world into the 3D space available to Signed Language then you have the world at your fingertips.

I love sign language for it's "pronoun" system and spatial features, but the reality is we could just a easily "annotate" spoken english with similar spatial context, sign language just does a good job of teaching all parties how to do that be default. By not teaching ASL to everybody who speaks english, we are really missing out on more bandwidth (for detail and redundancy) in communication.

That's really cool, I'm curious if other people that speak in ASL or other signed languages are good at that in general? I feel like even if I was fluent in sign language I wouldn't necessarily be as descriptive but perhaps I'm wrong there.

Here’s a thread from biology stackexchange about this which also refers to CETI.

https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/108499/can-whale....

I remember commenting on an article related to that here so I went digging through my comment history and found this post about dolphin visual language: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3314056

Given that that was all the way back in 2011 and didn't lead to any big world changing events I assume it was just cranks being cranky and a lot of people getting their hopes up.

There are visual thinkers among humans. Temple Grandin being a famous one. She's written about how she thinks in pictures and had to learn to translate that to words growing up. Also how she believes animals think in pictures. Although I wonder if smell might be more the case for some like dogs.

People without sight can also use echolocation. With the right head location sensors and a set of headphones you could describe objects to them with sound.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lAtVOK04XvA

I heard the same about dolphins few years ago but alas I cannot source scientifical evidences yet.

I heard also that while the major part of our brain is dealing with semantics, dolphins brain is dealing with acoustics; some kind of study was sourced in the radiophonic show I was listening which was telling about the different eras of brain growth in the history of humans and dolphins, trying to find some comparison points to better explain how similar cerebral masses could be specialized into different operations and a lot of different things I don't remember.

The shrew like common mammalian ancestor was a night animal and could echolocate. The 3d perception could have been the driving force behind the evolution of the large brain.

Reminds me of Arrival (the movie).

I read this speculation about dolphins. I'm oversimplifying here, but they use their nostrils independently to produce 2-channel sound and some measurements consistent with 3D transformations have been observed.

That's fascinating!

In the thread of this thought, to search for intelligent life off-planet sort of misses the point, doesn't it? Here we have an intelligent species with a common ancestor, which we may assume to be easier to communicate with than an extra-terrestrial being. And we have hardly begun to attempt to communicate with our earthly neighbor in a meaningful way, but we have projects probing the cosmos for signals from space.

Following that thought even further, if dolphins or whales were as intelligent as humans would they even be capable of developing the ability to make instruments that can transmit electromagnetic signals?

Given the limitations of their physical bodies, would they even be capable of developing any sophisticated instruments at all?

Point being, intelligence may not be the limiting factor for extraterrestrial communication at all.

Why would you assume that sophisticated instruments are required for extraterrestrial communication?

I’m not quite sure what you’re asking. We were talking about searching for signs of extraterrestrial life by looking for electromagnetic signals that they may have sent through space.

Are you asking why I’d assume that they don’t have the biological ability to send electromagnetic communication signals?

If that’s not what you’re asking, I don’t understand how else they’d send signals through space without sophisticated instruments capable of transmitting powerful signals.

Please clarify.

Don’t words transmit 3D images?

They are no more optimized for 3D images than taste or smells.

Try and describe your chair or oddly shaped rock as a 3D object without referring to it by classification and ask yourself how many people would have used the same sounds in the same order. There’s no direct mapping between 3D objects and the sounds used to describe them,

First, words aren’t really related to sound. You and I are using words without sound, are we not? Language is an encoding. One of the things it encodes is shape. And even if you wanted to describe a chair without using the word “chair” you could do so using a series of precise measurements. It doesn’t matter that people wouldn’t use exactly the same words to describe it. In the end, everyone would understand each other.

>You and I are using words without sound, are we not?

Nope! You're sounding the words out in your head (or out loud) when you read it.

Not necessarily. Deaf people can read, even ones who are deaf from birth.

Exceptions don't make the rule. Generally, people sound words out. Even if the language doesn't have an alphabet of sounds like Mandarin.

> Generally, people sound words out.

That's how hearing people learn to read. But even then it does not follow that they continue to sound words out or play back the audio in their head after they become proficient. In fact, one of the hallmarks of a proficient reader vs a beginner is that the former no longer needs to sound words out. They can just look at a word and recognize it more or less immediately.

I think sounding words out would be the exception. Do you sound words out when you read code? I'm having trouble imagining that.

To chime in, I don't, but yes, it's my understanding that for many people the "voice in their head" instead metaphorical at all.

I was always under the impression that the internal narration used in visual media (e.g. the Dexter opening sequence comes to mind [1]) was taking a dramatic license, but it's apparently some people's lived experience.

1. https://youtu.be/d3_znBNPjl4?si=N5zfhtobEVtc5O1X

I think code is a different situation entirely. The whales are communicating not coding anyway.

It's definitely not "generally", it's not even a supermajority.

> Some estimates suggest that as much as 50% or more of the population subvocalizes when reading, especially during their early years of reading development. However, with practice and improved reading skills, many individuals can reduce the extent of subvocalization and increase their reading speed.

I am not. Not everyone subvocalizes, and for some people, like myself, an inner monologue narrating what you read is voluntary. I might choose to have the latter if I'm reading a book for enjoyment, but if I'm just reading comments online, I would prefer not to limit my reading speed by doing things like that.

Except you couldn’t come up with those measurements just by looking at a chair, and someone listing to your series of precise measurements is unlikely to understand what the object actually looks like. So it failed the basic goal of communicating the shape of something you’re looking at. Where the suggestion is whales might utilize similar bits of their brain that decode echolocation sounds into 3D images to similarly decode spoken sounds into 3D images.

Beyond that there’s a complex predefined encoding between human words and sounds and sounds back to words. There isn’t for your “series of precise measurements” so a dozen young English speakers at the same high school might all come up with wildly different schemes.

A subtle example of this is how is error correction mechanisms are automatically used. You can understand someone talking though some surprisingly serious distortions and missing content. Even written languages include quite a bit of redundancy. Remove every forth letter from a sentence and it’s generally surprisingly understandable. “I lo_e to _alk _y do_ in t_e mo_nin_.”

So your ad hock scheme could work if everything was perfect and someone write it all down, and then say turned those measurements into a sketch, but it’s all quite useless day to day. Thus people default to using general classifications and pointing at stuff.

> First, words aren’t really related to sound.

No, but they are related to a naturally occurring medium of language, of which there are only two notable ones: the human voice, and signing. Written languages are simply codified representations of these forms of natural language. (Note: Sign languages are distinct unrelated languages from the local spoken languages with their own grammar and everything, not just signed representations of them.)

By using written language, you are merely encoding a representation of a spoken phrase into a graphical representation. This is what truly makes writing separate from other commonplace but more abstract symbols, such as arrows, crosses, checkmarks, bathroom/restaurant/exit indicators, warning signs, etc, which convey an idea quite effectively but do not have a clear reliable decoding into natural language (i.e. if you ask 100 people to explain what they indicate, you won't be given the exact same sentence 100 times).

> By using written language, you are merely encoding a representation of a spoken phrase into a graphical representation.

I would argue the opposite. Language is an encoding of ideas. By speaking, we are merely using an auditory representation of a word and when we write we use a graphical representation of a word, but the word is entirely separate from both audible and graphical representation. And indeed, we see that we can create other representations of a word. We can create a mathematical representation, like in the case of LLMs, and use words in a way that is entirely separate from sound and visuals. As a species, we used sound to invent words, but the invention isn’t tied to sound in any way. If we, as a species, evolved further and lost our vocal cords and ears, we could still use words. We could also continue to use words if we lost our sight as well. Truly words are separate from our senses.

That’s not how language works, people still use sounds and gesticulations not just words. If we lost the ability to speak we might abandon words entirely for something else.

Buzz, growl, etc are obvious example where sound directly influenced what the word was and how it’s written. But the ability for kids to form specific sounds also influenced words like mom. The same is true of world complexity, natural languages always have some imperatives like stop and go that are short and simple rather than long complex utterances like sesquipedalian.

Further, comparisons between languages suggest that words evolved from sounds. “No” for example sounds similar in a shocking number of languages from Afro-Eurasia and the America’s despite very long term separation.

We might abandon words for something else, but we wouldn’t need to abandon words because they could continue to work without sounds. That’s because words are a totally distinct concept from sounds.

It’s super ironic to talk about how sounds and gestures are a part of language while using purely written communication to talk. We will never hear each other. You will never see my gestures. And yet…

It’s possible to communicate in words alone just as it’s possible to communicate non verbally, but misunderstanding increases. The written word is a poor subset of language not a 1:1 mapping of tone and cadence.

As to abandoning words, we might abandon them for something better. When people use a whiteboard they tend to draw a great deal rather than simply writing words down. If we eventually move to say brain machine interfaces we could be sending more nuanced thoughts than words allow. Subtle degrees of emotion and perception that the written word simply can’t convey. The old a picture is worth a 1,000 words but taken even further to the point where the use of words atrophy and eventually disappear.

If I said "blue chair" then wouldn't it likely activate the visual cortex in most humans as they relate it back to an image stored in their brain from past experience?

A few words are related to sound: in English, "meow" sort of sounds like the sound cats make (although my cat is much more nuanced, he wants you to know!). "Woof" sort of sounds like some dogs' bark, "cock-a-doodle-do" has the same stress pattern as some roosters, and so forth.

Some languages tend to have more onomatopoeic sounds than English, and signs in sign language (especially "young" sign languages, meaning sign languages that have been codified recently) are probably even more onomatopoeic.

But in general, your point is true: the vast majority of words do not sound like the thing they represent. "Knock" (as in a knock on the door) doesn't sound anything like a knock.

This suggests not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molyneux%27s_problem

If you (think you can) make the case for 3D, then you can make the case for 4D, because we can talk about time--past, present, future, yesterday, five minutes ago...

Cymatics is very interesting.

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