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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

how is this different than me meowing at my cat and her meowing back? a “conversation” didn’t happen. Also, the scientific community is very resistant to the idea of categorizing any non-human communication as “language” (language is pretty much defined as being done only by humans) despite many cetaceans clearly showing signs of having this ability.

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Terrible article.

The crucial info that's missing from the article is that they used AI to translate whale language to human, and then from human to whale again.

So there was, in fact, a conversation, mediated by AI; a lot like using Google Translate to talk to a whale.

Wait for a better article on it.

Thank you, I was really hoping this was the case, this is a pet topic of interest of mine.

A pet whale topic?

interestingly, it puts us in a room adjacent to that of a famous thought experiment from philosophy, John Searle's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

The paper is linked in the article:

https://peerj.com/articles/16349/ (also has a PDF download)

Ah woops I posted this in the main thread before I saw this comment, thanks

It seems to be the "conversation" part, not necessarily "communication", one of the early stages in children's language acquisition is teaching the flow of back and forth responses and pausing for the other to speak: which seems to be what they're indicating in this article.

I read the article and can't come up with a way it is any different from you meowing back and forth with a cat.

This experiment teaches us basically nothing and has no bearing on talking to extraterrestrials. I can't believe it was written up this way.

This experiment? You didn't read the paper about the experiment.

Blame the crappy article, not the science, experiment or paper.

Read the "Results and Discussion" section of the actual paper[1] and tell me how it wouldn't apply to someone meowing to their cat. The authors even use the word "conversing" (in quotes), so the paper itself and the write-up posted here seem to be in agreement that this experiment should be wildly overblown.

This isn't bad science, but it's not exciting or any kind of breakthrough. It's some preliminary work that might lead to something more interesting in the future. It seems that the authors were desperate to make it seem more important than it was.

1. https://peerj.com/articles/16349/

It’s interesting for sure but ‘conversation’ seems like an oversell here. That implies some sort of exchange of information at the least which doesn’t seem like what happened?

I’m extremely interested as well but the article talks about so much other stuff than the headline. In decades of whale communication research no one has thought to play whale sounds at whales to see what happened, or is this just the first time one has responded? What does “matching intervals” mean? He matched their greeting, I’m meant to assume, which I guess could qualify as “conversation” but the researchers still don’t really know what information was exchanged, right?

Simply matching a greeting is a lot of information. It conveys shared context, it conveys an acknowledgement by the party doing the matching that the party doing the original communication was recognized and understood, it conveys an acceptance by the matcher of the possibility of further interchange, and so on.

The fury at this article in the comments is puzzling to me

> the scientific community is very resistant to the idea of categorizing any non-human communication as “language” (language is pretty much defined as being done only by humans) despite many cetaceans clearly showing signs of having this ability.

Plenty of animals communicate, just not like we do. I’ve always found the self-righteousness of humans to not accept that to be ridiculous and indicative of how entitled we are as a species.

Yeah, sure. We're the only entitled species. Do they have cats where you're from?

What's really wild is how impenetrable animal languages are. We know they exist and have studied them for decades but they are still utterly opaque. I think this really shows how hard inter-species communication is. We even struggle to translate ancient human languages and we share the same mental architecture. Animal or alien languages are really going to stretch our minds to comprehend.

The tendency of the scientific community to cling to ignorant and clearly false notions about the intelligence of animals just baffles me. Its maliciously dissonant.

Did your cat tell you its name?

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