Scientists Find an 'Alphabet' in Whale Songs | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Find an 'Alphabet' in Whale Songs

nytimes.com

252 pointstintinnabula200 comments

It is less like an alphabet, we already know that there is a discreet number of click clusters (basically an alphabet). Here they have found that the sperm whales modulate tempo of these clusters, rhythm within the clusters, add additional ornamental clicks, and change the rhythm of individual clicks within clusters over time (rubato). This adds an insane order of magnitude to their language much like our use of tone, context, and all the other ways we take our alphabet and enrich it with exponentially more meaning. This is the first time this has been proven in an evolutionary lineage separate from ours!

What are the chances of us being able to decode some of that in our life time? There must be some meaning to it, even if it's not as complex as human speech.

We should do it just to make sure they're not saying "so long and thanks for all the plankton."

The topic paper is part of a big project called Project Ceti that's aiming to do just that.

On the theoretical side for why it may be possible, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.11081 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10931

I am now anticipating some form of an existential crisis around whether animals that can talk via a specific language are any less entitled to rights than other humans.

We barely give certain humans rights, we'll have no issue ignoring the rights of animals

I expect there will plenty that think animals speaking is nothing more than a politically motivated hoax, no matter what research shows.

Clever Hans

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

Don't worry, we've had a pretty pisspoor track record with fellow humans too. There's always room to turn it around

It's always surprising to me when people seem to be unaware that things like human rights or international laws only exist as long as every authority (i.e. everyone with the power to enforce it with violence if necessary) agrees with them.

The US literally passed a law allowing itself to invade The Hague if necessary to free any US service member brought before the International Court of Justice. Even the signatories of the UN human rights conventions could simply refuse to cooperate and experience no meaningful consequences. International laws are just treaties and treaties can be cancelled or revoked. Human rights are no more reliable than company mission statements.

Not to mention that even on a national level laws only exist as limitations the state imposes on itself (or to chisel away at limitations it imposed on itself before). This is why it took the civil rights protests and literal terrorism to arrive at universal suffrage and civil rights for women and Black people. Of course this only works if the government would rather change its laws than escalate protests to a civil war and which one your government chooses might surprise you.

Don't forget us gays, too.

And yep, everybody's just a monkey with or without a stick.

So what you're saying is to some extent everything's made up and the points don't matter, so maybe we can rope animals into this same messy web of loose promises too!

No, I'm saying unless those animals pick up guns and fight for their rights, they'll have to rely on how icky society at large feels about mistreating them and how willing we are to cause a ruckus about that to outweigh the influence of the moneyed interests that benefit from their lack of rights.

Of course if for some reason the domestic meat industry collapsed and people relied on imported meat there would be an incentive for praising lab-grown meat or veganism because it would benefit the domestic companies but that's more or less the inverse of what's happening in the US.

Animals already can be considered to have certain rights. The interesting question is whether a truly sentient animal could be considered a person - then they would have ALL the rights humans have.

No, an abstract entity such as a company is already given the status of a person, but it doesn’t mean it has the same extent of rights a human being is given in the same jurisdiction.

Corporations aren't natural people, my friend.

Wales, maybe.

Thank you for giving me some friendly response. :)

I understand the feeling here, definitely wales and corporations are not of the same ontological class.

What I was trying to point out however, was that just because a jurisdiction give an entity the status of person, it doesn't mean it give to it the same extend of rights.

"A truly sentient animal"?

Aren't all animals sentient? And what is the difference between "truly sentient" and "sentient"?

They probably mean sapient. We consider most animals sentient but only humans sapient.

That said, rights don't happen through scientific discovery but through reform or revolution. There are strong economic incentives to keep animal rights minimal and there is only very weak political will to change that. It also doesn't help that in the US there are strong religious doctrines that oppose the notion of animals deserving rights at all.

It's worth mentioning that there are indeed jurisdictions (not sure about the US) where animal cruelty laws are actually framed as animal rights (usually with some limitations, e.g. only considering vertebrates) rather than as protection of private property but even they usually don't include a right to life or bodily integrity and are flexible about what constitutes cruelty and what can be done to reduce it.

> Aren't all animals sentient?

How far are you willing to go with this? Is a roundworm sentient? An amoeba? A bacterium?

I expect most of our communications with them will be political in nature or will involve apologizing to them.

woah a double rainbow!

There's an enormous gap between being able to "decode" it and actually understanding what it means.

Wittgenstein's quote on lions is still relevant.

Wittgenstein didn't present any evidence.

Probably that I miss the deepness of this quote, but lions or whales are mammals like us and they must be chatting about their basic needs which we should be able to relate to.

For Wittgenstein words don't so much express things in themselves, but are deeply integrated in nonspoken contexts and impressions. It's hard enough to really /get/ somebody from a different cultural context, whereas a lion lives in a massively different lifeworld, with a very different body.

What does a word like "hungry" mean to you, when your diet is gorging yourself on freshly killed meat every couple of weeks? What does feeling "tired" mean, when you're the size of a bus and sleeping is done in increments of 10 minutes because you must constantly wake and resurface to breathe through a hole in your back? You can use language to gesture at these experiences, but that's different from really knowing what we are talking about.

Not that I understand Wittgenstein very well at all, even though it seems like it should be easier than understanding whales and lions ;)

> It's hard enough to really /get/ somebody from a different cultural context

This is such an eye roll statement. The world “really” is the one which does all the work in it. One would say “nah, communication is actually amazing, and through listening to people / reading their words and being attentive one can understand many different cultural contexts”. And whoever wrote the original sentence can always come back and ask “but did you really really understand them”?

> What does a word like "hungry" mean to you, when your diet is gorging yourself on freshly killed meat every couple of weeks?

I don’t understand the problem here. “Hunger” is the feeling which make you seek out food. If your normal is to gorge yourself full and don’t eat anything for weeks then you are not hungry for most of those weeks and then when you start feeling hungry that is when you start preparing for a new hunt, chasing a herd and so on.

We already and in our everyday life understand such differe ces. We know for example that newborns need feeding a lot more frequently than adults, so when they become fussy we ask “is he hungry maybe?” Despite the fact that our own hunger works on a different schedule. We also undestand that when a holocaust survivor describes the deep hunger they suffered from in the camp that is a different feeling than the one you feel 2 hours after lunch when you start thinking about opening a pack of chips. Somehow we “get it”. But do we “realy” get it? Yeah i mean we know that the baby will become more and more fussy the longer it is not fed, and will die eventually. We know that the lion on the hunt will eat us if we look easy enough prey. We understand that people in the camps turned to eat things they would have considered inedible before, and the experience left lasting psychological scars on many of them. And we understand that the person thinking about opening a pack of chips will stop thinking about it if something distracts him/her for a minute. “But do we really really really understand them?” Idk. You tell me what you consider “really really really” understanding anything. Because one can play this game forever.

> What does feeling "tired" mean, when you're the size of a bus and sleeping is done in increments of 10 minutes because you must constantly wake and resurface to breathe through a hole in your back?

If that is normal for that being then they wouldn’t describe that state of being as tired. It is just their normal. But if something (illness, activity, noises) disturbs their normal which make them seek out more sleep they would call that being tired.

>And whoever wrote the original sentence can always come back and ask “but did you really really understand them”?

Asking questions that are very difficult to answer precisely and well, and then trying to do so, is kind of the whole deal with philosophy. How /do/ you know the things that you think you know? You can roll your eyes at it and choose not to investigate further, or you can try to get super granular about sussing out an answer. Philosophers generally try to do the latter.

If your answer to "what does it mean to know things" or "how do we actually use words to navigate meaning" or "how well can we understand other living things" is "I don't care, that's nerd shit" then I highly recommend that you don't read Wittgenstein, because you're gonna get real bored real fast.

> highly recommend that you don't read Wittgenstein,

I did read Wittgenstein. I still hold contempt in my heart to those aping his thoughts mindlessly.

> Asking questions that are very difficult to answer precisely and well, and then trying to do so, is kind of the whole deal with philosophy.

Yes. And declaring that things are impossible is not that. "If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it." is a feel. It's not the conclusion of a reasoned argument. (I'm talking about the sentence in the context it is found in the Philosophical Investigations of Wittgenstein)

> If your answer to "what does it mean to know things" or "how do we actually use words to navigate meaning" or "how well can we understand other living things" is "I don't care, that's nerd shit"

No. Those are all very interesting questions. But if you start with "understanding is impossible" then I hope you get a hug from a loved one. That stuff is hurt speaking. It is not a usefull starting point to answer any of those questions.

I don't think anybody here is upholding Wittgenstein as an exemplar of an emotionally well-adjusted person. I'm not proselytizing for him, just explaining his take to the best of my ability.

I don't disagree with this criticism of his position either, for what it's worth - Personally I think Wittgenstein ignores empathy as a transfer of embodied nonspoken knowledge, for one.

It'd be one thing if his example were of something very radically different (IE space aliens), but social mammals like lions and whales and humans all learn to navigate the world through the presence of others first and foremost. Long before you have any awareness of language, even long before birth, you will have an awareness of closeness. You will primarily learn to navigate the world by way of your relationships to others. That goes whether you're a lion cub or a human baby.

> It'd be one thing if his example were of something very radically different

Yeah absolutely! I just think Lions would be easy. :D But imagine trying to explain to a tree what a "having a bad commute" is. :)

Reminds me of the Chinese room [1] argument: Does a computer really understand Chinese language if it can respond to Chinese inputs with Chinese outputs?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

> Searle's thought experiment begins with this hypothetical premise: suppose that artificial intelligence research has succeeded in constructing a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. It takes Chinese characters as input and, by following the instructions of a computer program, produces other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Suppose, says Searle, that this computer performs its task so convincingly that it comfortably passes the Turing test: it convinces a human Chinese speaker that the program is itself a live Chinese speaker. To all of the questions that the person asks, it makes appropriate responses, such that any Chinese speaker would be convinced that they are talking to another Chinese-speaking human being.

> The question Searle wants to answer is this: does the machine literally "understand" Chinese? Or is it merely simulating the ability to understand Chinese? Searle calls the first position "strong AI" and the latter "weak AI".

(Emphasis added)

If we were to make an analogy to contemporary machine learning, we're talking about the difference between an LLM (with context) and a Markov Chain. 'Understanding' requires novel reuse of recollections. Recollections require memory (i.e. context), and the novel reuse of those recollections require a world model with which to inference.

> The question Searle wants to answer is this: does the machine literally "understand" Chinese? Or is it merely simulating the ability to understand Chinese? Searle calls the first position "strong AI" and the latter "weak AI".

I don't know why anybody thinks this is a profound question worth spending time thinking about. All it boils down to is whether or not we reserve the word "understand" for beings with souls or whether we allow it to describe machines too.. and BTW there's no empirical test for souls (not even for people!) so it's really just asking if "understand" is some sort of holy word reserved for people who have faith and believe in souls.

The question isn't about machines and their empirical capabilities at all, it's just about how humans feel about that particular word.

I am personally in favor of the use of the word 'understanding' with LLMs, but it should be noted that many people strongly disagree with that use of the term.

You're saying that LLMs meet the stronger definition of "understanding?" I disagree: You're confusing necessary with sufficient. [0]

Take the original analogy of a person with an if-then opaque phrase table, and make it a slightly fancier two-step process where they must also compute a score based on recent phrases or words to determine the proper output.

So now the system has "memory" and gives better output... But was that sufficient to create understanding? Nope.

[0] And perhaps not even necessary, if we consider an operator who does understand Chinese but their short-term memory has been damaged by an injury.

I think the confusion comes here in believing that humans have some exceptional mechanic for understanding. Ultimately human intelligence is the product of neural networks. The only thing that's separates us from ML is both scale (in terms of compute and memory) and agency, the latter giving us the ability to train ourselves. We take inputs, we output behaviors (including language). The idea that we are, in all actuality, deterministic computers is really at the heart of the existential panic around AI.

> Ultimately human intelligence is the product of neural networks

Citation needed?

Sounds like "human intelligence is the product of <current tech hype>"

> Citation needed?

"Speech and Language Dysfunctions in Patients with Cerebrocortical Disorders Admitted in a Neurosurgical Unit"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6417298/

> Sounds like "human intelligence is the product of <current tech hype>"

What? Neural networks is a biological/medical term. Are you confusing it with _artificial_ neural networks?

In a weird way "hype" undersells how history repeats itself: Rene Descartes promoted the idea of the brain as a pump for the spirit, then in Freud's era it was the steam engine, etc.

You can only be trolling if you say brains aren’t made of neural networks. Poe’s law in effect

> if you say brains aren’t made of neural networks.

Except biological brains are not made like hyped-up artificial neural networks. The latter are from a simplified hypothesis then massively twisted and cut-down to fit practical electrical engineering constraints.

> The only thing that's separates us from [machine learning] is both scale [...] and agency

... And the teensy tiny fact you keep refusing to face which is that they don't work the same.

Declaring that the problem is basically solved is just an updated version of a perennial conceit, one which in the past would have involved the electrical current flow or gears.

> simplified hypothesis

There's no hypothesizing at this point. Neurons have been studied in the lab since – checks notes – 1873. Modern neural nets have largely taken Occam's Razor rather than precise biomimicry, mostly due to 'The Bitter Lesson' that basic neural networks show more generalizable emergent behaviors when scaled vs being clever about it. e.g., dendrites themselves have been shown to behave something like a multilayer perceptron on their own. So it's really perceptrons all the way down when it comes to brain circuitry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golgi%27s_method

> electrical current flow or gears

Perceptrons were built to be mathematical models of neurons. When gears or 'electricity' were first created/harnessed, there was no intention to build a model of the mind or to mimic neurons whatsoever. There really is no weight to this argument.

> Declaring that the problem is basically solved

I'm not making that declaration for whatever you might be terming 'the problem' here. I'm just stating that 'understanding' is still (incorrectly) rooted in our belief that our means of computation is exceptional. As far as anyone can tell, 'understanding' isn't substrate dependent, and as far as we know, our 'understanding' comes from neuronal computation.

You do realize that artificial neural networks are based on the organic ones? Unless you have some dualist interpretation of intelligence that involves some ethereal intangible soul that somehow eludes all detection, nor holds any explanatory power for intelligence?

If you were obliterate your own neural network, by, I dunno, shooting yourself in the head, might that have some affect on your intelligence? Head trauma? Brain cancer? Alzheimer's? Senescence? Do I really need a citation that your brain is where intelligence comes from? *scratches head*

Artificial neural networks have departed any biologic principles.

So comparing ANN to NN no longer makes sense to me.

> Artificial neural networks have departed any biologic principles.

ANNs are perceptrons. Perceptrons mimic biologic principles.

Isn't a large company more handy model than a "Chinese room"?

Hordes of these in practice own our species. They come up with the decisions on carbon footprint, on whether to colonize Mars, on where to shift collective attention.

Although these entities are only one of achievements of our culture, for now they dominate on global level.

Big achievement. "Consciousness" not strictly needed. Whatever the definition of "consciousness", a big company is driven by a glorified stack of excels and definitely couldn't write Chinese (assuming none of employees does, after Searle).

So, running a planet and overriding any individual human is not enough, let's focus on entertaining an individual human with an interesting conversation in Chinese? What do you even seek with that model? /s

Good point on the difference between decoding and understanding. The paper "What is it like to be a bat?" [1] comes to mind. We can certainly try to decode the behaviors and language of whales, but understanding their mindset is an entirely different matter.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%...

a big part of the project is to not just collect whalesong data but also measure what activities the whales physically engage in as they “speak”.

Temba, his arms open.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

it would be interesting if data mining and embeddings could reveal meaning hidden in the patterns and context.

Could be just like that classic Gary Larson canine decoder cartoon.[0]

Could be more musical. I hope / fear it's something more sophisticated.

[0] https://twitter.com/Andr6wMale/status/1501487704399298560/ph...

> even if it's not as complex as human speech

I wouldn't make that assumption. Just because whales don't have opposable thumbs and have a harder time making and using tools doesn't mean that their speech isn't advanced.

Extremely likely, especially with the increasing abilities of LLM to decode unknown languages. Then the test would be for us to produce these sounds and see if the whales respond as expected.

We'll just fine tune our existing models with data scraped from the whale internet. Surely that will work.

You could train an llm on all existing whale sounds, get it to “listen” to live whales and respond with what it “thinks” it should, then do human analysis on the results, maybe find one shred of meaning, rinse and repeat.

That's literally impossible. Imagine trying to learn Japanese by talking to a Japanese man on the phone, with neither of you being able to understand or see each other or what you're each doing. Without shared context communication is impossible. Best case, you and the Japanese man would create a new context and a new shared language that would be neither English nor Japanese that would allow you to communicate about whatever ideas fit through the phone line. Maybe words like "sound", "word", "stop", etc.

Impossible in a single step, but perhaps impossible is too strong a word to reject the possibilities that arise when we consider how the statistics of words, or sounds are connected. If you can work out the statistical correlation between groups of sounds you can start to gain an idea of how they are interrelated. This is a stepping stone on the path to understanding.

>the statistical correlation between groups of sounds

That assumes that the speaker is similar to the person correlating the sounds. For example, if you had statistical data for utterances of English sounds in the context of Magic the Gathering tournaments, and you tried to decipher the speech of a Swahili electrical engineer talking about transistors, you could very well decipher something that's seemingly coherent but entirely incorrect.

It would be an overgeneralization to assume that whales speak about things in the same statistical patterns that humans do.

You just applied the concept of conversation and topic to yourself when the proposal did not suggest that.

I could see that being possible with a human language, but a non-human language? No way near enough context, I'd think.

Then what's needed is a sea drone that tags along with whales and collects context for their language.

Well even one of those words could be enough. If I knew he was in danger by the terror in his voice well then probably one of those words is “help”

Nice. Probably just start with whale twitter and go from there

What increasing abilities of LLMs to decode unknown languages are you referencing?

(I possibly missed a paper)

No idea of this is even vaguely in the right direction, but this comes to mind: Unsupervised speech-to-speech translation from monolingual data

https://research.google/blog/unsupervised-speech-to-speech-t...

See e.g. here: https://ai.meta.com/research/no-language-left-behind/

If you scroll down, the very first step they describe is for collecting datasets of existing translations. They aren't translating even unknown human languages, let alone completely alien ones.

I dunno if sometimes the language would be contextual, and utterances could not be understood without taking into account the context of what is occurring, or the speaker. Yes I know human language can be subject to these variables too. Anyhow it's all speculation and the dream of talking to animals is surely exciting.

Also, a Youtube doc about researchers attempting to teach dolphins english: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UziFw-jQSks

Imagine if they are communicating using a lot of pronouns.

I can’t even understand some other people when they keep switching the target of the pronoun without being explicit.

“He is tired. He dropped the ball on his foot. He yelled at him for being tired.”

(How many people are here?)

I've heard that "da kine" in Hawai'i Creole English historically was, and still may be, used exactly in situations where the speakers share plenty of context, allowing them to figure out what it denotes, but leaving listeners largely unenlightened.

compare "dude" in Fig. 1 of https://acephalous.typepad.com/79.3kiesling.pdf

In a language such as Thai, pronouns are left out in most cases, and only added when you need to disambiguate. No plurals either, requiring you to add this information with extra words when it matters. But nobody forces you to communicate effectively, or use Oxford commas.

> Imagine if they are communicating using a lot of pronouns.

That's fine. The idea is to record them with lot of metadata in situ. Recording what is going on with the whales. (are they feeding? are they traveling? are they in a new location or somewhere they have been for a while? How many wales there are?) And also about their surrounding (sea state, surface weather, position and activity of boats, prey animals etc etc.)

You would need some way to convert the whale LLM to human language though. Otherwise you would just be making pre trained GPT4 for whales. One option would be to label data according to induced reactions in whales to whale language completions (i.e., let the LLM complete whale language and use the reactions to try to induce some understanding. But it feels unlikely we would get further than providing a chatgpt for whales that only they can understand.

You wouldn't necessarily need that. You don't actually need translated text for every single language pair a LLM will learn to translate.

ie train a LLM on English, French, Spanish data. This data only contains parallel text in English-French. Can this LLM still translate to and from Spanish ? Yeah.

You still have a bridge and each of those languages are not just from the same species but the same language family. If there’s English to French and French to Spanish there’s a semantic relationship between English and Spanish.

There exists no bridge to whale any more than there is aliens from Alpha Centauri.

Common concepts are common, what species the language is in is not as relevant as you think. Text and Image space, two entirely different modalities are so related in high dimensional space, you can translate between them with just a simple linear projection layer.

Where do you get this idea that LLMs can be useful “to decode unknown languages” at all?

How would we train the LLM to actually decode it though? Don't we need some way to weigh the results?

My guess: train a generative model to predict whale sounds, based on recordings of real ones, and hope that the resulting latent space will map to the one of a human-trained LLM. We'd need a stupidly large amount of recordings of whale songs, a tokenization scheme, and few already translated sounds/phrases to serve as starting points for mapping the latent spaces.

Exactly. Also, I think an alternative to LLM that is more generally trained towards identifying large linguistic patterns across a language could be cross referenced with the aforementioned more standard llm to at least point to some possible meanings, patterns, etc

We'd need contextual tracking of what the whales are actually doing/communicating to match to the songs. An LLM would be excellent at finding any correlated patterns between the language and actions, and then mapping those to similar English concepts, but that all requires the behavioral data too. Cameras strapped to whales maybe?

I unironically want this more than another particle collider.

Would just need a way to tokenize, then use predictions to map back to some positive interaction symbol. Something like we think a certain phrasing means "food-fish-100m-down" and whales respond consistently to that.

We'd do it without its "help" and give it the results which it would then recombine and hallucinate.

The people hand-rolling their own hydrophones think there might be a lot going on we simply haven’t been able to hear yet.

> This adds an insane order of magnitude to their language

Do we assume they only have one language? We humans have thousands of languages.

So more sophisticated than a mere alphabet, if anything

Exactly

Maybe it's more like phoneme set.

It always amazes me how science has historically tripped over itself to avoid calling what is clearly some sort of culturally defined communication as “language” when it comes to cetaceans.

I think and suspect these animals are far more intelligent than we guessed, and the ethical ramifications of that reality would be difficult to swallow. Many species of toothed and baleen whales are under threat of extinction according to a lot of climate predictions.

I think the whole point/perspective of science is that claims have to be provable with evidence. Scientists don’t make claims without evidence.

I am sure that there were a lot of preconceived biases that blocked scientific research from occurring in this space, but it might also be that we didn’t have the tools to examine evidence until recently.

Scientists are generally very curious, open to exploration, and absolutely want to prove the unproven or refute the previously proven with new evidence. It’s how they make their stamp in their field.

> I think the whole point/perspective of science is that claims have to be provable with evidence

Really, the whole point of science is that claims have to be falsifiable with evidence, which is more or less the opposite of provable. Nothing is ever positively proven in science, hypotheses are only ever falsified, and only hypotheses susceptible to falsification with evidence are scientific. A failure to prove a hypothesis false is the closest we come to establishing a positive scientific truth.

Pretty sure the reason stuff like this isn’t called language is because language is circularly defined as something only homo sapiens does.

Where did you learn this definition? It's the first time I hear something like this. I very much doubt that it's a generally accepted definition.

It's more a de facto definition than an official definition. Finding reasons that animal communication is not "Language" seems to be a hobby of linguists, in my experience.

Really? Does that mean the term 'alien language' is meaningless?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_language

I think we anthropomorphize aliens. We expect individuals that communicate, but intelligent life could take many forms.

Psychic ocean? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)

Distributed beings like coral or slime molds

You're pretty sure? Well, that's convinced me. (/s)

I'm not going to debate this topic here, but for what it's worth you're coming across as somebody who has chosen their stance and is cherry-picking their evidence and anecdotes to suit their biases.

While I agree with your suspicion that a lot of animals are more intelligent than most give them credit for, you're not arguing for that viewpoint well. You might want to revisit how you make your points.

I mean wikipedia is free but yes this is how it is defined:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language

https://www.britannica.com/topic/language

I’ve never seen a definition of language in a scientific context that frames it in any other context other than something humans do. Please feel free to show me otherwise. Whether or not you are convinced isn’t really my concern - this is a well known scientific thing.

A simple search on google scholar turns this up:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240572231...

For such a "well known scientific thing" I certainly haven't heard of it nor can find any evidence of your claim. Yes, most papers use communication instead of language, but that's because until more recently there has been little evidence that shows any other species communications have sufficient complexity to be called a "language." E.g. having words and sentences rather than signals with a given meaning.

There is even a scientist claiming mushrooms have language https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsos.2119... !

I didn’t mean “the word language is never used in a scientific text,” I meant there has never been a case in science where science has ever said “this thing $organism is doing is language.” You could get pretty nitpicky with the examples you provided - however I made a new year’s resolution not to fall into these silly little semantics traps on this site that I’m now failing, so I’ll bow out.

Language is a system of grammar and syntax for converying meaning. Until you find evidence of those, calling something language is a baseless opinion.

The closest we currently have to evidence of non-human language use I know of, comes from attempts to teach language to apes, (which is an example of some scientists saying "$organism is doing language", which you claim never happened) The general criticism was that the great apes did fairly well learning semantics but show limited to no syntactic ability.

We do see semantic capabilities in other species and there's long been reason to suspect semantic content in whale songs. Deciphering the Alphabet of whale songs is a great step towards figuring out the semantic structure. When we do, I wouldn't be surprised if we find syntactic structures as well. Until then, calling whale song language is speculation.

Do you have specific examples of places where we have both syntax and semanti

Yes - prairie dogs.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/magazine/can-prairie-dogs...

Combining semantic symbols is behavior we have evidence of in other species, but without evidence of structure impacting the relationships between the meanings we still don't have sytax. That seems like a good candidate for where we might find syntax given the apparent semantic richness, but we still have a lot of work to do deciphering prairie dog communication before we can make a scientific claim one way or the other about if it is language.

It's a claim one way or the other, isn't it?

These sounds are thought to be language

These sounds are not thought to be language

The default position ought to be "we're not sure if it's language or not", but then why are people so surprised when they find out it is?

A scientist would assert we have no evidence that they this is a language, but here is what we do know. Here is how it is like a language here is how it is not like a language, this is what we need to measure/prove that it is a language.

Agreed. Even in physics there are many things we dont know. We dont just say "we cant prove it so its not true and were not going to consider otherwise".

It isn't true that scientists refuse to consider the possibility of other animals having language.

It’s both.

Making unproven claims is exactly how science is advanced

Defining an experimental and null hypothesis and measurably testing that hypothesis is how science is advanced.

A claim is an assertion of fact. Science doesn’t make unproven claims. It tests them.

> Scientists don’t make claims without evidence.

History has shown that to not be true.

> Scientists are generally very curious, open to exploration

In my experience, it is the opposite. I often find scientists are in fact very uncurious when it comes to anything outside their domain of choice.

There are definitely examples of individuals, institutions and such not living up to expectations. That said, a "black pill" conclusion that the precise opposite is universally true is even sillier.

Going back to the context... I think scientists, linguists, musicologists and others have in fact been very curious about cetacean "language" over the decades. There is a hesitation to make "big claims," but that's appropriate... imo.

I thought it would be implied, but I meant "not always true".

Regarding intelligence, it's an interesting thing. I'm not sure I understand that assuming animals, in particular cetaceans, to be intelligent requires a "big claim". In fact, it's basically a big claim to assume they are not intelligent. Intelligence is a spectrum, and it does indeed seem to be the case that humans, in general, start from one extreme of that spectrum in assuming that all intelligence needs to be proven. For cetaceans, it's a bit mindboggling at this point that people are still surprised by their intelligence.

Cetacean brains are huge and deeply folded. If you simply look at a whale brain versus a human brain, once would guess that the whale brain is from the more intelligent species. Yes, whales are bigger and thus dictate a larger brain to operate, but it isn't clear what that scaling relationship actually is. And whales are well known to be some of the emotionally evolved creatures on Earth, so it continues to surprise me that there is this hidden assumption that they need to be proven to be intelligent. At this point, it would seem the burden of proof should be on those who think they are not intelligent.

In my opinion, part of the bias is in our own unintelligence. For us to consider something intelligent, it seems we require burden of proof such that the "other" intelligence is related back to our own. However, this completely precludes the perspective and perhaps even discovery of there being different intelligences. For example, the part of the brain related to emotional intelligence in whales dwarfs our own, all relative to the rest of the brain. Thus, it might be hard or even impossible for us to understand such emotional intelligence. This is actually where I think the science might be tunnel visioned. There needs to be more thought put into what intelligence actually is such that we might recognize intelligence that isn't like our own.

You could say it like this: "GOOD scientists are very curious."

In fact, the best try to remain child-like in attitude, i.e. being able to be in awe about nature, which adults tend to "unlearn".

> History has shown that to not be true.

[citation needed]

To not always be true. It's a little hard to cite hundreds of years of science history. But one of the big examples is general relativity, from many aspects. Many scientists simply didn't believe it (yes, the word "believe"). One could follow the theoretical arguments, which were sound, but many didn't want to. Even once evidence started coming in, many still didn't believe it. It took many decades for general relativity to be broadly accepted, and now today, it's one of the most tested and verified theories.

The book Black Hole: How an Idea Abandoned by Newtonians, Hated by Einstein, and Gambled on by Hawking Became Loved is a pretty good one that covers various components of this story, in particular focusing on black holes.

There's far more belief and bias in science than the science community will admit to.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology

I can't speak for others, but when I've discussed the work of peers or even my own work I try to be very careful about not overstating the results. It's far too easy for a lay audience to take such comparisons and run amok.

As for your latter point, I doubt that most scientists studying animals are the ones against preventative measures in regards to extinction. There are plenty of ethical reasons to prevent extinction of a species without ascribing human characteristics.

This is a nature article, not hard hitting scientific journalism - it is designed for a “lay audience” as you so condescendingly put it.

It’s accepted that there are unique “dialects” and cultural artifacts amongst different pods of orcas, for instance. They’ve been observed engaging in highly clever and coordinated attacks on prey (that can differ drastically depending on culture). It’s not really “running amok” to make a conclusion that they’re probably not coordinating and passing along cultural artifacts/hunting techniques by telepathy, but I do acknowledge that we don’t know everything.

What's worse, a lay audience that thinks whales are talking amongst themselves or a lay audience that has no idea whales do anything other than mating songs and sonar clicks?

The issue is that human language is visibly a tier above just "culturally defined communication". Lots of mammals have some sort of learned 'language' in that they associate sounds or actions with certain meanings, cats and dogs can even be taught to communicate with humans by pressing buttons that say human words.

However it's obvious that human language has much more complexity than just that. Barring undeniable and extraordinary evidence of communication of similar complexity to humans, the claim that cetaceans have language in the human sense remains extraordinary.

Well, of course some people do want to call it language, but so far it's not clear that it is. We might say it's so complex it's more like a symphony than birdsong, but a symphony doesn't necessarily have anything like semantic content. Given the way whale songs evolve over time, with wanna-be whales imitating the cool whales, it's quite possible that it's pretty much all showing off their talents rather than communicating ideas.

Used to be they were just hunted to near extinction, for their oil. It has since been replaced with a more whale-friendly alternative.

"There are no solutions …only tradeoffs."

—Thomas Sowell

Climate isn’t the biggest risk to some species. Some orcas (which are technically dolphins) don’t have enough supply of the fish they eat. Issues like river and fishery management or dam removal or ocean overfishing don’t get enough attention, but would be important to fix even if climate wasn’t an issue.

Maybe that's why they started attacking boats... Hitting the competition

fishing net entanglement is still the biggest problem for some nearly extinct species like the right whale

Noone wants to admit that we brutly hunted down and genocided the nearest thing to an alien culture on our planet for some fucking lamp oil.

Just like no one wants to admit that we cause untold suffering to billions of cows and pigs every year in our factory farm matrix.

That's why we don't talk about animal intelligence and language the way that we should.

There's many that believe cats and dogs have no feelings. Until we can convince people if that, I have no hope of people caring about whales.

Interspecies communication is a massively underrated field.

We've bridged human cultures in the past, which is easier because humans do similar (ish) things, we can use sight, touch, smell, etc to establish common ground.

We can communicate simple things with pets, though in my experience they learn from body language and intonation, understanding grammar and language feels like a step further.

What's the common ground with whales?

Like how eskimos have 100 words for snow, whales could have thousands of phrases for water, currents, temperature, storms. Fish, migration of different species. A language of relative position needed for pack hunting. They might tell stories about El Niño, earthquakes, tsunamis.

If they have social structure we may share ideas of relationships, friendship, giving (food), owing, sharing, helping, etc.

We might be able to correlate their speech with weather patterns and animal sightings. We could probably start a two way communication, I wonder if us or them would have better forecasts for sea conditions. They could act as a network of hundreds of thousands of sensors.

Sperm whales travel so far, that even without maps they might know the shape of the continents.

Very excited for the future.

From what I understand that 100 words for snow thing isn't really true, it's just that the language uses compound words like german, so it's just that an adjective + noun is rolled into one word (e.g. powder snow would also be pulverschnee in german, but it's really just the word for powder and snow without the space)

More than you ever wanted to know:

The snow words myth: progress at last - https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/...

Bad science reporting again: the Eskimos are back - https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4419

"Words for snow" watch - https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3497

The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax - https://web.archive.org/web/20181203001555/http://users.utu....

"Eskimo Words for Snow: A Case Study in the Genesis and Decay of an Anthropological Example" - https://www.jstor.org/stable/677570

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow

As a brief aside, I think "Inuit" is the preferred term for people mistakenly called Eskimo.

As the first article linked to explains:

> the language family is generally called Eskimo or Eskimoan, because it includes the Yup'ik languages of Siberia and Alaska as well as the Inuit languages from the northeastern half of Alaska across Canada to Greenland

And I've heard Eskimo is a preferred collective term for North American indigenous arctic dwellers, because Inuit is just one tribe/ethnicity among a few!

So it goes.

Just think about it from the other direction.

To most Australian Aborigines, whites are called "Hollanders".

How much are you offended by that?

> How much are you offended by that?

Tremendously :P where I'm from "hollander" is a type of pipe fitting.

Well, you should have discovered Australia first then.

.. but I am thinking about if from the other direction.

From the perspective of the non-Inuit Eskimos.

Often people claim that Hungarian has over 50 words for "you" (https://dailymagyar.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05...)

But even the concept of what is a "word" in Hungarian is complex. Words have so many different forms depending on the context. As a Hungarian speaker, I perceive three forms of you (te, ön, maga) and one ending that is added to other words to to form a second person form of the word (-d), but even that is a complete oversimplification.

I don't think there is any reason why whale languages would have a concept of discreet words like we have in English.

Fun fact: That is why linguists are more interested in spoken language than written language. Written languages are ultimately "amateur" attempts to codify spoken (natural) languages. Spoken language consists of utterances not letters, words or sentences. Analyzing language requires grouping sounds into compounds that serve specific functions or carry specific semantics but for spoken language the structure will be a lot fuzzier and more complex than for the simplified written language even if the author attempts to replicate spoken language in writing. Even phonemes don't tell the full story.

A list of 65 English words/phrases for types of snow by a skier: https://skimo.co/words-for-snow but missing a few "spring snow", "Sierra cement".

Ok, so let’s say there are ten qualifiers and ten base words for snow. That makes 100 compound words.

It’s still substantially more snow-related vocabulary than in German, it seems to me.

Phrases, then.

I like how you start out with "their experience is so alien how can we even expect to have words for their relevant concepts", and then proceed to list a bunch of words for their relevant concepts.

I can understand why scientists, linguists, and whale enthusiasts might be interested in understanding whale communication. But I have a much harder time imagining that whales have much to say to humans other than, "Please kindly fuck off" in 99% of cases.

Dogs have a lot to say to humans. Most of it also applies to whales:

"Feed me"

"I'm hurt, help me"

"I found the thing you wanted. How about a reward?"

If you can solve the whale's problems, then it will have things to say to you.

Dogs have lived with humans for millennia. The majority of whale individuals can probably solve their own problems far better than humans can.

It might be true that the filter feeder whales are better at feeding themselves than we are at feeding them. But probably not.

For the predatory whales, it's definitely untrue.

The reason dogs live with humans is that it's easier to have their problems solved by the humans than to do it themselves. That's why the phenomenon continues and why it began.

I think finding out what they're saying about (rather than to) us would be amazing

Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47221-8

The chart on page 6 (of the PDF) is fascinating, kind of sums up the findings visually.

Much appreciated

Can we tokenize these signals? A ripe new market for LLM-based solutions may be opening up!

If we could (we probably can), we'd have a fluent LLM that would generate sounds that we still couldn't understand.

It's not a completely useless idea. LLMs are pretty good at relating parallel concepts to each other. If we could annotate the whale speak with behavioral data we might catch something we'd otherwise have missed. Since whale children need to start (almost) from scratch, it sounds worthwhile to tap into that for teaching an LLM alongside a real whale infant.

it's an important step though. with a whale llm and chatbot we would have a tool to study whale language and communication actively rather than just being able to listen to their interactions passively. i could think of all sorts of cool experiments with an algorithm that can generate whale click sounds and elicit predictable replies from actual whales.

Couldn't the LLM translate it to words that have similar embeddings in our own language? Translation is one of the tasks that LLMs excel at.

Don't you actually need manual translations to feed into the model first for that? AFAIK LLMs are not sci-fi-esque magic universal translators.

Not necessarily. For example:

https://engineering.fb.com/2018/08/31/ai-research/unsupervis...

> Training an MT model without access to any translation resources at training time (known as unsupervised translation) was the necessary next step. Research we are presenting at EMNLP 2018 outlines our recent accomplishments with that task. Our new approach provides a dramatic improvement over previous state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches and is equivalent to supervised approaches trained with nearly 100,000 reference translations. To give some idea of the level of advancement, an improvement of 1 BLEU point (a common metric for judging the accuracy of MT) is considered a remarkable achievement in this field; our methods showed an improvement of more than 10 BLEU points.

Although, this specific method does require the relative conceptual spacing of words to be similar between language; I don't see how that would be the case for Human <-> Whale languages.

No, translation from one language to the other doesn't occur in vacuum, there are millions of examples of translated text done by humans, without it LLM wouldn't learn anything.

You would need to align the vectors of words in our language to the ones in their language... which requires knowing their language (or enough of it)

From the article: “I’ve no doubt that you could produce a language model that could learn to produce sperm-whale-like sequences,” Dr. Rendell said. “But that’s all you get.”

https://archive.is/7prpD

Text only alternative -

https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/science...

Never heard of txtify. Amazing

Seems like the NYT found a way to fuck with archive.is. There’s a gigantic overlay blocking a ton of the content.

Boo.

I found this via the topbar history nav on archive.is when visiting the original link you’re replying to:

https://archive.is/vwQ4Z

also available on Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240507155229/https://www.nytim...

It is an SVG loading indicator that's broken when embedded on the archive page, nothing to do with NYT trying to obfuscate archival tools.

>nothing to do with NYT trying to obfuscate archival tools //

How would you know? Seems pretty likely based on how companies try to enshitify the web.

Looking at the code, there is nothing malignant going on, it's simply a common CSS + SVG bug. Most people wouldn't know how to intentionally write this so that it breaks on one page, but works on the other. Occam's razor etc.

install uBlock Origin, block content element, it’s gone (until they change things to not match the selector anyway)

I've always been able to read The New York Times through Tor by using their official onion address: https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2l...

No mention of birdsong in this article leaves me hanging. Surely birdsong has got to be much more studied, and must contain lots of complexity ripe to be plumbed for hidden meaning.

AFAIK, pretty much all birdsong is telling other birds where you are and that either...

1. you want to mate!

2. you want others to stay away from your territory!

IIRC there have been studies and they showed differences in the latter depending on the specific threat. But "birds" is a large group and studying "bird songs" is not any more helpful than studying "mammal noises" and I don't recall which species the study looked into.

It's worth remembering though that "language" is a form of communication and communication is vital in all social species. "Come here, I'm a good mate and available" and "Go away, I'm big and scary" are the lowest common denominator so even non-social species usually have some way of expressing those sentiments. But the more complex a species' social dynamics are, the more likely it is they will have means of communication capable of reflecting that.

It's also a mistake to look at utterances (mouth sounds) in isolation, especially when looking at a communication system we're unfamiliar with. Body language and facial expressions are a big deal in human communication even if we sometimes exclude them from analysis for simplicity. Not to mention that language features may be different if only because of the different biology (e.g. overtones, repetition or rhythm might carry semantics).

In other words, what Arrival did with alien "written language" equally applies to non-human "spoken language". It would be a mistake to assume that all the concepts we use for analyzing human language would apply to forms of communication in other animals even if another animal's language might turn out to be similarly complex.

https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/photoshop/6/0/1/150601.j...

For anyone wanting a short piece of fiction about human-animal communication development, I enjoyed this one (or part one of one) from Lars Doucet: https://www.fortressofdoors.com/we-trade-with-ants-a-short-s...

For a blast from the past, Ursula Le Guin's The Author of the Acacia Seeds is also fun:

https://xenoflesh.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/u...

(Note: PDF)

what categories of concepts would they express to each other? maybe an identifier and some conditions like depth, water temperature or pressure, maybe some magnetic or gravitational field direction and locations, tides, topography, mating, food, distress, and then probably some concept of boats and types of boats.

All of those options sound interesting and plausible, yet when I go for a walk while talking with a friend, I'm imagining an alien anthropologist wondering, "Are they communicating the ambient air temperature, and the availability of food nearby, their orientation to the sun and Venus setting?" Maybe the whales are gossiping, or sharing old stories, songs, jokes...

like the weather, restaurants, and plans for the summer, or even breeding opportunities? (will admit to missing the subtlety of the joke tho)

maybe they're complaining about how the options on whale tinder are too blubbery, but he categories for living things to talk about are definitely shared, and dividing phenomena into them is pretty straightforward. the real risk might be that the next iteration of GPT simulates an always just out of reach imagined better option and whales stop reproducing in pursuit of it. we should try it on another species first.

Good point, yeah, generally the basic survival topics are still in play even when we're busy with finer details! Still, giving an intelligent species the credit for (perhaps) engaging in the final details seems like something generous to leave on the table! Like whale dating apps, exactly.

Maybe the trees would show something useful to GTP

I'm really excited to see where ML takes us in cetacean linguistic research. I don't know if it will successfully translate whale song, but we'll learn a whole lot by trying.

Whale song is about the closest thing we have to an alien language. It's very much worth studying with all the tools we have.

Besides that, the 12 year old in me just screams look at the size of their brains! There has to be something going on in there. I really want to know what they have to say!

The smarter birds are easier to study. As are the great apes and dolphins. Research has been finding it isn't brain size so much as density and architecture of particular parts that leads to what we call 'intelligence', and I would assume what we could call a 'conversation'. Not that we shouldn't study whale songs, but that the scope is much larger than you indicated. We can communicate with gorillas with English words (but not English grammar last I heard?), but I'm not sure if we even know what noises and gestures gorillas make that are communication or are just them clearing their throats. But I've gone past studies working out the vocabularies of birds and meerkats.

Echoes Part II always makes me think of whales trying to talk to us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW9Kts3fo98

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a28802

Who knew that the sentient life we were looking for were beneath our feet in our deep blue oceans rather than up above the stars.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Oh we knew.

Hyperion covers this topic quite well.

Douglas Adams had it right, as usual.

“So long and thanks for all the fish”

Do whales have dialects or is it a global language

Here is the blog post from Project CETI that did the research

https://www.projectceti.org/blog-posts/sperm-whale-phonetic-...

Ridiculous how many articles repeat the NYT'$ paywalled headline but don't report any sources.

> Rhythm, tempo, rubato and ornamentation can be freely combined. This gives rise to a large inventory of distinguishable codas — a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet” that makes it possible to systematically explain observed variability in coda structure.

It's remarkable how musical analysis is at the forefront here as a central categorizing schema.

There's remains a lot of mystery surrounding human neurology with respect to music, but it seems tha music travels different pathways than verbal communications, while still having "liguistic" features.

Music might even have vestigial function for us that birdsong and whalesong are still maintaining.

Is this article's source available somewhere else, non-paywalled?

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47221-8

"Gracie is pregnant"

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