Scientists working to decode birdsong
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I recently read a paper[0] that claimed to have decoded the basic building blocks of Sperm whale language. I went and took a look at the github for the project CETI and found that most of the code was for the whale trackers and hydrophones. It seems like there are a lot of pre-requisite problems that you have to solve to even get good whale recordings.
On the other hand though, whales probably don't rely on body language since they are communicating way out of line of sight. So it may be easier in that regard.
Anyways, I am convinced that we will figure out how to teach some basic human concepts (like self) to animals and the intelligence of even "stupid" animals like chickens will make people more reluctant to eat meat.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47221-8#:~:text=S....
Robots asking millions of birds to attack any hooman at sight in its own bird language, AKA the Tippi Hedren project. Seems pretty fly.
There was sporadaric research into animal linguistics, e.g. the Koko study, but those were dismissed on the grounds that animals can't have language by definition.
The ethics of enslaving and torturing animals is definitely part of the motivation for the dogma.
However, this "dogma" as you call it is beginning to be weakened as researchers document more nuance and complexity in non-human communication than ever before, and so some researchers begin to say, "maybe we shouldn't have this all-or-nothing view of language". But it is simply not true that researchers are suppressing evidence of language in animals out of a desire to enslave and torture them.
This always seemed wildly implausible to me. A very large number of communicable meanings, sure, but infinite?
This is "trivial" in the boring kind of way. With just digits, we can communicate an infinite set of distinct numbers simply by counting.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HDyePg6oySYQ9hY4i/david-deut...
The whole book is worth reading, though, as it lays it out in more detail.
Mary ran after the dog and the dog was brown and a cat came along and…
I think you're going to find out that no, you can't, and this impossibility is going to trivially demonstrate itself.
Both viewpoints are useful, they can prove general properties that hold for arbitrary long sequence of words and you put a practical bound on that length.
That's clearly false. It's not about some platonic mathematical simplification. Humans patently do not fit the Chomsky criterium for intelligence.
In fact, I'm pretty sure it's physically impossible for any real being to fit it.
Well, yes and no. Constructing this "infinite" sentence will run into some serious problems once the last star burns out, possibly sooner.
The only way you can represent this symbolically is in the trivial sense like you can represent everything, because you can use few symbols to build up natural numbers, and then you can use those numbers to approximate everything else. But I doubt it's what Chomsky had in mind.
It's far from clear whether humans are capable of the Chomskian criteria of language. And Chomskian linguistics have more or less collapsed with the huge success of statistical methods.
Is this a joke?
So very, very little new info will be conveyed by the vast majority of the content.
Not even close; they're already proficient at two.
A pre-trained LLM also can also learn new concepts from extremely few examples. Humans may still be much smarter but I think there's a lot of reason to believe that the mechanics are similar.
The argument is based on multiple questionable assumptions of Chomskian linguistics:
- Humans actually learn grammar in the Chomskian way - Syntax is separate from semantics, so only language (utterances) can be learned from uttrances, and not e.g. what is seen in the environment - At least in the Gold's formalization of the argument language is learned only from "positive examples", so e.g. the learner can't observe that some does not understand some utterance
One could argue for a (very) weak form of POS that there has to be some kind of "inductive bias" in the learning system, but this applies to all learning as shown by Kant. The inductive bias can be very generic.
It seems to be a persistent myth (possibly revived more recently due to Norvig?) that Chomsky's POS argument has some interesting connection to Gold's theorem. The two things have only a very loose logical connection (Gold's theorem is in no sense a formalization of any claim of Chomsky's), and Chomsky himself never based any of his arguments for innateness on Gold's theorem. Here is a secondary source making the same point (search for 'Gold'): https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/jcl_macwhinney_c...
The assumption that syntax is 'separate from semantics' also does not figure in any of Chomsky's POS arguments. Chomsky argued that syntax was separate from semantics only in the fairly uncontroversial sense that there are properly syntactic primitives (e.g. 'noun', 'chain', 'c-command') that do not reduce entirely to semantic or phonological notions. But even if that were untrue, it would not undermine POS arguments, which for the most part can be run without any specific assumptions about the syntax/semantics boundary. Indeed, semantic and conceptual knowledge provides an equally fertile source of POS problems.
People have been saying this for decades. But the hype around large language models is finally starting to wane and I wouldn't be surprised if in another 10 years we hear again that we "finally disproved generative linguistics" (again?)
Also, how many R's are in "racecar"?
Also, the racecar example is because of tokenization in LLMs - they don't actually see the raw letters of the text they read. It would be like me asking you to read this sentence in your head and then tell me which syllable would have the lowest pitch when spoken aloud. Maybe you could do it, but it would take effort because it doesn't align with the way you're interpreting the input.
Working well for what? Generative linguistics has certainly made progress in the past couple of decades, but it's not trying to solve engineering problems. If you think that generative linguistics and deep learning models are somehow competitors, you've probably misunderstood the former.
That idea seems like a strawperson, not something anyone seriously thinking about it would say. Everyone sees animals communicate.
You might argue that the definition itself is arbitrary and coming from the same place that geocentrism, creationism and flat-Earth views come from. I can't argue for or against that.
I suspect things as more nuanced than the current definition that we have though, especially after the recent study from the Scientific American that heated up Hacker News in a way that only "Is CS a science" articles can.
Chomskian linguistics does posit that human language is based on (innate) recursive grammars (narrow language faculty hypothesis), but this has always been a contentious question. And per that definition humans too have demonstrated only very limited ability in e.g. infinite embedding.
That's according to you. Just because a few apples disagree doesn't mean there is no consensus.
That’s the minimum level of complexity science will accept.
I'd say about 80% of the time he listens. So he is capable of understanding what we want him to do, and capable of supressing his own personal desires in order to maintain harmony in our group. Funny enough, he won't go to bed unless both me and my partner tell him it is bedtime, so maybe he is only obeying because there is some majority consensus?
Because of this, I find it easy to believe that a cat or dog could be taught something as abstract as "self" if they can understand commands and intent and group dynamics. It's just difficult to tell what is "understood" and what is just conditioned behavior. Hell, I can't even answer that question for myself as a human.
- use arbitrary links between signifier and signified
- generate new linguistic tokens (new signifier and signifieds as well as links between them)
- refer to events and times beyond the current ones
- talk about the system of communication itself using the system itself
Then, you would have grounds to think that your cat uses a language in the linguistic sense. But until, then it is just a communication system no matter how sophisticated.
Your cat being a extremely well oiled operant conditioning system does not mean that it is able to think the way you can even if they are likely more intelligent than what we give them credit for because, as much as we would like to believe we do, we don't know what they think and any patterns that we see are just good old human pareidolia. Like hearing voices in the wind, faces on rocks, etc. Your feeling is real but the belief that feeling induces does not have grounds in reality as far as we know so far.
Or is it special? We are just a well oiled operant conditioning system, it does not mean that we are able to think the way cats can.
Is there linguistic creativity? ie. you can generate new words to describe things never encountered
Is there metalinguistic reflexion? ie. can you use the language to talk about the language itself?
Can the language allow displacement? i.e. talking about things that are not in the current spacetime point
These are some of the core requirements for a system of communication to be considered a language.
2. You don't need to understand the words to push the buttons. You could replace the English words with gibberish and it would still work as long as you always give the same thing when the same button is pressed. Many animals can do this. It is called positive reinforcement. Nothing to do with language
It is also worth pointing out that detecting language is a great deal easier than understanding language. Something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c is reasonably recognizable as clearly some sort of language even if we have no (unassisted) human idea what it is saying. We can tell with quite high confidence that most animal sounds are not hiding some deeper layer of information content.
Such exceptions as there are, like whalesong, take you back to my first paragraph, though.
The idea that language is a uniquely human phenomenon may be "dogma", but it is also fairly well-founded in fact. It should also not be that surprising; had another species developed language first, they'd be the ones looking around at their surroundings being surprised they are the only ones with proper language, because they'd probably be the dominant species on the planet. It isn't a "humanist" bias, in some sense that humans are super special because they're humans, it's a "first species to high language" bias, which happens on this planet to be humans.
When we think about ETs, we're wondering about technological civilizations on other planets with space craft and radio telescopes, not the equivalent of birds or dolphins.
What modern person said that? I've read a bit about it and didn't encounter that.
> The ethics of enslaving and torturing animals is definitely part of the motivation for the dogma.
What does that have to do with language?
1. Train crows to push a touchscreen for reward of food.
2. Next set up two touchscreens back to back. Make it so touching one screen only dispenses food on the other side.
3. Next make it so food is dispensed on the other side only one crow is perched at each terminal.
4. Next make it so food is only dispensed after a crow says something to the other crow on the other side.
5. Next display a picture on one terminal and give the other crow the choice of four quadrants. The food is dispensed if the picture on the far side matches the displayed picture.
6. Start decoding words.
And I think the same applies to animals. Bird songs have already been noted to have accents by region. We'll probably end up finding out that if animals do have complex language, it's something they develop through community exposure just like humans do, and it'll vary by area. Crows in Texas will talk very different from crows in England, I'm sure.
With pets, most of them are kept isolated from the world at large. It wouldn't surprise me if dogs raised by people have very stilted or nonexistent language compared to feral dogs. Maybe 200 years from now, we'll see the modern concept of raising dogs completely alone as inhumane and sending them off to doggy daycare a couple times a week to learn the local dog language and "culture" will be normalized.
For animals I think there is less language as we know it. Communication is an instantaneous and unfiltered expression of mental state, and there isn’t much guarantee that it’s received as intended. My dog is the friendliest little dude. He will play bow other dogs immediately, and then jump around with excitement. But it’s extremely common that other dogs misread this and respond with aggression.
I suppose I think animal language is less something we could ever learn academically and more something you just feel.
https://support.ebird.org/en/support/solutions/folders/48000...
I think unusual bird behavior recordings are appreciated by scientists
Reading through the rules I like these people already. They prefer high quality .wav files as do I. Not sure if I have the skills to edit to their standard but I will try.
I've been more than happy with it's id abilities.
Maybe give it another try?
Whenever I hear this question I always remember the Eddie Izzard skit about birdsong being territorial, so the nightingale in "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" was essentially shouting "Get out of Berkeley Square! It's my Square!"
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/f0/24/0d/f0240d4ff7e3e08700f48d944...
Want to have sex?
Want to have sex?
Want to have sex?
As I mentioned before, only the most obvious examples of behaviors and context can be translated into anything meaningful.
Oh wait. Because the devil's in the details, the ones SW dev hubris glosses over ;) ;)
By almost trivial I mean it wouldn't require much new technology. Something like WaveNet or VQ-VAE could be applied almost out of the box.
Data availability is may be a significant problem, but there are some huge animal sound datasets. E.g. https://blog.google/intl/en-au/company-news/technology/a2o-s...
With LLMs we can leverage human insight to e.g. caption or describe images (which was what made CLIP and successors possible). With animals we often have no idea beyond a location. There is work to include kinematic data with audio to try and associate movement with vocalisation but it’s early days.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/transform/can-generative-ai-he...
At the time it seemed a bit wild / long shot, but now he just looks like a pioneer.
And they never shut up, plus they are so loud. They're talking about something.
But maybe this has become the tradition because when you clap for a long time it would slowly synchronize.
In the video it is quite clear a few people are seeding the synchronisation.
The idea being that the V takes shape because they want to have a bird in front of them the entire time while one poor bird gets stuck out in front.
I imagine they take turns like bicyclists do, right?
But it could be more than that. Maybe the lead bird vocalizes or signals that they want to swap out, and some type of social status determines the order, with disputes resolved by wing flap aggression. Or maybe not.
If, as Jane’s Addiction and many sf authors have imagined, we’re being kept as pets by aliens, much of our behavior would look rules-based, unthinking and reactive.
https://www.amazon.com/Mock-Mockingbird-Raymond-Smullyan/dp/...
Do dogs have a language? Woof woof woof sounds a lot like the crows craaaw craaaw, and while they don't speak they do communicate. Maybe there are nuances just us can't hear or recognize.
It's certainly fascinating.
How do you map sound to action, you can't analyze it independently, but also need to take the environment into account
Maybe the trick is to be able to know, and then temporarily not know when that knowledge is harmful.
give me a worm or money
The point here is that if you want to know what birds are saying you'd probably have to record the flapping of wings (especially with the more colorful birds) and then the bird song - their eyesight is particularly acute due to needing to eat fresh berries so body posture is most likely important in communication. A high def camera and microphone and an LLM should be able to do the job if the data is good enough on a particular species. From there you should be able to extrapolate to multiple species.
The language would probably be along the lines of a few set phrases
- wanna mate? - where's food? Here's food! - stay away - fly together south?
Stuff like that.