Why alien languages could be far stranger than we imagine Essays
aeon.co
aeon.co
> ~~life is pretty resourceful~~
Youtubers are pretty creative.
The only thing i can imagine erroding that away is a prolonged surplus society. A startrek like language i can imagine pretty much communicating "hunger" only as a foodsource-error.
But the situations for the individual and the neuro adaptions (mental phenotypes)i imagine to be pretty universal .
We often assume that language, a distinctly human trait, is a prerequisite for intelligence or success, but it may be unique to us. Even on our own planet, no other species demonstrates the capacity for language.
I'd guess that it could take years or decades even for simple communication, and the nuances of cultural exchange could take centuries.
A large part of our "intelligence" is actually the ability to not needing to know everything, because we live in a society. I don't need to know how to build a vehicle or how it works to be able to learn how to drive it. Most animals don't have that luxury. And an important requirement for that is being able to communicate complex ideas with your peers, and pass them on to the next generations.
Maybe if intelligence alien life is completely different than what we find on Earth, this isn't necessary. Like if they don't live in the same plane of existence. But if it is comprised of physical conscious individuals, it's highly likely that they would have some sort of language.
> We also have building evidence that
You're agreeing with them. They didn't say we have "limited evidence of communication", they said we have "limited success understanding the communication of".
There is ample precedent for that on Earth. In our own history, when two district linguistic groups meet, they do not learn each other's language. They mutually establish a primitive protocol language (pidgin) that is sufficient for communication.
With animals, pretty much any pet owner can attest to establishing some communicative ability with their pets. Even with non domestic species like dolphins, scientists have been able to establish basic communication.
If there was a species of comparable intelligence, knowledge, and institutional capacity to us, we would be able to work around having incompatible innate communication facilities.
[0] In the build intergalactic space ships, and whatever their version of dedicating teams of researchers and supporting logistics is
She is very capable to express what she wants, but my attemps not so much.
Except when I make certain weird noises (a specific set). She will wave her tail a bit every time, whether she is sleeping, or staying at something invisible, or looking at the roomba.
I always wondered what this tell wave mean (it is just the sun's, they're is no followup afterward)
What would such a device be called? Perhaps universal translator?
If I'm understanding, the main idea is for it to figure out language/grammar rules, which would then enable communication between the two species. I think it makes sense to call that information, but its utility is independent of what we call it.
Such a device might make sense as something to include on probes we send out in case they encounter life, since in many cases round-trip communication back with Earth would take a long time.
> (Our) AI is not magic, and is only interpolating human knowledge, so I don't think it can figure anything out by itself.
I don't think deep learning models are interpolating in any literal sense - curse of dimensionality means essentially no real inputs or outputs fall within the convex hull of the training samples.
LLMs aren't currently as good at reasoning as humans are, but figuring out language rules does feel within their wheelhouse. Granted our architecture choices, like attention, do convey some priors that are true of human languages but might not be of alien languages, so we shouldn't expect them to be as good at picking up alien languages as human languages, but similar can be said of our own brains.
> What would such a device be called? Perhaps universal translator?
Such a device is properly called "a fantasy."
I really liked the concept, but the game was a bit hampered by a fairly rigid decision tree. A remake using a local LLM could potentially be much more engaging.
Training data for that LLM could be difficult to source...
Given it's an alien language, we'd be less inclined to see its flaws I imagine.
We know they communicate to each other, and maybe the "language" is simple. People have tried for decades without luck.
Can you imagine what a complex alien language would be like ? I think our only hope would be the aliens can understand our language.
Imagine that, hyper extrovert aliens that are understudied because they feel acutely icky to all introvert humans lmao.
Not really, no. Sign languages have basically the same structure as spoken languages. (Exceptions are fairly minor, e.g. the use of space for anaphora in ASL.)
> That the language does not have written form is not helping.
Again, no. There are a number of well-established sign language writing systems, including SignWriting [0] and Stokoe Notation [1].