If a lion could speak, would we understand it?
I train my cat and while I can't always understand her I think one of the most impressive features of the human mind is to be able to have such great understanding of others. We have theory of mind, joint attention, triadic awareness, and much more. My cat can understand me a bit but it's definitely asymmetric.
It's definitely not easy to understand other animals. As Wittgenstein suggests, their minds are alien to us. But we seem to be able to adapt. I'm much better at understanding my cat than my girlfriend (all the local street cats love me, and I teach many of them tricks) but I'm also nothing compared to experts I've seen.
Honestly, I think everyone studying AI could benefit by spending some more time studying animal cognition. While not like computer minds these are testable "alien minds" and can help us better understand the general nature of intelligence
But Lion is not just animal, it is not just mammal, it is something more. Something which I have no idea how we would communicate with.
> But Lion is not just animal, it is not just mammal, it is something more.
But lions, and us, are not just animals + mammals. Being a lion or a human means more. Ultimately, there is a uniquely human or lion element. Wittgenstein is saying we cannot communicate this.
You probably didn't adapt to understanding cats as much as cats have adapted over millennia to be understood by humans. Working with and being understood by the dominant specie that is humans is a big evolutionary advantage.
Understanding a wild animal like a lion is a different story. There is a reason why most specialists will say that keeping wild animals as pets is a bad idea, they tend to be unpredictable, which, in other words, mean we don't understand them.
You or I, yeah, probably not going to understand a lion pretty well. But someone who works at the zoo? A lion tamer? Someone studying lion cognition? Hell, people have figured out how to train hippos so that they can clean their teeth[0], and these are one of, if not the, most aggressive animals in the world. Humans have gotten impressively good at communicating with many different animals and training them. There's plenty of Steve Irwin types who have strong understandings about many creatures who would be quite alien to the rest of us. Which, that requires at least one side to have a strong understanding of the other's desires and how they perceive the world. But me? I have no doubt that hippo would murder me.
My point isn't so much about would we understand the lion, but rather could we. Wittgenstein implied we wouldn't be able to. I'm pointing to evidence that we, to at least some degree, can. How much we ultimately will be able to, is still unknown. But I certainly don't think it is an impossible task.
OTOH feral cats are known for being highly social compared to other cats, forming large semi-collaborative colonies. And adult cats have much more difficulty socializing to humans than adult dogs, even if they don't have trauma/etc. I suspect the real story of cat domestication goes both ways: an unusually gregarious subspecies of African wildcat started forming colonies near human settlements and forming cross-carnivore collaborations with the humans who lived there. This was also true for dogs - it likely started with unusually peaceful Siberian wolves - but I believe cats were more "accidental." Humans have been deliberately creating dog breeds since antiquity, but with a tiny number of exceptions cat breeds are modern. I doubt ancient humans ever "bred" cats like they did dogs, it seems closer to natural selection.
But yes, both accidental domestication happens as well as non human cross species collaboration. Another famous example is with the cleaner fish and sharks. Animals also frequently collaborate with plants. Ants even have farms, both fungi and other insects
Huh. Apparently attention isn't all we need in order to parse that sentence.
Also, your comment still made me laugh. Women can be mysterious...
Would you care to expound?
- the % of shared experience/context with a mammal is > than % shared experience with a mollusk
- the gradient starts in communicating with other humans
and that Wittgenstein wasn't wrong in trying to use technology/science to bridge the context gap, he was just early.
Thus, to your point, assuming communication, because "there's nothing really special about speech", does that mean we would be able to understand a lion, if the lion could speak? Wittgenstein would say probably not. At least not initially and not until we had built shared lived experiences.
I mean who knows, maybe their perception of these shared experiences would be different enough to make communication difficult, but still, I think it's undeniably shared experience.
I think that's the core question being asked and that's the one I have a hard time seeing how it'd work.
My thinking is that if something is capable of human-style speech, then we'd be able to communicate with them. We'd be able to talk about our shared experiences of the planet, and, if we're capable of human-style speech, likely also talk about more abstract concepts of what it means to be a human or lion. And potentially create new words for concepts that don't exist in each language.
I think the fact that human speech is capable of abstract concepts, not just concrete concepts, means that shared experience isn't necessary to have meaningful communication? It's a bit handwavy, depends a bit on how we're defining "understand" and "communicate".
I don't follow that line of reasoning. To me, in that example, you're still communicating with a human, who regardless of culture, or geographic location, still shares an immense amount of shared life experiences with you.
Or, they're not. For example, an intentionally extreme example, I bet we'd have a super hard time talking about homotopy type theory with a member of the amazon rain forest. Similarly, I'd bet they had their own abstract concepts that they would not be able to easily explain to us.
And if we're saying the lion can speak human, then I think it follows that they're capable of this abstract thought, which is what I think is making the premise confusing for me. Maybe if I change my thinking and let's just say the lion is speaking... But if they're speaking a "language" that's capable of communicating concrete and abstract concepts, then that's a human-style language! And because we share many concrete concepts in our shared life experience, I think we would be able to communicate concrete concepts, and then use those as proxies to communicate abstract concepts and hence all concepts?
Obviously it's impossible to communicate even 90% of human experience with lions or people with mental disabilities. But if a translation model increases communication even 1%, brings everybody up to the level of a Kevin Richardson it's a huge win E.g. A pair of smart glasses that labeling the mood of the cat. Nobody cares about explaining why humans wear hats to a lion and of course no explanation is better than being a old human who has worn hats for a variety of reasons.
I think it's unlikely you could make a LLM that gives a lion knowledge via audio only, but very possibly other animals
Which isn’t saying much, it still couldn’t explain Lion Language to us, it could just generate statistically plausible examples or recognize examples.
To translate Lion speech you’d need to train a transformer on a parallel corpus of Lion to English, the existence of which would require that you already understand Lion.
Who knows, we don't really have good insight into how this information loss, or disparity grows. Is it linear? exponential? Presumably there is a threshold beyond which we simply have no ability to translate while retaining a meaningful amount of original meaning.
Would we know it when we tried to go over that threshold?
Sorry, I know I'm rambling. But it has always been regularly on my mind and it's easy for me to get on a roll. All this LLM stuff only kicked it all into overdrive.
For example, given thousands of English sentences with the word "sun", the vector embedding encodes the meaning. Assuming the lion word for "sun" is used in much the same context (near lion words for "hot", "heat", etc), it would likely end up in a similar spot near the English word for sun. And because of our shared context living in earth/being animals, I reckon many words likely will be used in similar contexts.
That's my guess though, note I don't know a ton about the internals of LLMs.
The reason I think this is from evidence in human language. Spend time with any translator and they'll tell you that some things just don't really translate. The main concepts might, but there's subtleties and nuances that really change the feel. You probably notice this with friends who have a different native language than you.
Even same language same language communication is noisy. You even misunderstand your friends and partners, right? The people who have the greatest chance of understanding you. It's because the words you say don't convey all the things in your head. It's heavily compressed. Then the listener has to decompress from those lossy words. I mean you can go to any Internet forum and see this in action. That there's more than one way to interpret anything. Seems most internet fights start this way. So it's good to remember that there isn't an objective communication. We improperly encode as well as improperly decode. It's on us to try to find out what the speaker means, which may be very different from the words they say (take any story or song to see the more extreme versions of this. This feature is heavily used in art)
Really, that comes down to the idea of universal language[0]. I'm not a linguist (I'm an AI researcher), but my understanding is most people don't believe it exists and I buy the arguments. Hard to decouple due to shared origins and experiences.
But I think those ambiguous cases can still be understood/defined. You can describe how this one word in lion doesn't neatly map to a single word in English, and is used like a few different ways. Some of which we might not have a word for in English, in which case we would likely adopt the lion word.
Although note I do think I was wrong about embedding a multilingual corpus into a single space. The example I was thinking of was word2vec, and that appears to only work with one language. Although I did find some papers showing that you can unsupervised align between the two spaces, but don't know how successful that is, or how that would treat these ambiguous cases.
> I don't think a universal language is implied by being able to translate without a rosetta stone.
Another way you can think about it, though, is that language might not be dependent on experience. If it is completely divorced, we may be able to understand anyone regardless of experience. If it is mixed, then results can be mixed.
> The example I was thinking of was word2vec
Apparently one thing you could do is train a word2vec on each corpus and then align them based on proximity/distances. Apparently this is called "unsupervised" alignment and there's a tool by Facebook called MUSE to do it. (TIL, Thanks ChatGPT!) https://github.com/facebookresearch/MUSE?tab=readme-ov-file
Although I wonder if there are better embedding approaches now as well. Word2Vec is what I've played around with from a few years ago, I'm sure it's ancient now!
Edit: that's what I get for posting before finishing the article! The whole point of their researh is to try to build such a mapping, ve2vec!
Its also pretty much how humans acquire language. No one is born knowing English or Spanish or Mandarin.
Reminds me of the quote:
“But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia
> In broad terms, the Hypothesis claims that the limits of the language one speaks are the limits of the world one inhabits (also in Wittgenstein), that the grammatical categories of that language define the ontological categories of the word, and that combinatory potentials of that language delimit the complexity of that world (this may be Jim Brown's addition to the complex Hypothesis.) The test then is to see what changes happen in these areas when a person learns a language with a new structure, are they broadened in ways that correspond to the ways the structure of the new language differs from that of the old?
I'd expect incomprehensible language from something that is wildly different from us, e.g. sentient space crystals that eat radiation.
On the other hand, we still haven't figured out dolphin language (the most interesting guess was that they shout 3D images at each other).