And of course I can't wait to have the cat translator. That's a big startup idea BTW, just a bit too early still.
Granted those were humpbacks (whales, not people).
When I was a teenager, I took a rowboat out onto what was then called Scammon's Lagoon, in Baja California, where the Grey whales raise their young. A mother whale -- several times the size of our boat -- and her calf approached. The calf was curious but cautious, so the mother nudged it into approaching the boat, close enough that we could reach over and rub its nose, which everyone on the boat did in turns.
What did the whales get out of this? Certainly nothing tangible -- nobody was feeding them or anything like that. But if you've ever rubbed a wild baby whale's nose while looking at it in the eyes -- and experienced the emotional connection which results -- then you will be forever incapable of hostility, apathy, or utilitarian thinking about whales.
I'm certain the mother whale knew what she was doing. She was recruiting us to her side. MUCH more effective, in the long term, than merely running away.
I know the story of a farmer whose wife trained one of their pigs to be living inside the house like a dog. part of everyday activity. But the farmer still killed the pig at the end of the season, because it was the thing to do.
So i think the japanese might not have the same cultural appreciation for the emotional connection with "food"
its a wall many vegan and animal activists are struggling often
> But if you've ever rubbed a wild baby whale's nose while looking at it in the eyes -- and experienced the emotional connection which results -- then you will be forever incapable of hostility, apathy, or utilitarian thinking about whales.
Comment you're replying to is saying that this is optimistic; most people are capable of doublethink, and will quite happily "love" one individual of a species while being completely indifferent to the death and suffering of the rest of that species. I've observed the same phenomenon.
I do agree that doublethink is widespread (just look at how we treat other humans, no need to go across species) but I think these are choices that happen on a personal level and can hardly be generalized. I know people who stopped eating octopus after seeing My Octopus Teacher, and I've seen Chinese restaurants serving dog meat. We live in a world full of contraddictions.
I was not saying it isnt possible to be changed by such an experience, just that other drivers might override that. There is Vegan Hunters that kill deer for the stability of the ecosystem as an exotic example.
Similar to how a significant subset of the human population responds to other humans.
Living in this reality, unfortunately I cannot.
So I should restate the whale story: that's the effect it had on me, and I still strongly suspect that this was intentional on the whale's part. But YMMV.
In the late 80s my father took me snorkeling at the Crystal River Manatee Sanctuary[0]. We rowed our boat out into the river and anchored. I jumped in and immediately spotted an adult manatee and a calf. I've always assumed it was a mother and her calf.
Judging distance under water is difficult, but I'd put them at least 40 feet away in water that might have been 12 feet deep.
The mother put herself between me and the calf surprisingly quickly. Knowing the rules I didn't approach them. I just floated there watching.
After a few moments the calf poked its head around its mother and looked at me. It felt just like a curious child peeking from behind a parent's legs. I stayed still and just watched them (thankful my father made me wear the yellow Navy surplus horseshoe collar BC that had just enough air in it to keep me afloat without the need to tread water).
My father was still getting his SCUBA gear together and hadn't jumped in yet. I think I stuck my head up and told him they were there-- I can't remember for sure-- but I know he stayed in the boat for awhile leaving me alone with the two manatees.
As I watched over the next couple of minutes both mother and calf went up for air and moved closer to me. It seemed like they were grazing along the bottom in the plants. I didn't see them eat any of the plants, but it seemed like they were nosing around in them. I definitely got the "sea cow" comparison.
The mother got close enough for me to see ugly gashes in her back from being stuck by boat motors. They weren't bloody or raw-looking, but they did look deep and painful to have acquired. Her calf's back was smooth and a lighter color.
As they proceeded past me the calf turned, swam over its mother, and approached me. I was shocked at how fast it could reorient itself and move. Again, having been told the rules, I kept my hands close to my body and didn't move. The calf bumped into my legs and rubbed against my back as it swam past. It descended and circled back around under me and rejoined its mother. They continued swimming away from me, into the murkier deeper water and down into the sanctuary where we weren't permitted to follow.
The whole thing might have lasted 5 minutes, but it really stuck with me. The memory is surely tarnished and altered, having been recalled so many times, but I definitely got bumped by a curious manatee calf whose mother was wary but didn't flee.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_River_National_Wildlif...
There's a monument located near the outlet of a spring on the river bottom. A photo of the monument: https://www.ardeaprints.com/manatee-monument-king-spring-182...
I couldn't visit the monument-- I hadn't learned to SCUBA dive yet. My father, who was an underwater photography enthusiast, took photos of it. The next year we transferred the photos and 8mm movie footage he shot onto VHS for me to show to my 6th grade class. I can remember him reading the inscription for the tape in a very somber voice.
> "Life must become more than the wants and needs of humans. We are not on this earth alone. If the manatee goes into extinction because the needs of humans became more important then we will have taken another step backward toward our own demise. Extinction is forever and for all." - Dr. Harvey Barnett
I'd love to find that VHS. His picture is somewhere in the mess of slides I need to eventually scan.
I'd also love to back and swim with the manatees again. Apparently their populations are doing better, though they're still at risk.
We know animals communicate with each other, and the trend is we generally discover more and have underestimated what many animal species practice and can do.
Everyone agrees that homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis have talked together and lived (and bred) together; what makes inter-species communication (assuming a translator or device) impossible?
No, I don’t think “universal translators” are outside the domain of science fiction; but I think us building a device that enables two-way communication between one species and us, is probably more likely than not.
[1]: https://urban.uw.edu/news/crows-hold-grudges-against-individ...
Not everyone agrees that Neanderthals possessed language like us either, although evidently they are much, much closer evolutionarily to us than crows or whales, and it is vastly more plausible that they talked. Having Neanderthal DNA doesn't mean that we talked with them though, it needn't have been even consensual, unfortunately.
They're pretty damn interesting. Cats sometimes think hard about their responses. And they use metaphors. And express emotions.
There's always the suspicion this is a fake marketing exercise. But if it is, it's a very ornate and extended one.
I have no idea how we're supposed to communicate with aliens if we can't communicate with other mammals.
"They're really stupid and can't do calculus or invent FTL travel" isn't much of an excuse.
The real lesson we should have learned is that horses are stupid and we should have been testing a Border Collie.
Except when we do, but it doesn't make for flashy press releases. Pet owners, vets, farmers throughout history - anyone who lives alongside animals, cares for them, and is open to developing an emotional relationship with them, knows animals are more than just small finite state machines made of meat. But it takes time to spot and learn the patterns of behavior, and as I said, it's a two-way street; the animal has to "open up" and learn you as much as you have to learn them.
It is a kind of thing that's difficult to cleanly verify and reproduce, and it's also kinda mundane. The cases that made headlines look like Clever Hans the other commenter mentioned.
I imagine that a better classifier, some general AI system that gets to learn and observe the animals, would be able to tease out the patterns and then translate them to English, and then that would be reproducable and make for flashy headlines.
There is a well-known story about this discussed in Radiolab [2010] https://radiolab.org/podcast/91725-words/transcript
Here's ChatGPT summarizing one section:
> Younger signers had developed a richer vocabulary for mental states—concepts like believe, remember, forget, understand. They were much better than the original older signers at tasks requiring them to reason about what another person thinks or knows. Later, as the older signers picked up those mental-state terms from younger people, some of them improved on the same tests. Senghas describes it as language giving them new insight into other people’s thinking and motivations.
I see several likely stories:
* Much animal communication is practical, descriptive of the present (nothing abstract, or very few abstract concepts)
* If a species could expand its communication, it would give it more powerful tools and allow for more meaningful conversation with humans
* If such a thing is possible, it will be extremely disruptive to that species
I think if you could communicate about abstract ideas with your dog, you could exchange bedtime stories. However, I don't think such a thing is possible today, and it's not clear what species (if any, besides humans) will, in fact, be able to learn such things
I don't think it's particularly controversial to say "written language is a meaningful technology advancement for a civilization", though!
Whale and Dolphin "languages" (or substitute "utterances" if the hypothesis is so antithetical to you) score remarkably complexly, close to Human "utterances" (again, if animal language is so offensive a notion) on some of these measures. Dog utterances do not:
Zipf's Law (Data Efficiency) • Humans: -1.0 slope showing an optimal balance of information and physical effort. • Whales & Dolphins: -1.0 slope matching the exact mathematical curve of human speech. • Dogs: No -1.0 slope, heavily skewed toward isolated, repetitive alert spikes.
Menzerath's Law (Physical Pacing) • Humans: Present; internal sounds get shorter as the total sequence grows longer. • Whales & Dolphins: Present; highly efficient pacing across multiple species. • Dogs: Absent; vocalizations lack the structured phrase sequences required for this law.
Shannon Entropy (Predictability) • Humans: High; complex grammatical dependencies stretch across long sentences. • Whales & Dolphins: Moderate-High; governed by structural rules and click patterns. • Dogs: Very Low; individual sounds are isolated events with no grammatical rules.
Repertoire Size (Signal Diversity) • Humans: Infinite vocabulary built from tens of thousands of words. • Whales & Dolphins: High diversity with hundreds of whistles and thousands of clicks. • Dogs: Very small vocal pool limited to roughly 10 distinct sounds.
I'd say, it's difficult to say, but calling the hypothesis of whale language "absurd" sounds like something someone might have said (and still might say, incorrectly) about the concept of evolution by natural selection. I think you are overselling your argument.
And the main comment thinks the whales will have the brains to understand something like space travel or why we desire it?
Then again, you give me an inkling what humans trying to talk to whales will be faced with.
Because I think your analogy is piss poor? Sorry to have contradicted you, Omniscient One! Get the fuck off your high horse, you're nothing special and that was downright offensive and absolutely uncalled for.
If a species has the cognitive capacity that would be required for a language akin to ours (or even more complex than it?) then why do you assume that they wouldn't have concepts like ego, greed, brutality? We already know that animals use tools; what is a weapon but a tool for the purpose of brutality?
Your example of teaching an alien all of humanity in 5 minutes, though: it's silly, and I don't think anyone in the debate here (except, you, apparently) expects that we are going to meld minds with whales in that short a time.