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Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

Crows can remember a human face for 17 years, and pass this knowledge through their murder (group).

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...

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I pissed off a crow once, not a good idea. It got its revenge and it was crazy how its murder group would destroy my property. Luckily they have moved on but I make friends with them now and understand them much better.

There's a classic "This American Life" episode along those lines. Poor sap ended up wearing a fake beard and glasses on the back of his head just be be able to leave the house. Bonkers.-

I miss the specifics of what you did to deserve your fate in the story :)

I think you are very naïve about how complicated language is. I'm not saying animals lack any intelligence whatsoever, but I don't see how remembering faces means you'll be able to talk. The crows could just have acted hostile to the masked people in front of each other. Communicating is not the same thing as language which is vastly more expressive than any non-human animal is capable of.

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.

Lots of animals communicate with each other, I think we agree. If we can automatically translate their communicative utterances into English (or any other utterances that we understand), in general, that would be remarkable, and useful! Who cares whether those utterances qualify as "language".

My whole point is what we could communicate would be profoundly limited. It's like how we can communicate with dogs to a certain extent, but we're not telling them bedtime stories. The comment I responded to originally is fantasising an absurd degree of complexity in communication which is profoundly unrealistic.

Communication is a two-way street, with both parties negotiating and evolving some "communication protocol" over time. We won't know how far we'll be able to go until we're able to try.

There are people doing experiments with pet buttons - one-sound samplers that play a voice recording when the pet paws the button.

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.

Have you ever heard of Clever Hans?

I think we learned the wrong lesson from Clever Hans, which is that animals don't communicate and it's always the human handler doing it.

The real lesson we should have learned is that horses are stupid and we should have been testing a Border Collie.

I think we rarely even try.

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.

Language and written language are themselves technologies that change what individuals can do (and thus impact their societies)

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

Nicaraguan sign language is evidence for an innate language capacity, not that it is an invented technology and certainly not evidence for Sapir Whorf.

Evidence for vs compatible with are different things, and agreed!

I don't think it's particularly controversial to say "written language is a meaningful technology advancement for a civilization", though!

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