We've got a bunch of new people now so let's bring back a classic post. What low stakes conspiracy theory do you believe that you cannot prove but feels right to you?
I'll start: I believe that dating apps have made a concerted effort to smear in person meeting people and tie it to being "creepy" through social media so you are forced to meet people online(which was the creepy option just 15 years ago)
okay here's one i'm actually serious about that's kind of controversial: Koko the gorilla did not know sign language. in fact she did not know any language. she was very intelligent and emotionally deep, but she did not do what humans do when we communicate with each other through spoken or signed words. at most she repeated some actions that got her some reward, but she did not associate the actions with any meaning beyond the reward. her trainer did not know ASL and did not bother properly codifying the reduced version she supposedly taught Koko. instead she convinced herself of her conclusion, and having done so, worked to imbue any pseudo-signing behaviors by Koko with linguistic meanings whether they made sense or not.
I believe pretty much the same thing about everyone on youtube and tiktok who made those button boards that their dog or cat presses to "talk." i think these cases and claims are worth investigating scientifically, but so far no one has definitively demonstrated what would be a very surprising conclusion i especially find it suspect when they say things like "so far Grover has learned over 80 words!" and what they mean is their golden retriever has pressed over 80 buttons that said a word that the owner could come up with some explanation for.
I think that's the general academic consensus, that Koko probably had some simple psudo-signing behaviour to communicate single concepts (perhaps even as complex as "sad"), but had no real language capability and was just randomly stringing these concepts together at best and signing whatever got her food at worst, likely somewhere between the two.
The claim she 'knew language' or could 'speak sentences' is obvious nonsense. But there's no doubt that animals like dogs can indeed learn hundreds of words and associate them with real-world concepts. I've seen videos where someone has a hundred different stuffed toys in another room, and they can tell the dog to get a specific item with complete reliability. So I've no doubt a dog could convey a desire for a specific object, for example. Conveying any abstract concepts, or stringing any sentences beyond a single word, I certainly haven't seen done with any objectively measurable success.
Yeah I suppose that's true, I was too extreme in saying animals can't learn any language when I meant they can't compose sentences like a lot of these people claim they do.
You may be on to something, and it goes triple for "chatbots are at least as sapient as mere human computer meat puppets" hype believers too.
"Keep repeating variations of the given data set until the recipient approves of the output" is just a computerized version of an animal doing a behavior to receive a reward, techbro hype aside.
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The usual solipsistic tactic is to denigrate human intelligence to make the chatbot/virtual waifus feel more real by comparison if he squints his eyes and wishes really hard.
I remember seeing someone deboonk it once, but I won't say I think animals can't learn language-based communication. Like dogs can learn commands, they can learn that a sound conveys a meaning. Surely animals can then also learn that a motion conveys meaning.
Performing a specific action in response to stimulus isn't the same thing as language. Language means you're manipulating abstract signs and symbols to convey information. There are places where all the different birds and monkeys have specific alarm calls for "Predatory Bird" "Snake" and "predatory cat". All the animals in the region understand what the alarm calls of the other species mean, more or less. If you hear a "predatory bird" call you go down in to the canopy where the hawks and eagles can't manuever. If you hear "predatory cat" you out to thinner branches where a jaguar can't manuever. But that's not language. It might, debatably, be culture, in that adult animals are teaching their offspring how to respond and the calls aren't genetically encoded but vary from region to region, but it's not language.
If they had a bunch of symbols they could string together to convey arbitrary information "The predatory bird is behind that tree" "the predatory bird his near the sun" the "the predatory bird is coming from up-wind" you'd have an argument for language. Very few animals can do anything remotely like that. Bees might be doing something like that with their little "This is where teh flowers are" dances. Corvids are doing something we don't fully understand that appears to allow them to convey abstract information about situations and objects that aren't visible. I think there's some speculation that Orcas can do some language-like things. But apes don't. There's no serious evidence Chimps or Gorillas can do language. Dogs can't even though they've co-evolved nearly unique cognitive abilities like the ability to recognize when a human is pointing at something, and that pointing means they should look where the finger is pointing. Most animals can't do that. They don't have whatever it is that allows a dog to look at a human's body posture and say "That human wants me to look in that direction". Apparently Elephants can understand pointing, too. Buy non-human apes mostly cannot. Like some individuals figure it out, but it's not universal.
I think there's also speculation that Elephants might be doing something language like with some kind of very loud, low-frequency sound they transmit through the ground, and distant elephants can hear through their feet since their feet are pretty sensitive and have a large surface area in contact with the ground. I don't know much about that, though.
When humans think they're seeing another animal engaged in language like behavior, a lot of the time what's happening is that humans are so hyper-tuned to be constantly looking for and trying to interpret what other humans are doing, that we tend to get a lot of false positives. Doing language and interpretting complex facial and body language is hard and reuquires a lot of mental juice. We're the best at it among every animal we've ever observed and we still screw up all teh time - misinterpretting other people's intentions or facial cues, hearing the wrong words in a sentence, things like that. And just to get there, we have to have a lot of brain power devoted to listening for language all the time. We have to quickly discern whether a sound fits the pattern of language, or if it's just wind or monkeys yelling or something. And we get false positives. We hear sounds that sound like they have a meaningful pattern in them, and we htink "that must be language". Sometimes we interpret ambiguous noises as being words or names. We see human faces all over the place and we attribute human expressions, and then human-like mental states, to animals that absolutely do not have either of those things. It can get so bad that people will get to thinking that statues or trees or stars have human-like minds and intelligence. Z
So, like, basically, it's so important that we recognize language and human minds when they are present, that we're set up to generate a lot of false positives, to make a lot of mistakes. Thinking a a bear is contemplating the beauty of nature, or that a cat is feeling content, aren't going to hurt you whether you're right or wrong. It's okay to be wrong about those things, even a lot, if it means you're more likely to successfully catch when humans are saying or doing something important. So we tend to think our dogs and cats and fish and birds and cows and all kinds of other things are way more human-like than they are, because mostly it doesn't hurt us to do so, and if became more selective in what we judged to be human like behavior we might miss actual important human behavior that would hurt us.
Wow thank you very much for this insightful response Frank. It's very interesting.
I'd like to ask a question: Is it possible your definition of when communicating becomes language is human-centric or even really frank-centric? Like the definition or the observance might be faulty? For example because birds have a single sound that says "predatory bird" rather than a string of sounds, we've decided the thing that's communicated is not complex enough to warrant a language definition.
Like we say it's not complex, but really "predatory bird is over us, fly down" is a lot of information to convey
Language specifically means manipulating symbols to convey abstract information. It's not the same as using simple signals to communicate. Dogs barking, African wild dogs sneezing, birds singing, frogs bellowing, cuttlefish changing skin color, all those things are communication. But they can generally only convey one specific piece of information. Communication becomes language when you can combine symbols to convey abstract meaning.
One example of the difference between animal communication and language - A lot of animals can say "There is danger". But they can't say "There is danger over there" or "There was danger" or "there will be danger" or "There is danger behind you". They have a signal for danger, but they can't combine that signal with other abstract ideas to convey more detailed information. They can't talk about something that isn't present, ie "I saw danger there last week".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language#Distinctive_features_of_human_language
Basically, what we're doing is vastly, vastly more complicated and flexible than what we've observed in any animals to date, to the point where using the same term for human language and animal communication is more misleading than helpful. And like I mentioned - We're starting to find instances where some animals may be doing some language like things, but to date we haven't ID'd anything that can really be termed language in the way that humans use it. That doesn't mean there isn't a lot of complex communication going on, but so far what we've found doesn't work the way human language does or use the same features.
Something to think about - Langauge requires a lot of very specific cognitive processes tied to specific parts of the human brain. People can, and do, lose the ability to use language all the time. Conditions like aphasia result in the inability to use words. Folks can still think just fine, but somewhere between the thinking and the making speech something is broken. And there are many, many other conditions that can impair language use. One way to learn about a thing is to observe it when it breaks. Humans are very specialized in language usage, but we can lose that ability relatively easily. Most other animals never had it at all, lacking the highly specialized brain structures that humans use for that purpose.
That's really neat, thanks so much for sharing your knowledge
I think this is obviously true
at this point I don't care if Bunny the dog is actually incredibly depressed and having an existential crisis or not; i just think she's cute and the buttons are neat
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