We should do it just to make sure they're not saying "so long and thanks for all the plankton."

The US literally passed a law allowing itself to invade The Hague if necessary to free any US service member brought before the International Court of Justice. Even the signatories of the UN human rights conventions could simply refuse to cooperate and experience no meaningful consequences. International laws are just treaties and treaties can be cancelled or revoked. Human rights are no more reliable than company mission statements.

Not to mention that even on a national level laws only exist as limitations the state imposes on itself (or to chisel away at limitations it imposed on itself before). This is why it took the civil rights protests and literal terrorism to arrive at universal suffrage and civil rights for women and Black people. Of course this only works if the government would rather change its laws than escalate protests to a civil war and which one your government chooses might surprise you.

That said, rights don't happen through scientific discovery but through reform or revolution. There are strong economic incentives to keep animal rights minimal and there is only very weak political will to change that. It also doesn't help that in the US there are strong religious doctrines that oppose the notion of animals deserving rights at all.

It's worth mentioning that there are indeed jurisdictions (not sure about the US) where animal cruelty laws are actually framed as animal rights (usually with some limitations, e.g. only considering vertebrates) rather than as protection of private property but even they usually don't include a right to life or bodily integrity and are flexible about what constitutes cruelty and what can be done to reduce it.

> The question Searle wants to answer is this: does the machine literally "understand" Chinese? Or is it merely simulating the ability to understand Chinese? Searle calls the first position "strong AI" and the latter "weak AI".

(Emphasis added)

If we were to make an analogy to contemporary machine learning, we're talking about the difference between an LLM (with context) and a Markov Chain. 'Understanding' requires novel reuse of recollections. Recollections require memory (i.e. context), and the novel reuse of those recollections require a world model with which to inference.

Take the original analogy of a person with an if-then opaque phrase table, and make it a slightly fancier two-step process where they must also compute a score based on recent phrases or words to determine the proper output.

So now the system has "memory" and gives better output... But was that sufficient to create understanding? Nope.

[0] And perhaps not even necessary, if we consider an operator who does understand Chinese but their short-term memory has been damaged by an injury.

Citation needed?

Sounds like "human intelligence is the product of "

If you were obliterate your own neural network, by, I dunno, shooting yourself in the head, might that have some affect on your intelligence? Head trauma? Brain cancer? Alzheimer's? Senescence? Do I really need a citation that your brain is where intelligence comes from? *scratches head*

I don't know why anybody thinks this is a profound question worth spending time thinking about. All it boils down to is whether or not we reserve the word "understand" for beings with souls or whether we allow it to describe machines too.. and BTW there's no empirical test for souls (not even for people!) so it's really just asking if "understand" is some sort of holy word reserved for people who have faith and believe in souls.

The question isn't about machines and their empirical capabilities at all, it's just about how humans feel about that particular word.

Hordes of these in practice own our species. They come up with the decisions on carbon footprint, on whether to colonize Mars, on where to shift collective attention.

Although these entities are only one of achievements of our culture, for now they dominate on global level.

Big achievement. "Consciousness" not strictly needed. Whatever the definition of "consciousness", a big company is driven by a glorified stack of excels and definitely couldn't write Chinese (assuming none of employees does, after Searle).

So, running a planet and overriding any individual human is not enough, let's focus on entertaining an individual human with an interesting conversation in Chinese? What do you even seek with that model? /s

What does a word like "hungry" mean to you, when your diet is gorging yourself on freshly killed meat every couple of weeks? What does feeling "tired" mean, when you're the size of a bus and sleeping is done in increments of 10 minutes because you must constantly wake and resurface to breathe through a hole in your back? You can use language to gesture at these experiences, but that's different from really knowing what we are talking about.

Not that I understand Wittgenstein very well at all, even though it seems like it should be easier than understanding whales and lions ;)

This is such an eye roll statement. The world “really” is the one which does all the work in it. One would say “nah, communication is actually amazing, and through listening to people / reading their words and being attentive one can understand many different cultural contexts”. And whoever wrote the original sentence can always come back and ask “but did you really really understand them”?

> What does a word like "hungry" mean to you, when your diet is gorging yourself on freshly killed meat every couple of weeks?

I don’t understand the problem here. “Hunger” is the feeling which make you seek out food. If your normal is to gorge yourself full and don’t eat anything for weeks then you are not hungry for most of those weeks and then when you start feeling hungry that is when you start preparing for a new hunt, chasing a herd and so on.

We already and in our everyday life understand such differe ces. We know for example that newborns need feeding a lot more frequently than adults, so when they become fussy we ask “is he hungry maybe?” Despite the fact that our own hunger works on a different schedule. We also undestand that when a holocaust survivor describes the deep hunger they suffered from in the camp that is a different feeling than the one you feel 2 hours after lunch when you start thinking about opening a pack of chips. Somehow we “get it”. But do we “realy” get it? Yeah i mean we know that the baby will become more and more fussy the longer it is not fed, and will die eventually. We know that the lion on the hunt will eat us if we look easy enough prey. We understand that people in the camps turned to eat things they would have considered inedible before, and the experience left lasting psychological scars on many of them. And we understand that the person thinking about opening a pack of chips will stop thinking about it if something distracts him/her for a minute. “But do we really really really understand them?” Idk. You tell me what you consider “really really really” understanding anything. Because one can play this game forever.

> What does feeling "tired" mean, when you're the size of a bus and sleeping is done in increments of 10 minutes because you must constantly wake and resurface to breathe through a hole in your back?

If that is normal for that being then they wouldn’t describe that state of being as tired. It is just their normal. But if something (illness, activity, noises) disturbs their normal which make them seek out more sleep they would call that being tired.

Asking questions that are very difficult to answer precisely and well, and then trying to do so, is kind of the whole deal with philosophy. How /do/ you know the things that you think you know? You can roll your eyes at it and choose not to investigate further, or you can try to get super granular about sussing out an answer. Philosophers generally try to do the latter.

If your answer to "what does it mean to know things" or "how do we actually use words to navigate meaning" or "how well can we understand other living things" is "I don't care, that's nerd shit" then I highly recommend that you don't read Wittgenstein, because you're gonna get real bored real fast.

I did read Wittgenstein. I still hold contempt in my heart to those aping his thoughts mindlessly.

> Asking questions that are very difficult to answer precisely and well, and then trying to do so, is kind of the whole deal with philosophy.

Yes. And declaring that things are impossible is not that. "If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it." is a feel. It's not the conclusion of a reasoned argument. (I'm talking about the sentence in the context it is found in the Philosophical Investigations of Wittgenstein)

> If your answer to "what does it mean to know things" or "how do we actually use words to navigate meaning" or "how well can we understand other living things" is "I don't care, that's nerd shit"

No. Those are all very interesting questions. But if you start with "understanding is impossible" then I hope you get a hug from a loved one. That stuff is hurt speaking. It is not a usefull starting point to answer any of those questions.

I don't disagree with this criticism of his position either, for what it's worth - Personally I think Wittgenstein ignores empathy as a transfer of embodied nonspoken knowledge, for one.

It'd be one thing if his example were of something very radically different (IE space aliens), but social mammals like lions and whales and humans all learn to navigate the world through the presence of others first and foremost. Long before you have any awareness of language, even long before birth, you will have an awareness of closeness. You will primarily learn to navigate the world by way of your relationships to others. That goes whether you're a lion cub or a human baby.

I wouldn't make that assumption. Just because whales don't have opposable thumbs and have a harder time making and using tools doesn't mean that their speech isn't advanced.

ie train a LLM on English, French, Spanish data. This data only contains parallel text in English-French. Can this LLM still translate to and from Spanish ? Yeah.

Also, a Youtube doc about researchers attempting to teach dolphins english: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UziFw-jQSks

I can’t even understand some other people when they keep switching the target of the pronoun without being explicit.

“He is tired. He dropped the ball on his foot. He yelled at him for being tired.”

(How many people are here?)

That's fine. The idea is to record them with lot of metadata in situ. Recording what is going on with the whales. (are they feeding? are they traveling? are they in a new location or somewhere they have been for a while? How many wales there are?) And also about their surrounding (sea state, surface weather, position and activity of boats, prey animals etc etc.)

I think and suspect these animals are far more intelligent than we guessed, and the ethical ramifications of that reality would be difficult to swallow. Many species of toothed and baleen whales are under threat of extinction according to a lot of climate predictions.

I am sure that there were a lot of preconceived biases that blocked scientific research from occurring in this space, but it might also be that we didn’t have the tools to examine evidence until recently.

Scientists are generally very curious, open to exploration, and absolutely want to prove the unproven or refute the previously proven with new evidence. It’s how they make their stamp in their field.

I'm not going to debate this topic here, but for what it's worth you're coming across as somebody who has chosen their stance and is cherry-picking their evidence and anecdotes to suit their biases.

While I agree with your suspicion that a lot of animals are more intelligent than most give them credit for, you're not arguing for that viewpoint well. You might want to revisit how you make your points.

The closest we currently have to evidence of non-human language use I know of, comes from attempts to teach language to apes, (which is an example of some scientists saying "$organism is doing language", which you claim never happened) The general criticism was that the great apes did fairly well learning semantics but show limited to no syntactic ability.

We do see semantic capabilities in other species and there's long been reason to suspect semantic content in whale songs. Deciphering the Alphabet of whale songs is a great step towards figuring out the semantic structure. When we do, I wouldn't be surprised if we find syntactic structures as well. Until then, calling whale song language is speculation.

Do you have specific examples of places where we have both syntax and semanti

A claim is an assertion of fact. Science doesn’t make unproven claims. It tests them.

History has shown that to not be true.

> Scientists are generally very curious, open to exploration

In my experience, it is the opposite. I often find scientists are in fact very uncurious when it comes to anything outside their domain of choice.

Going back to the context... I think scientists, linguists, musicologists and others have in fact been very curious about cetacean "language" over the decades. There is a hesitation to make "big claims," but that's appropriate... imo.

Regarding intelligence, it's an interesting thing. I'm not sure I understand that assuming animals, in particular cetaceans, to be intelligent requires a "big claim". In fact, it's basically a big claim to assume they are not intelligent. Intelligence is a spectrum, and it does indeed seem to be the case that humans, in general, start from one extreme of that spectrum in assuming that all intelligence needs to be proven. For cetaceans, it's a bit mindboggling at this point that people are still surprised by their intelligence.

Cetacean brains are huge and deeply folded. If you simply look at a whale brain versus a human brain, once would guess that the whale brain is from the more intelligent species. Yes, whales are bigger and thus dictate a larger brain to operate, but it isn't clear what that scaling relationship actually is. And whales are well known to be some of the emotionally evolved creatures on Earth, so it continues to surprise me that there is this hidden assumption that they need to be proven to be intelligent. At this point, it would seem the burden of proof should be on those who think they are not intelligent.

In my opinion, part of the bias is in our own unintelligence. For us to consider something intelligent, it seems we require burden of proof such that the "other" intelligence is related back to our own. However, this completely precludes the perspective and perhaps even discovery of there being different intelligences. For example, the part of the brain related to emotional intelligence in whales dwarfs our own, all relative to the rest of the brain. Thus, it might be hard or even impossible for us to understand such emotional intelligence. This is actually where I think the science might be tunnel visioned. There needs to be more thought put into what intelligence actually is such that we might recognize intelligence that isn't like our own.

In fact, the best try to remain child-like in attitude, i.e. being able to be in awe about nature, which adults tend to "unlearn".

The book Black Hole: How an Idea Abandoned by Newtonians, Hated by Einstein, and Gambled on by Hawking Became Loved is a pretty good one that covers various components of this story, in particular focusing on black holes.

There's far more belief and bias in science than the science community will admit to.

As for your latter point, I doubt that most scientists studying animals are the ones against preventative measures in regards to extinction. There are plenty of ethical reasons to prevent extinction of a species without ascribing human characteristics.

However it's obvious that human language has much more complexity than just that. Barring undeniable and extraordinary evidence of communication of similar complexity to humans, the claim that cetaceans have language in the human sense remains extraordinary.

"There are no solutions …only tradeoffs."

—Thomas Sowell

Just like no one wants to admit that we cause untold suffering to billions of cows and pigs every year in our factory farm matrix.

That's why we don't talk about animal intelligence and language the way that we should.

We've bridged human cultures in the past, which is easier because humans do similar (ish) things, we can use sight, touch, smell, etc to establish common ground.

We can communicate simple things with pets, though in my experience they learn from body language and intonation, understanding grammar and language feels like a step further.

What's the common ground with whales?

Like how eskimos have 100 words for snow, whales could have thousands of phrases for water, currents, temperature, storms. Fish, migration of different species. A language of relative position needed for pack hunting. They might tell stories about El Niño, earthquakes, tsunamis.

If they have social structure we may share ideas of relationships, friendship, giving (food), owing, sharing, helping, etc.

We might be able to correlate their speech with weather patterns and animal sightings. We could probably start a two way communication, I wonder if us or them would have better forecasts for sea conditions. They could act as a network of hundreds of thousands of sensors.

Sperm whales travel so far, that even without maps they might know the shape of the continents.

Very excited for the future.

> the language family is generally called Eskimo or Eskimoan, because it includes the Yup'ik languages of Siberia and Alaska as well as the Inuit languages from the northeastern half of Alaska across Canada to Greenland

But even the concept of what is a "word" in Hungarian is complex. Words have so many different forms depending on the context. As a Hungarian speaker, I perceive three forms of you (te, ön, maga) and one ending that is added to other words to to form a second person form of the word (-d), but even that is a complete oversimplification.

I don't think there is any reason why whale languages would have a concept of discreet words like we have in English.

It’s still substantially more snow-related vocabulary than in German, it seems to me.

https://engineering.fb.com/2018/08/31/ai-research/unsupervis...

> Training an MT model without access to any translation resources at training time (known as unsupervised translation) was the necessary next step. Research we are presenting at EMNLP 2018 outlines our recent accomplishments with that task. Our new approach provides a dramatic improvement over previous state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches and is equivalent to supervised approaches trained with nearly 100,000 reference translations. To give some idea of the level of advancement, an improvement of 1 BLEU point (a common metric for judging the accuracy of MT) is considered a remarkable achievement in this field; our methods showed an improvement of more than 10 BLEU points.

Although, this specific method does require the relative conceptual spacing of words to be similar between language; I don't see how that would be the case for Human <-> Whale languages.

It's worth remembering though that "language" is a form of communication and communication is vital in all social species. "Come here, I'm a good mate and available" and "Go away, I'm big and scary" are the lowest common denominator so even non-social species usually have some way of expressing those sentiments. But the more complex a species' social dynamics are, the more likely it is they will have means of communication capable of reflecting that.

It's also a mistake to look at utterances (mouth sounds) in isolation, especially when looking at a communication system we're unfamiliar with. Body language and facial expressions are a big deal in human communication even if we sometimes exclude them from analysis for simplicity. Not to mention that language features may be different if only because of the different biology (e.g. overtones, repetition or rhythm might carry semantics).

In other words, what Arrival did with alien "written language" equally applies to non-human "spoken language". It would be a mistake to assume that all the concepts we use for analyzing human language would apply to forms of communication in other animals even if another animal's language might turn out to be similarly complex.

Whale song is about the closest thing we have to an alien language. It's very much worth studying with all the tools we have.

Besides that, the 12 year old in me just screams look at the size of their brains! There has to be something going on in there. I really want to know what they have to say!