Proposed New Paradigm in Animal Cogition -- From Observation and Experimentation to Making Contact

[jordan179]

I was watching a Nova special on corvids, and it mentioned that the meaning of over 250 distinct calls in one species of crow had been deciphered. And I got to thinking about the implications of this, combined with our recent discoveries of syntactical language in prairie dogs and natural sign language in bonobos. I concluded that we should make

Comments

[jordan179]

It varies from animal to animal. To take the ones that you mention:

Bees aren't individually intelligent by mammalian standards, though they are smart by insect standards (ants are even smarter). They are probably not even sentient, let alone sapient. OTOH, a whole hive or swarm of social insects is smarter, and probably thinks in a very alien manner. The community appears to be sentient, and whether or not it's sapient is really anyone's guess. If it's sapient, it will be very hard for us to learn to speak to them. Good practice for contact with true alien intelligence.

Dogs understand good-sized human vocabularies if they are interactively exposed to human language during childhood and adolesence. The largest recorded vocabulary known by a dog belongs to a Border Collie

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827921.900-border-collie-takes-record-for-biggest-vocabulary.html

who knows the meaning of over 1000 human words. Dogs are definitely sentient, but probably not sapient.

Anyway, my point is that the "higher animals" do exhibit a more sophisticated understanding of human language but expecting them or any living creatures to have structured language that mimics human cognition and expression might be a stretch.

I predict that we'll find that the nonhuman great apes, probably the lesser apes, and possibly some monkeys, are sapient (is that really such a big surprise, given that they're our close kin?) Other likely clusters of sapient species would be amongst the proboscideans (elephants), rodents (especially prarie dogs, because their language is syntactical), psittacenes (parrots etc.), corvids, ceteceans (whales and dolphins) and possibly (and surprisingly) cephalopods. I cannot say yet with how many other truly sapient species we share the Earth, but there's enough evidence now that I'm pretty sure there are some.

The vast majority (possibly all), of course, will prove to be not as intelligent on the average as are humans; most will be far less intelligent than us (there's a lot of evolutionary space between "non-sapient" and "advanced technological civilization"). However, that doesn't preclude communication, and learning their thoughts and feelings.

And there is much of value to learn in their thoughts and feelings. Even a chimp or gorilla won't think exactly like us, and the thoughts of an elephant, whale, crow, parrot, or (especially) octopus might be very alien from ours.

In this lies diversity, and in diversity strength. If all the sapient races of Earth can contribute to our Great Leap Outwards, it will be a stronger and better founded expansion than if we have to go it alone.

[metaphorsbwithu]

Oh, yes. I agree with what you're saying.

I was using the lower life forms as an absurd extension of what I still feel is a barrier between humman "communication" with lower life forms.

There is no doubt that many sounds and movements are recognized to identify specific realities within each living things life experience.

Approach a bird's nest and a guard or too is liable to get antsy, do a dance, squawk, even dive over your head.

A female bird may cover her newly-hatched youngs with leaves the exacy color of their beaks.

A mouse may be conditioned to respond to a bell "knowing" there's food on the table.

A dog, through living with humans, becomes aware that certain words and faces mean certain things within its experience.

Apes and chimps, as you referenced, are most certainly the closest to humans in actual thought processes and the ability to engage in human-like behavior.

What I am saying is that any real "communication" between humans and other higher forms of life is most likely to be a one-way street for the most part ... aside from the examples you gave and. dependent on the intelligence of the animal and the complexity of its experiences.

[marycatelli]

We have tried communicating with the great apes. It was kinda limited.

[jordan179]

We took individual great apes, in all but one case ones raised in captivity, and taught them our sign or symbol languages. This would be the analogue of taking a small child of one of the natives from the native community, raising him in ours, and teaching him English, or taking the children or grandchildren of small children taken that way. Of course we would learn nothing of their culture doing it this way, and we didn't in the case of the great apes.

What we have never done -- in part because we only found out that great apes have cultures within the last couple of decades -- is attempt to learn the signing systems which great apes use in the wild, and then converse with those wild great apes in their own languages. If we did that, we might learn something about great ape intellectual culture (to start, we might find out whether or not they have any).

Do they have legends, myths, religious beliefs, philosophies, histories, conceptualized animal and plant lores? We don't really know right now, and we will never really know unless we decipher their own languages and talk to them.

We do know that at least some common chimpanzees have the functional equivalent of herbal lore, because we've seen them self-medicate. We've even learned about at least one new medicinal plant from this observation.

But there's a limit to what one can learn from passive observation of actions, rather than interaction with words.

[marycatelli]

If you did that to small children, they would rapidly develop their own culture. Indeed, one third-world country attempted to teach sign language to the deaf children. Somewhat later they imported a foreign expert to decypher the children's language, which they had rapidly developed to fantastic complexity.

[jordan179]

Indeed, and the smarter zoo or cognition experimental animals probably do develop their own cultures. But this doesn't let us contact or understand the wild cultures.

[tara_li]

“But there is one more reason to protect other species. One seldom if ever mentioned. Perhaps we are the first to talk and think and build and aspire, but we may not be the last. Others may follow us in this adventure. Some day we may be judged by just how well we served, when alone we were Earth’s caretakers.”

― David Brin, The Uplift War

David Brin. If you haven't, you want to read his stuff.

[jordan179]

Oh yes. He's one of my inspirations. One of the few sf writers (Raymond Z. Gallun, Andre Norton and Robert A. Heinlein were among the others) to grasp the true potential of animal sapience.

[tara_li]

You can add in L. Neil Smith. In his Probability Wars stories, the last President of the North American Confederation, before None Of The Above was elected President Forever, was a Gorilla.

[jordan179]

And aside from H. G. Wells (who depicted it as horrible, one of the first writers to describe what Brin would call "Uplift" was L. Sprague de Camp, in his stories about a modified bear which had been brought to human-level intelligence. De Camp liked to show that nonhuman sapients would not necessarily be monstrous: he also wrote stories about mermaids and non-sapiens species of Genus Homo, in which they were essentially Just Plain Folks with some differences.

[ext_1279885]

Few?

Walter Jon Williams had intelligent dolphins. Aldiss makes references to monkey factory workers in Hothouse. Paul McAuley wrote an entire trilogy based around animals raised to sapience.