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

[kitten_goddess]

Sounds like a good science fiction premise!

I believe that this is possible, of course. It would also make one heck of a good story.

[metaphorsbwithu]

This is always an interesting subject and, as far back as I can remember, there have been studies to investigate communication within other species of living things

[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

[metaphorsbwithu]

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

[marycatelli]

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

[marycatelli]

Ursula K. LeGuin had a story about communicating with animals. Epislatory -- I remember one bold scientist setting out to study the emperor penguins, which was deemed impossible because of the conditions.

[jsl32]

author of the acacia seeds? i have that somewhere, it is pretty much an exploration of this very idea.

[kalance]

If nothing else, developing methods and techniques for communicating meaningfully with a group that operates on a fundamentally (and functionally) different level than humans (linguistically, culturally, behaviorally), would be good practice for dealing with extraterrestrial contact.

[jordan179]

Very much so, and showing up as the leaders of a multi-species coalition rather than the annihilators of all other sapient life on our planet might also induce alien sapients to be more likely to trust us rather than regard us as destructive barbarians.

From four years ago in

"Animals, Aliens and Human Destiny"

http://jordan179.livejournal.com/59278.html

Well, would you really want these homicidal sociopaths with starships and antimatter bombs? Free to ravage Queem knows how many other races with less advanced technology than even their own? To slaughter promising young species across a thousand stars?

If we're lucky, they'll just quarantine us until we matured a bit.

[polaris93]

Can we really understand anthropology, sociology, or history if we only have the nature, society, and deeds of one sapient species to study? It is, perhaps, like trying to grasp linguistics with only one known language. One could imagine such an effort, but it would be handicapped by ignorance and fraught by error.

An excellent reason to try to establish communication in some form with other species -- and a possible clue that the reason no one has set up a formal project of that sort is because we don't want to know our nature, psychology, society, and history that way. For example, I know from long experience as well as from research that cats have societies in which status, friendship, and kinship are important, and their interactions with one another include a wealth of meaningful experiences -- triumph, tragedy, need, generosity, you name it. They may be different from us, but not that different, and their minds are similar to ours in many ways. But try telling that to many people and they'll deny it flatly -- and want

[jordan179]

I very much agree. The reason why we aren't attempting "contact" with sapient animals is that doing so implies an acknowlegement of equality with us on a fundamental level as fellow "people," while simply observing and sometimes experimenting on leaves them relegated to the status of "things." Which suits most humans just fine.

I have, since learning about the sapience of nonhuman animals, encountered no end of attempts to deny clear evidence of animal intelligence (such as toolmaking among chimps and New Caledonian crows) and communication (such as the syntactical language of prairie dogs). The standard formulation "Oh, that's just [lower-status processing word]," with the utterer apparently believing that changing the terminology changes the reality being discussed -- which is not a very good advertisement for the height of human intelligence!

[polaris93]

We've had practice at getting to know true non-human sapience, though not in a controlled fashion. Those who live with cats, dogs, or other animals frequently come to regard them as people, be it odd ones, many of which have their own languages (cats, some birds), are inventive and curious (ever had a cat happily take apart a record-player to see how it works?), care for one another (you can even see this in ants; when an ant is injured, other ants will do what they can to help the injured one and soothe the pain), and otherwise display traits that strongly suggest sapience. Some cats and dogs are very, very good at sussing out what the human beings around them are thinking and planning (start thinking "Time to go to the vet" and you'll see what I mean). All of which is excellent practice for getting to know creatures of other species -- even aliens. This isn't the sort of controlled experiment that is carried out in laboratories, and it deals with many non-repeatable incidents, but has to be approached like learning to be a

[jordan179]

Agreed about even cats and dogs, and they probably aren't even sapient, just high-level sentient. I think that exceptionally smart cats and dogs may have "flashes of sapience" the way that humans have flashes of genius. I've seen my smartest cat, Sekhmet, do some awesomely-intelligent things, and also some incredibly-stupid things, depending on her stress level (when stressed she tends to act first and think second, which doesn't always work so well for her).

You're probably right about my spelling error.

[polaris93]

They're sapient, all right -- not all of them (and we've all know human beings who aren't, haven't we?), but the potential is solidly there in both species. They figure things out -- often more than we'd like -- and act on it in surprisingly intelligent ways. You see it most as they age, when wisdom comes to the fore, e.g., the family cat in my youth who figured out how to fish for a gopher that was otherwise proving to be too quick for her arthritic shoulders and arms to grab (the one who bit off a long blade of grass and held it so the tip dangled in the gopher's hole, luring him out). We really should start with the animals we have as pets and work animals, dropping assumptions about just how intelligent they are and using an anthropologist's techniques for getting to know them personally and discover what cultures they may have when we allow them to have them (human-pet and human-work animal cultures also).

[ext_1279885]

If cats were actually sapient, they'd rebel against humans for humiliating them with those stupid lolcats.