"Tinkering with them" and "designing their society" so that they don't do things that are "bad."
So, basically, making humans in furry suits. We already have furry conventions, we don't need science for that.
I feel like there's a perception here that intelligence is something separate and magical that you just "give" a species, and suddenly they become like us and if we just teach them to read hand them the right secular humanist books they will become just like us because those books will show them The Truth. There is no natural "truth" and all our books were written by humans, with human biases, in response to human needs.
Our brains are biologically part of us; the speech center may be THIS big and the memory center may be THAT big, but what we are is also influenced by what we were, the kinds of animals we were, the kinds of needs we had to survive. If you take a different animal, with different evolutionary needs, a different brain, and "make it" intelligent--make the speech center THIS big and the memory center THAT big--you will end up with something significantly different from us.
Which sounds quite interesting, and would kinda be the point with this whole endeavour.
Intelligence, that is alien.
And no, I doubt that we'd end up with "humans in furry suits" by restricting their behaviour (whether it has to be done on a genetic basis or by just enforcing laws like with ourselves). I doubt our differences hinge upon that these specific key behaviours which we might want to remove if they come into conflict with the notions of sapient beings having the right to be spared death or torture.
Seriously? You can demonstrate that humans are doing it better than most species, because they are going extinct and we aren't. If our genes continue and theirs don't, we are doing it better. Arguably some bacteria/fungus/insects etc, do it better, but when it comes to large mammals, we do it better than all the rest combined. That is we pass our genes on more succesfully than they do at this point.
I doubt success at evolution, at least in the popular mind, involves preservation of one's genes. After all, if a helpful random mutation were to be uptaken by the population at large, and in the process to displace some of our old genes, this would be considered a success not a failure (despite it preventing the continuation of some genes). Or, perhaps more dramatically, if we were to completely dismantle and replace our genes with something better, or to put ourselves into computers, or whatever, I doubt anyone would think of us as evolutionary failures, despite our genes failing to transmit.
Even if we assume that the metric of evolutionary success is survival, that entails that we're not doing any better than the common housecat, mushrooms, or the bacteria which lives in deep sea trenches. All sorts of things are surviving, or, at least, are continuous with things that are surviving. But usually, when people talk about humanity as the pinnacle of evolution, they are not thinking of housecats as quite the same.
Finally, it's true that we can always simply define 'evolutionary success' as whatever we want. Nothing stops us from using our words as we see fit. But whatever stipulative definition we give, it's unclear why that standard is anything we should care about at all. Success generally entails a positive, but there is nothing intrinsically positive about gene transmission, or about longevity, or whatever else we decide to denote by evolutionary success. So it would be, as such, a somewhat misleading way of talking.
They don't "rape" each other. The society they live in does not have the concept or social construction that human society has of rape. We don't know what the male dolphins think or feel when they isolate a female (which they will do for months at a time--even if the female is already pregnant, so it's not just a breeding thing), we don't know how much or what kind of distress the female experiences, and we don't know if their actions are based off of instinct, socially learned behavior, or what.
This does not appear to be evidence that dolphins aren't raping each other, but rather, evidence that we can't really tell if they're raping each other. After all, you do not say the female isn't in distress, but rather, that we don't know whether she is.
If you assume that an animal is going to accept human social mores if you boost its intelligence, that is a very big and unsupported assumption. A fish that eats its own babies, a lizard that leaves its eggs under a rock and never thinks of them again, wolf that kills the pups of her rival, we don't know why they do what they do. Is it fair to ask them to change what they do, based on our own inconsistent rules which are based on our own evolutionarily created needs?
Should we, social mammals who MUST protect and love our young for them to survive, tell an intelligent lizard "don't murder your babies" . . . when its whole evolutionary history tells it, "You shouldn't give a crap about your babies, and that one over there looks yummy."?
You apparently take a rather poor view of moral reasons and our relation to them. I, by contrast, most certainly do not think that the contents of ethics are inconsistent rules based on evolutionary needs.
If they are intelligent, it is entirely fair for us to ask them to change what they do so as to follow the moral law. After all, according to some scientists rape is adaptive in humans, and, as such, our evolutionary history is 'telling us' to rape away. And infanticide is almost certainly adaptive, and also a widespread historical and even contemporary practice. But that does not, in general, stop us from demanding of one another that we neither rape nor practice infanticide. Nor does it stop us from abstaining from those practices. Regardless of what ancestral humans did on the savannah, I can recognize and respond to the moral reasons which command me not to rape.
By your logic there is nothing that is intrinsically positive. I mean if you don't think longevity or the continuation of our species (gene transmission which is the only current way we know how) is intrinsically positive, what on earth do you think is? I dont see how thinking that longevity or gene transmission is a good thing would be misleading. Who is it misleading and how?
By your logic there is nothing that is intrinsically positive. I mean if you don't think longevity or the continuation of our species (gene transmission which is the only current way we know how) is intrinsically positive, what on earth do you think is? I dont see how thinking that longevity or gene transmission is a good thing would be misleading. Who is it misleading and how?
I'm not sure I understand his point, but I suspect that you could make the claim that evolution is simply the environment attempting to generate a being more perfectly suited to it than attempting to generate and sustain a particular being or species. Under that, a species that is not well suited to its environment which substitutes changing the environment for changing the species could be considered a failure. Specifically, it would a be a failure to generate an exact replica of a theoretical being that matches perfectly with that specific environment.
Now, if you want to argue that we should care about that instead of reshaping the planet to match our needs I might be able to make an argument for it, but I wouldn't believe it.
edit: yes I'm playing a bit fast and loose with the definition of evolution there, but that should be sufficient for this at least (I think. maybe).
By your logic there is nothing that is intrinsically positive. I mean if you don't think longevity or the continuation of our species (gene transmission which is the only current way we know how) is intrinsically positive, what on earth do you think is? I dont see how thinking that longevity or gene transmission is a good thing would be misleading. Who is it misleading and how?
I'm not sure I understand his point, but I suspect that you could make the claim that evolution is simply the environment attempting to generate a being more perfectly suited to it than attempting to generate and sustain a particular being or species. Under that, a species that is not well suited to its environment which substitutes changing the environment for changing the species could be considered a failure. Specifically, it would a be a failure to generate an exact replica of a theoretical being that matches perfectly with that specific environment.
Now, if you want to argue that we should care about that instead of reshaping the planet to match our needs I might be able to make an argument for it, but I wouldn't believe it.
You are taking the environment and the species to be completely seperate which simply isn't the case. We are part of our environment, so if we change it to suit our needs that is essentially the environment changing itself.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
By your logic there is nothing that is intrinsically positive. I mean if you don't think longevity or the continuation of our species (gene transmission which is the only current way we know how) is intrinsically positive, what on earth do you think is? I dont see how thinking that longevity or gene transmission is a good thing would be misleading. Who is it misleading and how?
Alcoholism runs in my family, and yet, there is nothing positive about those genes being transmitted into the future. Even if the entire species were strongly predisposed toward alcoholism, and that were a universal human trait, there would still be nothing positive about those genes being transmitted into the future. It would be better if they were not. Gene transmission is positive when the genes are positive, but is, in itself, neutral.
In any case: I am not sure exactly what you are asking here. I think that plenty of things are good. But I do not think that evolution itself contains any relevant standards of goodness. Evolution is just the name of an semi-predictable process occurring in the natural world, much like erosion. Just as nothing inherent in the process by which water dissolves crevices into rock tells us what the best crevices are, nothing inherent in the way in which species arise and disappear tells us about which the best species are.
By your logic there is nothing that is intrinsically positive. I mean if you don't think longevity or the continuation of our species (gene transmission which is the only current way we know how) is intrinsically positive, what on earth do you think is? I dont see how thinking that longevity or gene transmission is a good thing would be misleading. Who is it misleading and how?
Alcoholism runs in my family, and yet, there is nothing positive about those genes being transmitted into the future. Even if the entire species were strongly predisposed toward alcoholism, and that were a universal human trait, there would still be nothing positive about those genes being transmitted into the future. It would be better if they were not. Gene transmission is positive when the genes are positive, but is, in itself, neutral.
In any case: I am not sure exactly what you are asking here. I think that plenty of things are good. But I do not think that evolution contains relevant standards of success. Evolution is just the name of an semi-predictable process occurring in the natural world, much like erosion. Just as nothing inherent in the process by which water dissolves crevices into rock tells us what the best crevices are, nothing inherent in the way in which species arise and disappear tells us about which the best species are.
So how would you define what the "best" species are?
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
So how would you define what the "best" species are?
An odd question, but, I would define the best species as those that best instantiate what is valuable, where what is valuable itself depends on whatever substantial ethical views one subscribes to.
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In any case: I am not sure exactly what you are asking here. I think that plenty of things are good. But I do not think that evolution contains relevant standards of success. Evolution is just the name of an semi-predictable process occurring in the natural world, much like erosion. Just as nothing inherent in the process by which water dissolves crevices into rock tells us what the best crevices are, nothing inherent in the way in which species arise and disappear tells us about which the best species are.
So how would you define what the "best" species are?
I think the problem with this question is that "best" doesn't really apply to evolution. Evolution has "currently surviving" and "failed to survive" as categories, and anything you want to append beyond that is beyond the scope of evolution.
To be more exact in my previous statement, I would suggest that when one is speaking of making substantial changes to one's environment that one is swiftly exiting the realm in which evolution is playing a role in your development. Once you stop letting the environment change your species, your species stops evolving to suit the world around it and instead the world starts changing to suit your species.
Should we, social mammals who MUST protect and love our young for them to survive, tell an intelligent lizard "don't murder your babies" . . . when its whole evolutionary history tells it, "You shouldn't give a crap about your babies, and that one over there looks yummy."?
The idea of natural rights is that they are inherent of any sufficiently sentient creature. There is a very fine line between what you are endorsing and, say, a culture of people in Africa murdering and raping one another because "it's what they've always done".
The question is difficult to approach, because it's impossible to really pin down what a sentient <insert animal here> would look like. I'm think the terminology used by Orson Scott Card in the Ender books would be kind of useful, here (and I forget what exactly they were called). There were four classifications defined by increasing alien-ness, ranging from "basically the same as us with different bits" to "so alien it's fundamentally impossible for us to even communicate with them".
But basically, if you can imagine a, for example, lizard who wants to live and doesn't want to be raped, then it becomes something of a moral imperative for us to protect it from murder and rape, even if a million years of evolution tell the lizard-boys that rape and murder are a box of awesome.
Honestly, you seem to take a curious offense to the idea of us speaking of ourselves as in any way better than any other species, even though by most (yet not all) meaningful metrics, we're pretty clearly superior.
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So how would you define what the "best" species are?
An odd question, but, I would define the best species as those that best instantiate what is valuable, where what is valuable itself depends on whatever substantial ethical views one subscribes to.
I am asking you personally not abstractly, because your abstract definition has virtually zero meaning. How would YOU define what the best species are? What substantial ethical views do you subscribe to and what things are held valuable in those views and what species best demonstrate those views?
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
I am asking you personally not abstractly, because your abstract definition has virtually zero meaning. How would YOU define what the best species are? What substantial ethical views do you subscribe to and what things are held valuable in those views and what species best demonstrate those views?
Can I ask where this is going? I didn't give my particular ethical views because they seem unrelated to the point at hand, which was that evolution is a value-neutral natural process.
I am asking you personally not abstractly, because your abstract definition has virtually zero meaning. How would YOU define what the best species are? What substantial ethical views do you subscribe to and what things are held valuable in those views and what species best demonstrate those views?
Can I ask where this is going? I didn't give my particular ethical views because they seem unrelated to the point at hand, which was that evolution is a value-neutral natural process.
Basically I am trying to work it back that your views will ultimately be based on what is succesful from an evolutionary standpoint, otherwise your views would be self defeating. So what I am trying to say is that evolution isn't value neutral, it adopts whatever values are evolutionary successes. For example, hyper altruism towards other species is pretty much an evolutionary dead end.
The argument that we shouldn't do something because evolution doesn't work like that is idiotic.
Of course evolution doesn't necessarily generate intelligence. But I'm pretty happy it did. More importantly, evolution is not a dark god which demands sacrifice. We don't have to stand idly by and let things go extinct because evolution demands it regardless of how many times they make this exact argument in Star Trek.
Similarly then, why should we simply accept that some beings aren't intelligent? Or should be stuck in the rut they are in (i.e. could dolphins develop a society, but can't because they lack key appendages rather then adequate brain function to do so?)
For all we know, it's natural evolution on a planetary scale for several species to rapidly gain sentience once one does exactly because of technological uplifting.
I don't know how calling the idea of an "uplift" insulting makes any sort of sense. Who are we insulting? The non-sentient/development-impaired species who can't understand or necessarily comprehend the term? (note: actually it's pretty clear a ton of species "get" the idea of an insult, but certainly as yet not in the abstract conceptual context it's being used here).
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Basically I am trying to work it back that your views will ultimately be based on what is succesful from an evolutionary standpoint, otherwise your views would be self defeating. So what I am trying to say is that evolution isn't value neutral, it adopts whatever values are evolutionary successes. For example, hyper altruism towards other species is pretty much an evolutionary dead end.
I don't think that you are in fact correct about my particular views; my views are that species membership is a morally irrelevant characteristic, that having children is optional but not required (and perhaps even wrong), and that one has special obligations to help one's family only insofar as that is compatible with a scheme guaranteeing similarly good lives to perfect strangers. So I am, as you would say, an evolutionary dead end. It's a good thing I don't care.
Even if you were correct that many people have the values they do as a causal result of evolutionary processes which act independently on ethics as the object of selection--which is an enormous 'if'--we can still ask ourselves if those are the values we ought to have, or whether evolution as a process itself generates ethical imperatives. And, when we ask that question, it becomes obvious that it doesn't. Rape is, in fact, a good example. Rape may have been adaptive in ancestral environments; we know that it exists throughout the animal kingdom. But, of course, even if the rapist 'wins' the gene-propagation lottery, that gives us literally no reason to rape anyone.
Similarly then, why should we simply accept that some beings aren't intelligent? Or should be stuck in the rut they are in (i.e. could dolphins develop a society, but can't because they lack key appendages rather then adequate brain function to do so?)
Would dolphins live better lives if they were more like people? I don't know the answer to that, but I imagine it probably depends on a huge number of practical variables that are extremely difficult to gauge from our current vantage point.
I do think that interacting with a supersmart talking dolphin would provide a wealth of data for philosophers to pour over, and, as such, it would be pretty neat. But I don't know if that's really the most important consideration here. It's hard to say what is given that it's such a fantastical scenario.
Similarly then, why should we simply accept that some beings aren't intelligent? Or should be stuck in the rut they are in (i.e. could dolphins develop a society, but can't because they lack key appendages rather then adequate brain function to do so?)
Would dolphins live better lives if they were more like people? I don't know the answer to that, but I imagine it probably depends on a huge number of practical variables that are extremely difficult to gauge from our current vantage point.
I do think that interacting with a supersmart talking dolphin would provide a wealth of data for philosophers to pour over, and, as such, it would be pretty neat. But I don't know if that's really the most important consideration here. It's hard to say what is given that it's such a fantastical scenario.
At least we are in a position to at least try to answer electricity's questions without creating the potential harm a whole uplift process would cause.
We can already link together lemur brains to robot arms that they control purely with their mind, and with good enough technology we could probably strap on a couple of light-weigh robot arms to a dolphin that would be controlled through a relatively non-invasive method and removed without any harm caused to the dolphin.
Just observing the dolphin and how (if it would) use it's new found appendages is an experiment that could give us so much.
I do think it's funny that people argue about what Evolution Wants as though it's not possible that intelligence catching like a flu is a useful trait for a species or group of species.
For all we know, this is the sexual maturity of a Planet-Scale Organism: Getting a critical mass of intellect in your biosphere and eventually duplicating via terraforming.
Would dolphins live better lives if they were more like people? I don't know the answer to that, but I imagine it probably depends on a huge number of practical variables that are extremely difficult to gauge from our current vantage point.
I think it's less that it depends on practical variables and more that it's completely subjective. I mean, there are plenty of people out there who think technology is terrible and that we were all better off as hunter-gatherers. There are folks that think we've gained comfort and luxury and increased health at the expense of our souls. I think that's a pretty daft assumption, but I'm hard pressed to come up with an objective reason why this is so.
Similarly, I think that if we gave dolphins prosthetic limbs and they invented pop culture and sat in front of their underwater TVs watching Real World: Great Barrier Reef all day, there would be those dolphins who found it an abomination and there would be those dolphins who thought it was pretty keen.
ElJeffe on
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If something speaks "English" that implies at at least on some vague level, English words signify the same concepts, and we'd be able to sort it out. It might be a little weird, like telegraphic speech, but it shouldn't be completely beyond comprehension.
Technically, the quote is "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him." So it doesn't mention English. I think the idea is something like: a lion's form of life is so different from ours, with such different interests and concerns, and ways of navigating the world, that any language they spoke could not be one we would understand.
I still think it's silly, and probably demonstrably false (as in the cases you mention), but not quite so plainly so.
It all turns on what we mean by "speaking". We don't recognize lions as speaking, becuase the sounds and gestures they make to each other are different enough from what we do that our terms "speech" and "language" don't clearly apply to them. This is a point about the meaning of our words; nowhere does the world tell us that we are right to apply them this way.
Just because all of our examples of human speaking and language use have certain things in common, does that mean that we are right to use the term as we do? Well, rightness does not really come in to it - those examples are all we have to pin down the term. We're just using what we have. You can't ask if lions are REALLY speaking even if what they are doing does not resemble what we do - because the meaning of our words are grounded in the limited example cases that we have, and all of those are human-based. Asking if they are "really" speaking just means: have we somehow missed the hidden patterns that confirm that they they do is sufficiently like what we do - are they really like humans?
So, if we extended the courtesy to the lion to credit what he does as speech and language use, have we gotten any closer to understanding him? If we changed our tune from saying, "Lion's can't speak," to saying, "Lions can speak and do speak," would this help us? I don't think W means to say that if a lion spoke English we wouldn't be able to understand him - after all, speaking English would basically make him a human in a different shape. This remarks highlights that recognizing acts as "speech" is complex, and that if you try and think about creatures radically unlike humans having their own language or speech, you set yourself up to conceive of a kind of speach and language that is radically unlike ours.
Davidson's point is not wholly different, I don't think - he just takes a hard line on the meaning of "speech" and "language". Since all we have are examples are are intertranslatable, intertranslatability is an essential feature of the things that we designate by the term "language". Therefore, a langauge that could not be translated into English (or human language" is a contradiction in terms. End of story. Wittgenstein would only add, I think, that Davidson's move from a common feature of our examples to an essential quality is a move that asks for more thought about the way in which definitions function for us.
So, if we extended the courtesy to the lion to credit what he does as speech and language use, have we gotten any closer to understanding him? If we changed our tune from saying, "Lion's can't speak," to saying, "Lions can speak and do speak," would this help us? I don't think W means to say that if a lion spoke English we wouldn't be able to understand him - after all, speaking English would basically make him a human in a different shape. This remarks highlights that recognizing acts as "speech" is complex, and that if you try and think about creatures radically unlike humans having their own language or speech, you set yourself up to conceive of a kind of speach and language that is radically unlike ours.
Well, there are several species of bird that can be taught to speak English. They can even be trained to speak English in vaguely appropriate ways such that they're communicating what passes for their thoughts. They still are a far cry from human. Or sentient.
I actually don't think that the thought processes of most "intelligent" animals - dogs, cats, pigs, et al - are so alien as to preclude communication with people. I think it's a lot simpler, but we share a lot of basic concepts. We both understand hunger, thirst, comfort, pain, anger, happiness, sadness, playing... Animals can already communicate with us. I suspect it's less that they're completely alien and more that there just really isn't much there. So much of human thought and communication is based on a distinct notion of self, and trying to hold these conversations with creatures that don't have that will be inherently limited.
It's a bit like performing a literary criticism of a child's picture book. The book has information to impart, sure, but if you try to start delving into complicated areas like theme and character analysis, you're going to get to a point where there's just nothing there. Spot runs, dude. That's it. There is no more. Doesn't mean that Dick and Jane isn't really a book, or that it can't communicate anything.
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So, if we extended the courtesy to the lion to credit what he does as speech and language use, have we gotten any closer to understanding him? If we changed our tune from saying, "Lion's can't speak," to saying, "Lions can speak and do speak," would this help us? I don't think W means to say that if a lion spoke English we wouldn't be able to understand him - after all, speaking English would basically make him a human in a different shape. This remarks highlights that recognizing acts as "speech" is complex, and that if you try and think about creatures radically unlike humans having their own language or speech, you set yourself up to conceive of a kind of speach and language that is radically unlike ours.
Well, there are several species of bird that can be taught to speak English. They can even be trained to speak English in vaguely appropriate ways such that they're communicating what passes for their thoughts. They still are a far cry from human. Or sentient.
I actually don't think that the thought processes of most "intelligent" animals - dogs, cats, pigs, et al - are so alien as to preclude communication with people. I think it's a lot simpler, but we share a lot of basic concepts. We both understand hunger, thirst, comfort, pain, anger, happiness, sadness, playing... Animals can already communicate with us. I suspect it's less that they're completely alien and more that there just really isn't much there. So much of human thought and communication is based on a distinct notion of self, and trying to hold these conversations with creatures that don't have that will be inherently limited.
It's a bit like performing a literary criticism of a child's picture book. The book has information to impart, sure, but if you try to start delving into complicated areas like theme and character analysis, you're going to get to a point where there's just nothing there. Spot runs, dude. That's it. There is no more. Doesn't mean that Dick and Jane isn't really a book, or that it can't communicate anything.
You show the problem very well - if we compare what animals do to the full flowering of what humans can do with language, we find some similarities at a basic level. So we say that, compared to the way in which we use langauge, what they are doing is comparible to some of our most basic applications.
But imagine, for a moment, that they were using similar building blocks to ours, but in a radically different way? Yes, humans and animals make noises and gestures; yes, both groups have feelings; yes, they share certain patterns of behaviour in common. We are also all made up of the same chemical components, if that matters. Does this mean that, because part of what they do can be interepreted as analogus to what we do, there is not some other kind of complexity that is utterly unlike what we have built in our language at work as well?
Consider a couple of painters. Imagine a great painter from the 18th century. He is suddenly brought face to face with early 20th century works that are simply blocks on canvas, irregular shapes, and so on. He might recognize that they were painting - that they had some relation to what he did. But he would judge them to be incredibly simple compared to his complex work representing landscapes and people. He would not have the resources to understand how to understand their meaning, and so he would see only their simplicity.
This is, of course, not a perfect analogy - because both painters are human and we can imagine one explaining to the other what is going on, and both reaching a mutual understanding. The older painter may not be able to understand the visual language of the younger, but they do at least share some langauge, and that can be used to bridge the gap.
In the case of animals, there is no shared language to go by - we only have what we presume to be a correct understanding of the simple elements we both share, and which we seem to be able to make work in similar ways. And so, to say that you understand an animal is not a factual claim about content of their sounds and gesture, or about your inferring their mental state. It is an expression of confidence that what they do that we are willing to call language or thought fits entirely with the boundaries of what we already do. And that confidence is nothing that is justified externally - it is your own conviction.
So, if we extended the courtesy to the lion to credit what he does as speech and language use, have we gotten any closer to understanding him? If we changed our tune from saying, "Lion's can't speak," to saying, "Lions can speak and do speak," would this help us? I don't think W means to say that if a lion spoke English we wouldn't be able to understand him - after all, speaking English would basically make him a human in a different shape. This remarks highlights that recognizing acts as "speech" is complex, and that if you try and think about creatures radically unlike humans having their own language or speech, you set yourself up to conceive of a kind of speach and language that is radically unlike ours.
Well, there are several species of bird that can be taught to speak English. They can even be trained to speak English in vaguely appropriate ways such that they're communicating what passes for their thoughts. They still are a far cry from human. Or sentient.
I actually don't think that the thought processes of most "intelligent" animals - dogs, cats, pigs, et al - are so alien as to preclude communication with people. I think it's a lot simpler, but we share a lot of basic concepts. We both understand hunger, thirst, comfort, pain, anger, happiness, sadness, playing... Animals can already communicate with us. I suspect it's less that they're completely alien and more that there just really isn't much there. So much of human thought and communication is based on a distinct notion of self, and trying to hold these conversations with creatures that don't have that will be inherently limited.
It's a bit like performing a literary criticism of a child's picture book. The book has information to impart, sure, but if you try to start delving into complicated areas like theme and character analysis, you're going to get to a point where there's just nothing there. Spot runs, dude. That's it. There is no more. Doesn't mean that Dick and Jane isn't really a book, or that it can't communicate anything.
You show the problem very well - if we compare what animals do to the full flowering of what humans can do with language, we find some similarities at a basic level. So we say that, compared to the way in which we use langauge, what they are doing is comparible to some of our most basic applications.
But imagine, for a moment, that they were using similar building blocks to ours, but in a radically different way? Yes, humans and animals make noises and gestures; yes, both groups have feelings; yes, they share certain patterns of behaviour in common. We are also all made up of the same chemical components, if that matters. Does this mean that, because part of what they do can be interepreted as analogus to what we do, there is not some other kind of complexity that is utterly unlike what we have built in our language at work as well?
Consider a couple of painters. Imagine a great painter from the 18th century. He is suddenly brought face to face with early 20th century works that are simply blocks on canvas, irregular shapes, and so on. He might recognize that they were painting - that they had some relation to what he did. But he would judge them to be incredibly simple compared to his complex work representing landscapes and people. He would not have the resources to understand how to understand their meaning, and so he would see only their simplicity.
This is, of course, not a perfect analogy - because both painters are human and we can imagine one explaining to the other what is going on, and both reaching a mutual understanding. The older painter may not be able to understand the visual language of the younger, but they do at least share some langauge, and that can be used to bridge the gap.
In the case of animals, there is no shared language to go by - we only have what we presume to be a correct understanding of the simple elements we both share, and which we seem to be able to make work in similar ways. And so, to say that you understand an animal is not a factual claim about content of their sounds and gesture, or about your inferring their mental state. It is an expression of confidence that what they do that we are willing to call language or thought fits entirely with the boundaries of what we already do. And that confidence is nothing that is justified externally - it is your own conviction.
The difference between 20th century vs. 18th century painting and the vocalizations of non-human animals vs. human speech is that the latter comparison involves actual knowledge transfer. A painting may be representative of a scene or an idea and thereby impart information to the viewer, but that isn't what you were talking about. The "meaning" of a painting of a red square on a white background is not inherent to the painting itself. It might invoke some emotional response, but not in a reliable way that would make the painting useful as a tool for communication. The meaning comes from the artist telling you, with language, what the square means.
Language has to impart actual information. It has to do it in a way that is consistent and repeatable. Language is pointless if two members of a pool of speakers and listeners cannot use the same linguistic constructs to repeatedly transfer the same information. If language were one-off like artwork, where linguistic structures followed no set rules that could be learned, generalized, and re-applied, then no one would be able to communicate, rendering the 'language' meaningless.
Given that language has to actually carry information, there are a limited number of ways for any communication medium to do so. Sounds have frequencies, durations, and amplitudes. We have many, many examples in the animal world of various animals communicating with other members of their species (or, in some cases, other species) by making repeated, similar vocalizations. In some cases we can observer that changes in duration or frequency slightly alter the meaning of the sound. The point, though, is that that's all there is to work with. Animals might communicate by means we would have difficulty reading (scent, posture, motion, in some species pigmentation, etc.) but in all cases there are limited numbers of ways for that communication to occur. Animal behavior specialists have pretty good catalogs of what various postures, vocalizations, and actions mean to the animals performing them. And like ElJeffe said, they're mostly very straight-forward uses of communication. Hunger, fear, aggression, contentment, etc.
Cat's aren't having secret debates that we can't pick up on because there simply isn't informational bandwidth for them to do so. We know how cats communicate. By and large we know what they're saying. More intelligent animals have more complex languages. We mostly don't know what the hell dolphins or whales are saying. Even there, though, we can examine their vocalization data and extrapolate the upper limit of how much information is actually being conveyed.
Most higher mammals are probably smart enough to talk, to some extent, if they had the hardware or we had a means of direct translation, but it's scientifically verifiable fact that they don't have much to say.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
And so, to say that you understand an animal is not a factual claim about content of their sounds and gesture, or about your inferring their mental state. It is an expression of confidence that what they do that we are willing to call language or thought fits entirely with the boundaries of what we already do. And that confidence is nothing that is justified externally - it is your own conviction.
And so, to say that you understand an animal is not a factual claim about content of their sounds and gesture, or about your inferring their mental state. It is an expression of confidence that what they do that we are willing to call language or thought fits entirely with the boundaries of what we already do. And that confidence is nothing that is justified externally - it is your own conviction.
How is this disanalogous with other humans?
It is analogus to what we do with other humans - but, whereas other humans have language that resemble ours strongly, we can get into deeper discussions and have factual disagreements about the content of symbols and mental staes. Without that foundational similarlity, we simply don't have as much to talk about - dare I say, because we don't necessarily recognize what the other one is doing as talking.
Look, I understand what people are saying here - you can define "language" however the hell you please, and then whatever follows from it follows from it. Complex demonstrations of this, as above, are hardly needed. There is no one monolithic definition of "language", and there is room for people to argue that we should alter our way of approaching natural phenomena to look at it in broader or narrower terms than we generally do now. No matter how many times you say "Language has to do x" you will probably find that Wittgenstein (or somebody else) has thought that maybe it doesn't. If the fact that other people think that language could be understood differently from the way you want it to be understood doesn't give you pause, then I suppose that that's that.
And also, the presumption that the early 20th centry artworks in question are not communicating information is a conclusion you could only come to if you completely neglegted the study of art history. They are communicating information - very precise information - but you have to know the context and know how it is being communicated in order to understand what that is. I think that really, it is a very helpful demonstration - people with art, as with animals, have the automatic tendancy to think that if they don't get it, there must be nothing to get, or that it is done poorly, or not "really" properly done. This is precisely the move that ought to be rejected as rather silly, I should say.
I do think it's funny that people argue about what Evolution Wants as though it's not possible that intelligence catching like a flu is a useful trait for a species or group of species.
For all we know, this is the sexual maturity of a Planet-Scale Organism: Getting a critical mass of intellect in your biosphere and eventually duplicating via terraforming.
No need for terraforming, just spread intelligent species that has been the designed and adapted to the environment in question instead of utilizing a lot more resources for the terraforming of the environment.
Didn't Wittgenstein say something along the lines that even if a lion could speak english we still wouldn't be able to understand it. Relevant as even if a species gained the ability to converse with us their thought processes and concept of the environment may be so alien as to be unable to interact with us.
I'm also of the opinion that rooks are one of the most freaky intelligent creatures on this planet outside of humans and the apes. Also those beady, beady eyes...
Birds in general strike me as more intelligent than the stereotype says, and after the great apes and other "obvious" candidates have been uplifted I'd expect some work in the area to be done on birds of various kinds.
But as it looks like it'd be a rather unpleasant process I'm afraid we'd only end up with "useful" uplifts, created by corporations or certain countries with no ethical qualms regarding the whole uplifting process with the intention of using the uplifted animals as slaves in servitude.
They'd probably go for intelligent bomb sniffer dogs, possible intelligent dolphins for more advanced underwater warfare activities (a capacity modern-day dolphins are already being used in) and completely skipping out on the uplifts which would be interesting because of the potential philosophical gain that could be had - such as whether or not we'd actually be able to understand the uplifted species should we grant them an increased brain complexity and means of communication with us.
I just imagined smoking a bowl and talking about the meaning of life with an uplifted koala.
my face when:
also, would a "maybe if the female dolphin didn't dress like that then she wouldn't get isolated" joke be a little too crass for this thread?
but seriously, I think it would be a little fucked up to wholesale trade-in animals for the new speechimals. I'd much prefer it to be more like a device which I could attach to a squirrel and be like "squirrel-bro, what up?" then he'd be all "oh you know, just tryin' to dig out deez nuts" then I'd be like "oh squirrel bro, you so crazy" then we'd laugh and then go on with our days business as usual.
I'd be pretty sad if 10 years later I saw squirrelbro again and was all like "squirrel bro, long time no see, what up?" then he'd be all "oh you know, just filing my taxes so I can pay squirrel-support for my dumb ass kid, you know, just trying to make ends meet since I had to give everything I owned as alimony to that squirrelwhore ex wife of mine who I caught all up in squirrel nemesis' nuts back in '14. The squirrel doctor says I got high cholesterol so I gotta take these damn pills and now I can't get it up."
Basically I am trying to work it back that your views will ultimately be based on what is succesful from an evolutionary standpoint, otherwise your views would be self defeating. So what I am trying to say is that evolution isn't value neutral, it adopts whatever values are evolutionary successes. For example, hyper altruism towards other species is pretty much an evolutionary dead end.
I don't think that you are in fact correct about my particular views; my views are that species membership is a morally irrelevant characteristic, that having children is optional but not required (and perhaps even wrong), and that one has special obligations to help one's family only insofar as that is compatible with a scheme guaranteeing similarly good lives to perfect strangers. So I am, as you would say, an evolutionary dead end. It's a good thing I don't care.
Even if you were correct that many people have the values they do as a causal result of evolutionary processes which act independently on ethics as the object of selection--which is an enormous 'if'--we can still ask ourselves if those are the values we ought to have, or whether evolution as a process itself generates ethical imperatives. And, when we ask that question, it becomes obvious that it doesn't. Rape is, in fact, a good example. Rape may have been adaptive in ancestral environments; we know that it exists throughout the animal kingdom. But, of course, even if the rapist 'wins' the gene-propagation lottery, that gives us literally no reason to rape anyone.
Similarly then, why should we simply accept that some beings aren't intelligent? Or should be stuck in the rut they are in (i.e. could dolphins develop a society, but can't because they lack key appendages rather then adequate brain function to do so?)
Would dolphins live better lives if they were more like people? I don't know the answer to that, but I imagine it probably depends on a huge number of practical variables that are extremely difficult to gauge from our current vantage point.
I do think that interacting with a supersmart talking dolphin would provide a wealth of data for philosophers to pour over, and, as such, it would be pretty neat. But I don't know if that's really the most important consideration here. It's hard to say what is given that it's such a fantastical scenario.
I don't neccesarily think your views are an evolutionary dead end. If the majority of people thought in a similar way it would most likely benefit the group as a whole, thus passing on the idea.
Also in todays society, the rapist doesn't really win when it comes to gene propagation. First, abortion is fairly common among rape victims. Secondly, most rapes don't end in a pregnancy, and thus when the rapist ends up in jail, he no longer has a chance to propagate. So I would say that society as a whole is pushing to make rape an evolutionary dead end.
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Foolproofthats what my hearts becomein that place you dare not look staring back at youRegistered Userregular
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I don't think humanity in general will agree with losing it's special status as the only form of intelligent life.
Consider the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence and all the benefits that could come from communication with them and compare that to the amount of effort put into investigating their possible existence and how we should attempt to communicate with them. To me it seems like an investment opportunity with an almost infinite return and it is still ignored by almost every government. I think the reason is that the human ego is unwilling to admit that is is not the only intelligence in existence.
What happens when someone wants to uplift a dog or a pig or some other animal that is considered unclean by a popular religion?
I think the prospect of artificial intelligence is something humanity will need to deal with long before we can uplift animals to a higher plane of awareness. What happens when a server farm contains a billion minds each smarter than any living human? What if they are made in such vast numbers that they can find or make no productive use of their time? Will they be content simply to exist without real purpose or will they focus on making even more advanced intelligences as a form of reproduction/provolution? Wouldn't implanting an AI into an animal body be more likely to occur before some kind of genetic upgrade?
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
I don't neccesarily think your views are an evolutionary dead end. If the majority of people thought in a similar way it would most likely benefit the group as a whole, thus passing on the idea.
And what is the evidence that selection actually operates this way? There's a significant controversy over the objects of selection, and the way in which they can engineer benefits and adaptations. What you are giving here is a just-so story, not an actual evolutionary explanation of why certain people have certain beliefs. Or, in other words, this is extremely vague speculation dressed up in the language of science.
It is analogus to what we do with other humans - but, whereas other humans have language that resemble ours strongly, we can get into deeper discussions and have factual disagreements about the content of symbols and mental staes. Without that foundational similarlity, we simply don't have as much to talk about - dare I say, because we don't necessarily recognize what the other one is doing as talking.
I mean, I agree that we can't talk to lions. But the Wittgenstein quoted earlier doesn't just claim that we can't talk to them, but rather, that even if they could talk it would still be the case that we couldn't understand them. So, in other words, the reason that we can't talk to lions in the actual world, according to Wittgenstein, is that even if they had language we could not understand them. But this seems wrong, for Davidsonian-type reasons.
So: it is easy to imagine a language so difficult to translate, and a population so stupid, that they could never figure it out. And we can imagine that this is the case with animal languages, if they have them. But it is hard to imagine a language whose expressions are in principle impossible to express in English. Such a language, a la Davidson, would not be one that we could recognize as expressing thought at all; if we could recognize it as expressing thought, then that thought would be one we could at least partially translate. So such a language cannot exist.
So, where Wittgenstein says that even if a lion could speak, we could not understand him, Davidson correctly replies that if we could not even in principle understand him, then a lion could not be speaking.
I don't neccesarily think your views are an evolutionary dead end. If the majority of people thought in a similar way it would most likely benefit the group as a whole, thus passing on the idea.
And what is the evidence that selection actually operates this way? There's a significant controversy over the objects of selection, and the way in which they can engineer benefits and adaptations. What you are giving here is a just-so story, not an actual evolutionary explanation of why certain people have certain beliefs. Or, in other words, this is extremely vague speculation dressed up in the language of science.
I agree that it is vague speculation. But how would you suggest ideas and values have come about if not by some sort of evolution?
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
I don't neccesarily think your views are an evolutionary dead end. If the majority of people thought in a similar way it would most likely benefit the group as a whole, thus passing on the idea.
And what is the evidence that selection actually operates this way? There's a significant controversy over the objects of selection, and the way in which they can engineer benefits and adaptations. What you are giving here is a just-so story, not an actual evolutionary explanation of why certain people have certain beliefs. Or, in other words, this is extremely vague speculation dressed up in the language of science.
I agree that it is vague speculation. But how would you suggest ideas and values have come about if not by some sort of evolution?
Our values are, at least sometimes, the product of our ability to recognize reasons. We think about what we have reason to do, and then form ethical conclusions on the basis of our investigation, like we look at the starry sky and form astronomical conclusions based on that investigation, or like we examine the fundamentals of set-theoretic relations and come to mathematical and logical conclusions based on that investigation.
Maybe there's some attenuated sense in which evolution plays a role in these investigations, by making us into the sorts of creatures that are capable of carrying them out. But that is a distal relation, and one need not advert to evolution in order to explain our astronomical or mathematical conclusions. It is certainly not the case that evolution makes it the case that a certain number of stars hang in the sky. Similarly, evolution most certainly does not make it the case that a certain way of life is valuable, or, for instance, that rape is wrong, even if it plays some part in making us into the sort of creatures who can discern those facts.
I don't think humanity in general will agree with losing it's special status as the only form of intelligent life.
Consider the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence and all the benefits that could come from communication with them and compare that to the amount of effort put into investigating their possible existence and how we should attempt to communicate with them. To me it seems like an investment opportunity with an almost infinite return and it is still ignored by almost every government. I think the reason is that the human ego is unwilling to admit that is is not the only intelligence in existence.
What happens when someone wants to uplift a dog or a pig or some other animal that is considered unclean by a popular religion?
I think the prospect of artificial intelligence is something humanity will need to deal with long before we can uplift animals to a higher plane of awareness. What happens when a server farm contains a billion minds each smarter than any living human? What if they are made in such vast numbers that they can find or make no productive use of their time? Will they be content simply to exist without real purpose or will they focus on making even more advanced intelligences as a form of reproduction/provolution? Wouldn't implanting an AI into an animal body be more likely to occur before some kind of genetic upgrade?
When it comes to extraterrestrial intelligence there are plenty of valid reasons for not contacting aliens for the sole reason that we're dealing with an unknown element that might very well be extremely dangerous for earth. Money should go into the research and exploration of space but any attempt to actively broadcast our position in the naive hope that we would gain something out of it is a big no-no to many people.
In that sense, developing a relatively alien mind that is still like us enough to be able to do some meaningful communication with it while we're in a position to influence it into not being an existential threat to the current form of intelligent life is a much better idea.
The whole process of attempting to understand the probably very alien mind of an uplifted ant colony or octopus would also improve on our ability to learn how to communicate with other intelligent minds.
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Which sounds quite interesting, and would kinda be the point with this whole endeavour.
Intelligence, that is alien.
And no, I doubt that we'd end up with "humans in furry suits" by restricting their behaviour (whether it has to be done on a genetic basis or by just enforcing laws like with ourselves). I doubt our differences hinge upon that these specific key behaviours which we might want to remove if they come into conflict with the notions of sapient beings having the right to be spared death or torture.
By your logic there is nothing that is intrinsically positive. I mean if you don't think longevity or the continuation of our species (gene transmission which is the only current way we know how) is intrinsically positive, what on earth do you think is? I dont see how thinking that longevity or gene transmission is a good thing would be misleading. Who is it misleading and how?
Now, if you want to argue that we should care about that instead of reshaping the planet to match our needs I might be able to make an argument for it, but I wouldn't believe it.
edit: yes I'm playing a bit fast and loose with the definition of evolution there, but that should be sufficient for this at least (I think. maybe).
You are taking the environment and the species to be completely seperate which simply isn't the case. We are part of our environment, so if we change it to suit our needs that is essentially the environment changing itself.
Alcoholism runs in my family, and yet, there is nothing positive about those genes being transmitted into the future. Even if the entire species were strongly predisposed toward alcoholism, and that were a universal human trait, there would still be nothing positive about those genes being transmitted into the future. It would be better if they were not. Gene transmission is positive when the genes are positive, but is, in itself, neutral.
In any case: I am not sure exactly what you are asking here. I think that plenty of things are good. But I do not think that evolution itself contains any relevant standards of goodness. Evolution is just the name of an semi-predictable process occurring in the natural world, much like erosion. Just as nothing inherent in the process by which water dissolves crevices into rock tells us what the best crevices are, nothing inherent in the way in which species arise and disappear tells us about which the best species are.
So how would you define what the "best" species are?
An odd question, but, I would define the best species as those that best instantiate what is valuable, where what is valuable itself depends on whatever substantial ethical views one subscribes to.
To be more exact in my previous statement, I would suggest that when one is speaking of making substantial changes to one's environment that one is swiftly exiting the realm in which evolution is playing a role in your development. Once you stop letting the environment change your species, your species stops evolving to suit the world around it and instead the world starts changing to suit your species.
The idea of natural rights is that they are inherent of any sufficiently sentient creature. There is a very fine line between what you are endorsing and, say, a culture of people in Africa murdering and raping one another because "it's what they've always done".
The question is difficult to approach, because it's impossible to really pin down what a sentient <insert animal here> would look like. I'm think the terminology used by Orson Scott Card in the Ender books would be kind of useful, here (and I forget what exactly they were called). There were four classifications defined by increasing alien-ness, ranging from "basically the same as us with different bits" to "so alien it's fundamentally impossible for us to even communicate with them".
But basically, if you can imagine a, for example, lizard who wants to live and doesn't want to be raped, then it becomes something of a moral imperative for us to protect it from murder and rape, even if a million years of evolution tell the lizard-boys that rape and murder are a box of awesome.
Honestly, you seem to take a curious offense to the idea of us speaking of ourselves as in any way better than any other species, even though by most (yet not all) meaningful metrics, we're pretty clearly superior.
I am asking you personally not abstractly, because your abstract definition has virtually zero meaning. How would YOU define what the best species are? What substantial ethical views do you subscribe to and what things are held valuable in those views and what species best demonstrate those views?
Can I ask where this is going? I didn't give my particular ethical views because they seem unrelated to the point at hand, which was that evolution is a value-neutral natural process.
Basically I am trying to work it back that your views will ultimately be based on what is succesful from an evolutionary standpoint, otherwise your views would be self defeating. So what I am trying to say is that evolution isn't value neutral, it adopts whatever values are evolutionary successes. For example, hyper altruism towards other species is pretty much an evolutionary dead end.
Of course evolution doesn't necessarily generate intelligence. But I'm pretty happy it did. More importantly, evolution is not a dark god which demands sacrifice. We don't have to stand idly by and let things go extinct because evolution demands it regardless of how many times they make this exact argument in Star Trek.
Similarly then, why should we simply accept that some beings aren't intelligent? Or should be stuck in the rut they are in (i.e. could dolphins develop a society, but can't because they lack key appendages rather then adequate brain function to do so?)
For all we know, it's natural evolution on a planetary scale for several species to rapidly gain sentience once one does exactly because of technological uplifting.
I don't know how calling the idea of an "uplift" insulting makes any sort of sense. Who are we insulting? The non-sentient/development-impaired species who can't understand or necessarily comprehend the term? (note: actually it's pretty clear a ton of species "get" the idea of an insult, but certainly as yet not in the abstract conceptual context it's being used here).
I don't think that you are in fact correct about my particular views; my views are that species membership is a morally irrelevant characteristic, that having children is optional but not required (and perhaps even wrong), and that one has special obligations to help one's family only insofar as that is compatible with a scheme guaranteeing similarly good lives to perfect strangers. So I am, as you would say, an evolutionary dead end. It's a good thing I don't care.
Even if you were correct that many people have the values they do as a causal result of evolutionary processes which act independently on ethics as the object of selection--which is an enormous 'if'--we can still ask ourselves if those are the values we ought to have, or whether evolution as a process itself generates ethical imperatives. And, when we ask that question, it becomes obvious that it doesn't. Rape is, in fact, a good example. Rape may have been adaptive in ancestral environments; we know that it exists throughout the animal kingdom. But, of course, even if the rapist 'wins' the gene-propagation lottery, that gives us literally no reason to rape anyone.
Would dolphins live better lives if they were more like people? I don't know the answer to that, but I imagine it probably depends on a huge number of practical variables that are extremely difficult to gauge from our current vantage point.
I do think that interacting with a supersmart talking dolphin would provide a wealth of data for philosophers to pour over, and, as such, it would be pretty neat. But I don't know if that's really the most important consideration here. It's hard to say what is given that it's such a fantastical scenario.
At least we are in a position to at least try to answer electricity's questions without creating the potential harm a whole uplift process would cause.
We can already link together lemur brains to robot arms that they control purely with their mind, and with good enough technology we could probably strap on a couple of light-weigh robot arms to a dolphin that would be controlled through a relatively non-invasive method and removed without any harm caused to the dolphin.
Just observing the dolphin and how (if it would) use it's new found appendages is an experiment that could give us so much.
For all we know, this is the sexual maturity of a Planet-Scale Organism: Getting a critical mass of intellect in your biosphere and eventually duplicating via terraforming.
I think it's less that it depends on practical variables and more that it's completely subjective. I mean, there are plenty of people out there who think technology is terrible and that we were all better off as hunter-gatherers. There are folks that think we've gained comfort and luxury and increased health at the expense of our souls. I think that's a pretty daft assumption, but I'm hard pressed to come up with an objective reason why this is so.
Similarly, I think that if we gave dolphins prosthetic limbs and they invented pop culture and sat in front of their underwater TVs watching Real World: Great Barrier Reef all day, there would be those dolphins who found it an abomination and there would be those dolphins who thought it was pretty keen.
It all turns on what we mean by "speaking". We don't recognize lions as speaking, becuase the sounds and gestures they make to each other are different enough from what we do that our terms "speech" and "language" don't clearly apply to them. This is a point about the meaning of our words; nowhere does the world tell us that we are right to apply them this way.
Just because all of our examples of human speaking and language use have certain things in common, does that mean that we are right to use the term as we do? Well, rightness does not really come in to it - those examples are all we have to pin down the term. We're just using what we have. You can't ask if lions are REALLY speaking even if what they are doing does not resemble what we do - because the meaning of our words are grounded in the limited example cases that we have, and all of those are human-based. Asking if they are "really" speaking just means: have we somehow missed the hidden patterns that confirm that they they do is sufficiently like what we do - are they really like humans?
So, if we extended the courtesy to the lion to credit what he does as speech and language use, have we gotten any closer to understanding him? If we changed our tune from saying, "Lion's can't speak," to saying, "Lions can speak and do speak," would this help us? I don't think W means to say that if a lion spoke English we wouldn't be able to understand him - after all, speaking English would basically make him a human in a different shape. This remarks highlights that recognizing acts as "speech" is complex, and that if you try and think about creatures radically unlike humans having their own language or speech, you set yourself up to conceive of a kind of speach and language that is radically unlike ours.
Davidson's point is not wholly different, I don't think - he just takes a hard line on the meaning of "speech" and "language". Since all we have are examples are are intertranslatable, intertranslatability is an essential feature of the things that we designate by the term "language". Therefore, a langauge that could not be translated into English (or human language" is a contradiction in terms. End of story. Wittgenstein would only add, I think, that Davidson's move from a common feature of our examples to an essential quality is a move that asks for more thought about the way in which definitions function for us.
Well, there are several species of bird that can be taught to speak English. They can even be trained to speak English in vaguely appropriate ways such that they're communicating what passes for their thoughts. They still are a far cry from human. Or sentient.
I actually don't think that the thought processes of most "intelligent" animals - dogs, cats, pigs, et al - are so alien as to preclude communication with people. I think it's a lot simpler, but we share a lot of basic concepts. We both understand hunger, thirst, comfort, pain, anger, happiness, sadness, playing... Animals can already communicate with us. I suspect it's less that they're completely alien and more that there just really isn't much there. So much of human thought and communication is based on a distinct notion of self, and trying to hold these conversations with creatures that don't have that will be inherently limited.
It's a bit like performing a literary criticism of a child's picture book. The book has information to impart, sure, but if you try to start delving into complicated areas like theme and character analysis, you're going to get to a point where there's just nothing there. Spot runs, dude. That's it. There is no more. Doesn't mean that Dick and Jane isn't really a book, or that it can't communicate anything.
You show the problem very well - if we compare what animals do to the full flowering of what humans can do with language, we find some similarities at a basic level. So we say that, compared to the way in which we use langauge, what they are doing is comparible to some of our most basic applications.
But imagine, for a moment, that they were using similar building blocks to ours, but in a radically different way? Yes, humans and animals make noises and gestures; yes, both groups have feelings; yes, they share certain patterns of behaviour in common. We are also all made up of the same chemical components, if that matters. Does this mean that, because part of what they do can be interepreted as analogus to what we do, there is not some other kind of complexity that is utterly unlike what we have built in our language at work as well?
Consider a couple of painters. Imagine a great painter from the 18th century. He is suddenly brought face to face with early 20th century works that are simply blocks on canvas, irregular shapes, and so on. He might recognize that they were painting - that they had some relation to what he did. But he would judge them to be incredibly simple compared to his complex work representing landscapes and people. He would not have the resources to understand how to understand their meaning, and so he would see only their simplicity.
This is, of course, not a perfect analogy - because both painters are human and we can imagine one explaining to the other what is going on, and both reaching a mutual understanding. The older painter may not be able to understand the visual language of the younger, but they do at least share some langauge, and that can be used to bridge the gap.
In the case of animals, there is no shared language to go by - we only have what we presume to be a correct understanding of the simple elements we both share, and which we seem to be able to make work in similar ways. And so, to say that you understand an animal is not a factual claim about content of their sounds and gesture, or about your inferring their mental state. It is an expression of confidence that what they do that we are willing to call language or thought fits entirely with the boundaries of what we already do. And that confidence is nothing that is justified externally - it is your own conviction.
The difference between 20th century vs. 18th century painting and the vocalizations of non-human animals vs. human speech is that the latter comparison involves actual knowledge transfer. A painting may be representative of a scene or an idea and thereby impart information to the viewer, but that isn't what you were talking about. The "meaning" of a painting of a red square on a white background is not inherent to the painting itself. It might invoke some emotional response, but not in a reliable way that would make the painting useful as a tool for communication. The meaning comes from the artist telling you, with language, what the square means.
Language has to impart actual information. It has to do it in a way that is consistent and repeatable. Language is pointless if two members of a pool of speakers and listeners cannot use the same linguistic constructs to repeatedly transfer the same information. If language were one-off like artwork, where linguistic structures followed no set rules that could be learned, generalized, and re-applied, then no one would be able to communicate, rendering the 'language' meaningless.
Given that language has to actually carry information, there are a limited number of ways for any communication medium to do so. Sounds have frequencies, durations, and amplitudes. We have many, many examples in the animal world of various animals communicating with other members of their species (or, in some cases, other species) by making repeated, similar vocalizations. In some cases we can observer that changes in duration or frequency slightly alter the meaning of the sound. The point, though, is that that's all there is to work with. Animals might communicate by means we would have difficulty reading (scent, posture, motion, in some species pigmentation, etc.) but in all cases there are limited numbers of ways for that communication to occur. Animal behavior specialists have pretty good catalogs of what various postures, vocalizations, and actions mean to the animals performing them. And like ElJeffe said, they're mostly very straight-forward uses of communication. Hunger, fear, aggression, contentment, etc.
Cat's aren't having secret debates that we can't pick up on because there simply isn't informational bandwidth for them to do so. We know how cats communicate. By and large we know what they're saying. More intelligent animals have more complex languages. We mostly don't know what the hell dolphins or whales are saying. Even there, though, we can examine their vocalization data and extrapolate the upper limit of how much information is actually being conveyed.
Most higher mammals are probably smart enough to talk, to some extent, if they had the hardware or we had a means of direct translation, but it's scientifically verifiable fact that they don't have much to say.
How is this disanalogous with other humans?
It is analogus to what we do with other humans - but, whereas other humans have language that resemble ours strongly, we can get into deeper discussions and have factual disagreements about the content of symbols and mental staes. Without that foundational similarlity, we simply don't have as much to talk about - dare I say, because we don't necessarily recognize what the other one is doing as talking.
Look, I understand what people are saying here - you can define "language" however the hell you please, and then whatever follows from it follows from it. Complex demonstrations of this, as above, are hardly needed. There is no one monolithic definition of "language", and there is room for people to argue that we should alter our way of approaching natural phenomena to look at it in broader or narrower terms than we generally do now. No matter how many times you say "Language has to do x" you will probably find that Wittgenstein (or somebody else) has thought that maybe it doesn't. If the fact that other people think that language could be understood differently from the way you want it to be understood doesn't give you pause, then I suppose that that's that.
And also, the presumption that the early 20th centry artworks in question are not communicating information is a conclusion you could only come to if you completely neglegted the study of art history. They are communicating information - very precise information - but you have to know the context and know how it is being communicated in order to understand what that is. I think that really, it is a very helpful demonstration - people with art, as with animals, have the automatic tendancy to think that if they don't get it, there must be nothing to get, or that it is done poorly, or not "really" properly done. This is precisely the move that ought to be rejected as rather silly, I should say.
No need for terraforming, just spread intelligent species that has been the designed and adapted to the environment in question instead of utilizing a lot more resources for the terraforming of the environment.
Considering that you can kinda talk with some birds, I definitely agree with you.
I just imagined smoking a bowl and talking about the meaning of life with an uplifted koala.
my face when:
also, would a "maybe if the female dolphin didn't dress like that then she wouldn't get isolated" joke be a little too crass for this thread?
but seriously, I think it would be a little fucked up to wholesale trade-in animals for the new speechimals. I'd much prefer it to be more like a device which I could attach to a squirrel and be like "squirrel-bro, what up?" then he'd be all "oh you know, just tryin' to dig out deez nuts" then I'd be like "oh squirrel bro, you so crazy" then we'd laugh and then go on with our days business as usual.
I'd be pretty sad if 10 years later I saw squirrelbro again and was all like "squirrel bro, long time no see, what up?" then he'd be all "oh you know, just filing my taxes so I can pay squirrel-support for my dumb ass kid, you know, just trying to make ends meet since I had to give everything I owned as alimony to that squirrelwhore ex wife of mine who I caught all up in squirrel nemesis' nuts back in '14. The squirrel doctor says I got high cholesterol so I gotta take these damn pills and now I can't get it up."
I don't neccesarily think your views are an evolutionary dead end. If the majority of people thought in a similar way it would most likely benefit the group as a whole, thus passing on the idea.
Also in todays society, the rapist doesn't really win when it comes to gene propagation. First, abortion is fairly common among rape victims. Secondly, most rapes don't end in a pregnancy, and thus when the rapist ends up in jail, he no longer has a chance to propagate. So I would say that society as a whole is pushing to make rape an evolutionary dead end.
Consider the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence and all the benefits that could come from communication with them and compare that to the amount of effort put into investigating their possible existence and how we should attempt to communicate with them. To me it seems like an investment opportunity with an almost infinite return and it is still ignored by almost every government. I think the reason is that the human ego is unwilling to admit that is is not the only intelligence in existence.
What happens when someone wants to uplift a dog or a pig or some other animal that is considered unclean by a popular religion?
I think the prospect of artificial intelligence is something humanity will need to deal with long before we can uplift animals to a higher plane of awareness. What happens when a server farm contains a billion minds each smarter than any living human? What if they are made in such vast numbers that they can find or make no productive use of their time? Will they be content simply to exist without real purpose or will they focus on making even more advanced intelligences as a form of reproduction/provolution? Wouldn't implanting an AI into an animal body be more likely to occur before some kind of genetic upgrade?
And what is the evidence that selection actually operates this way? There's a significant controversy over the objects of selection, and the way in which they can engineer benefits and adaptations. What you are giving here is a just-so story, not an actual evolutionary explanation of why certain people have certain beliefs. Or, in other words, this is extremely vague speculation dressed up in the language of science.
I mean, I agree that we can't talk to lions. But the Wittgenstein quoted earlier doesn't just claim that we can't talk to them, but rather, that even if they could talk it would still be the case that we couldn't understand them. So, in other words, the reason that we can't talk to lions in the actual world, according to Wittgenstein, is that even if they had language we could not understand them. But this seems wrong, for Davidsonian-type reasons.
So: it is easy to imagine a language so difficult to translate, and a population so stupid, that they could never figure it out. And we can imagine that this is the case with animal languages, if they have them. But it is hard to imagine a language whose expressions are in principle impossible to express in English. Such a language, a la Davidson, would not be one that we could recognize as expressing thought at all; if we could recognize it as expressing thought, then that thought would be one we could at least partially translate. So such a language cannot exist.
So, where Wittgenstein says that even if a lion could speak, we could not understand him, Davidson correctly replies that if we could not even in principle understand him, then a lion could not be speaking.
I agree that it is vague speculation. But how would you suggest ideas and values have come about if not by some sort of evolution?
Our values are, at least sometimes, the product of our ability to recognize reasons. We think about what we have reason to do, and then form ethical conclusions on the basis of our investigation, like we look at the starry sky and form astronomical conclusions based on that investigation, or like we examine the fundamentals of set-theoretic relations and come to mathematical and logical conclusions based on that investigation.
Maybe there's some attenuated sense in which evolution plays a role in these investigations, by making us into the sorts of creatures that are capable of carrying them out. But that is a distal relation, and one need not advert to evolution in order to explain our astronomical or mathematical conclusions. It is certainly not the case that evolution makes it the case that a certain number of stars hang in the sky. Similarly, evolution most certainly does not make it the case that a certain way of life is valuable, or, for instance, that rape is wrong, even if it plays some part in making us into the sort of creatures who can discern those facts.
When it comes to extraterrestrial intelligence there are plenty of valid reasons for not contacting aliens for the sole reason that we're dealing with an unknown element that might very well be extremely dangerous for earth. Money should go into the research and exploration of space but any attempt to actively broadcast our position in the naive hope that we would gain something out of it is a big no-no to many people.
In that sense, developing a relatively alien mind that is still like us enough to be able to do some meaningful communication with it while we're in a position to influence it into not being an existential threat to the current form of intelligent life is a much better idea.
The whole process of attempting to understand the probably very alien mind of an uplifted ant colony or octopus would also improve on our ability to learn how to communicate with other intelligent minds.