How exactly did boomers not see through this? Did they actually think this was real?
How exactly did boomers not see through this? Did they actually think this was real?
How exactly did boomers not see through this? Did they actually think this was real?
You know what's funny? We with our theory of mind and all intelligence can't comprehend dolphin or ape communication at all.
And both of these animals lead complex social lives that tequire a sophisticated communication.
>We with our theory of mind and all intelligence
to be fair most people are stupid as fuck and almost none of them have a complete grasp of their own language, let alone different ones.
luckily you can mostly get by using less than 10% of the words in the english language and far less than 1% of the concepts.
the autist is that dog hating catnagger from a few months ago isnt it
the one that threw a fit on Wauf instead of giving her mom the puppy back like they wanted to be bullied
https://streamable.com/ooh389
Can someone explain to me why people think this is not real?
See through what? Penny never claimed that Koko could have conversations with humans in sign language. That was just something we assumed.
Koko's story inspired zookeepers all over America. When I was little my mom and I had a free year-pass to the zoo and one time when we were at the gorilla exhibit we overheard a baby's mother talking on the phone about how the gorilla she was looking at just pointed at the baby and then signed "baby". At the time I knew who Koko the gorilla was, but I didn't make the connection that Koko the gorilla is what inspired the zookeepers to teach their gorillas to use sign language. Who cares if Koko isn't as intelligent as we thought she was? She still made a great impact.
Penny and her org definitely did claim that Koko had greater cognition and communication abilities than just conditioning. We know you can condition an animal, that's nothing new. But look at this clip:
It's implied here that Koko understands ecology, anthropogenic climate change, and abstract concepts like greed. And that she understands that she's speaking to a large audience here via a recording. Which maybe implies some understanding of the internet? Anyway, this is obviously bullshit but Penny didn't seem interested in rigor when it came to her pet project. Did Koko have a positive influence? Maybe. Maybe kids and adults who wouldn't ordinarily care about animal welfare now do. And maybe it encouraged pet owners to try more sophisticated conditioning with their pets. But it also seems like Koko's hype is much more visible than the cognitive science that was actually done on apes in that era. Which drew a much less romantic conclusion. Apes are not capable of grasping anything like human language. It's all a clever hans effect and classical conditioning. Apes will randomize signs until they're rewarded and that seems to be all that's going on.
>How exactly did boomers not see through this?
Probably a great surprise to you, but boomers didn't actually give a fuck about this.
It's real.
How is it not? Even cats and dogs can be taught to press buttons that say words. And they can use those buttons meaningfully. For example requesting food or indicating pain.
but they can not use the syntax even if they can interpret it
they lack the brain structure to think in such a way. like gorillas.
>orange me give hungry orange eat you orange give me you orange orange orange give eat
If what you're saying is correct then dogs should be unable to understand speech
Dogs can understand speech, but they can not turn their thoughts into speech with syntax. They're two different operations, and rely on two different areas, in the mammalian brain. Dogs have something resembling the wernicke's area but no broca area so they can't into speech production and neither can apes. Basically dogs, and most animals, think in one concept at a time and can put a name to it at most. That's still a step above human NPCs thoughever.
dogs do not understand speech, they know what sounds are, theres a difference between knowing and understanding. the dog does not understand what "walk" means, it only knows thats the sound you make when you want to take it out for a walk, this is basic pavlovian response to stimuli
Dogs do understand speech, and have been able to learn basic syntax. A dog understands walk as well as you. But when humans are confronted with the possibility that the animals they treat like absolute shit are smart, suddenly, the bar is raised
>no, the dog does not know what walk is
>the dog can not imagine the elation of the walk, think through its future walk, and imagine what kind of walk it wants to go on
>the dog is just excited because the word is associated with positive stimulus
>how do I know exactly what the dog is thinking?
>because animals are fucking stupid. now eat your bacon, snowflake.
>-the chudster
i. e. you are just too lazy to google the meaning of syntax. thanks man, really good effort. obviously the dog knows what walking is, this is by no means an understanding of grammar nor language.
dogs understand grammar and language.
After 15,000 years of being yelled at by humans that seems like the very least they could do.
sure thing i am now convinced my phoebus has the capacity to learn English
I'll double reply just cause you're so fucking retarded I'm laughing, no vérification required
not that anon but im 100 % sure youre an american
and thank God for it
i can tell you're a homosexual
>100 % sure youre an american
>vérification
>rent-free, cope, obsessed, etc
The guy who taught his friend's dog that "child porn" = "wanna go for a walk?" proves you're full of shit.
That doesn't prove anything. If the sound the word "child p" makes meant "walk" in your native language you'd think that it was the meaning.
Imagine a child seeing the color turquoise for the first time and it asks its parent what the name for that was. And the parent said "cheesegrater". The child would think the color is called cheesegrater. You know what im saying?
thank you for proving that the dog only knows and does not understand.
>when the human is threatened by other species they raise the bar
>NO you don’t need to just know the word means the thing you have to know why!
>dogs are just as smart as humans!
>dogs associate sounds with actions whereas humans actually understand the meaning behind said worda
>w-w-why are you raising the bar?
Kek
There is no difference. The meaning of the word walk is an action. Maybe you meant humans can associate one word with multiple ideas and dogs can only do one to one? Sadly you are an animal hating midwit who can’t comprehend his own thoughts.
maybe your brain is dogshit
>maybe you blew me the fuck out
I know I did.
>I know I did.
if this were a battle of wits you'd be dead.
the anon pointed out something you not only don't know, but appear incapable of learning.
in your silly and combative parlance, he btfo of you.
It's no surprise when a retarded person thinks dogs are super smart.
And retarded people might in fact give us some insights into how animals think.
But when that same retard pretends to pontificate on normal human cognition it's just sad. You don't understand the difference between human thought and that of dogs because as the anon says, "your brain is dogshit."
>Maybe you meant humans can associate one word with multiple ideas and dogs can only do one to one?
this is a much larger step than you understand. Humans don't just associate the ringing of a bell with getting food. We're capable of abstraction. A dog may know that the word "ball" means one particular ball, or perhaps to play with one particular ball. Humans understand the word "ball" to apply to literally millions of different round objects in billions of different contexts.
This is the difference between humans and dogs, and also between humans and bots. When you fail to grasp the importance of this difference you appear to be either a literal retard, or a chat bot.
The reason abstraction is so important is of course for communication.
A dog that associates the word "ball" with a round yellow object his owner likes to throw will probably fail to recognize another dog's ball if it's large and blue.
so there is no basis for communication because the 1 to 1 association is just a conditioned response with no flexibility. Humans don't just understand words by conditioning, or if we do, we also have enough mental flexibility to understand that words can also mean any number of things we aren't conditioned for.
This doesn't mean dogs are dumb. It just means they didn't evolve to use language as humans have. They don't have the capacity to communicate with words that humans do. They do convey other much broader concepts via communication, such as fear or anger or attraction, but it's a valid question whether we should even call these concepts emotions when dogs apparently have no words for them and may thus lack the ability for introspection necessary for experiencing human-like emotions. They may just be instinctively responding to other dog's biological state without thought or understanding. Just as they instinctively respond to an owner's mental states without necessarily understanding why they're doing it or even caring why.
But you have moved the goalpost of understanding, or more specifically, weren’t communicating clearly in the first place. You meant UNDERSTAND IT IN THE SAME WAY I DO even if you have made no effort to communicate that ball is a class rather than a name.
The dog understands ball. Not the dictionary ball, but ball as they have learned ball in their interactions with you. To say dogs don’t understand words because they don’t immediately use them as abstractions as prolifically is assinine. You have to teach that ball is a class for them to understand ball as a class. Woe to the jap that tries to teach you that inuko is his dogs name AND a kind of dog. Understanding and abstracting aren’t the same thing. That said i know dogs definitely know door, couch, car, etc refer to a class of objects rather than specific ones.
>But you have moved the goalpost of understanding
I moved nothing since I'm not the anon you were disagreeing with, and they may be more than one anon as well.
even if they understand a word as a class of objects, their ability to identify objects in the class is extremely limited, and they tend to fail at automatically understanding that every word aside from a name refers to a class of objects.
again because they didn't evolve to use words this way and need to be taught exhaustively and individually with each word. Much like an AI bot that has no mind but has memory and sets of rules to follow.
Even a human would not automatically understand a word referring to a class if you didn’t consistently use that word to refer to something they could deduce as a class, retard. You lack theory of mind if you think a dog should understand the word ball as you do if you only use it for one ball and sufficiently identical balls.
My dog knows ball. Big, small, yellow, green, blue, perforated, squeaky, they know ball and knew ball from the time i used the word ball for a second ball. Maybe the third. I wasn’t keeping track. My dog also knows couch, and thinks armchairs are couches. As well as car, door, friend (literally people), and “toy” being any toy. Sorry your dog must br stupid. This is one of those cognitive tasks where you can see how obedience isn’t indicative of or dependent on great intelligence because an obedient dog does not need to understand a category, ever. Maybe in the process of breeding for obedience a lot of dogs came out retarded, but alas, poor retard, mine did not.
>Even a human would not automatically understand a word referring to a class if you didn’t consistently use that word to refer to something they could deduce as a class, retard.
this is false
normal humans understand this concept automatically just as they learn language automatically. People that don't automatically understand the concept are considered to be disabled,. Retarded.
I expect your personal experiences with your dog are projection and anthropomorphization, probably for emotional reasons.
do you have sex with your dog? It sounds like you spend far more time with your dog than most people would.
So if i call a dog xliclub, and that is the only dog you ever see, and then i show you another dog, you MUST assume it is xliclub? No sane man would press for explanation, confirmation?
A dot can’t press because they can not produce language. You always have to take the initiative and explain it in their terms. They can, however, understand it to a limited degree.
>No sane man would press for explanation, confirmation?
you're moving into the difference between names and words. Which I already touched on.
names are dog-words. They are a 1 to 1 association. A person MIGHT mistake names for words, particularly if they are retarded. But context will quickly fix the error.
dogs have no sense of linguistic context, so they cannot fix that error by themselves.
Are you really this stupid? A name is a kind of word. Clearly you never asked questions, were not exposed to sufficient context, or are just fucking retarded.
Word can be name, one word, one thing
Word can be category, one word, many thing
Word can be word changer, say where thing go, in which order
A dog can learn ball as a category if you teach them and still name each ball
A dog can learn verbs, like take and drop
A dog can learn prepositions, saying which things go where
This is not just strongly implied by a primitive language processing area but has been demonstrated. However, like a man with a lesion in the broca’s area, a dog can not produce or think in terms of language. Its thoughts are at best visualizations (strongly implied by their ability to dream).
>A dog can learn ball as a category if you teach them and still name each ball
you have to go along with them and teach them every time they encounter a new ball that that is a ball.
that's you telling them that ball is a category and them failing to learn it.
> you have to go along with them and teach them every time they encounter a new ball that that is a ball.
No. I was at the park with my dog last night and there was a wiffle ball on the ground. I don’t keep those in my home and it was their first time seeing one. I told them to get the ball. And they got it.
This is a dog that doesn’t bark at mirrors and likes to do commands halfway to confirm that they’re going to get a treat. I’m sorry your dog is retarded lady, but not all dogs are, just like most humans aren’t as dumb as you (thank god).
so your arguement is that some dogs (by extremely strange coincidence YOUR dog), think human thoughts while others don't?
Did i not already explain this to you?
Dogs literally do not have the hardware to make a linguistic thought. They can only translate communication into dog thoughts. They understand. They do not speak. Their thoughts are unlikely to go past visualizations, feelings, and random assortments of semi relevant words ala the chimp asking for an orange. They can know a word but never make one.
How many times have you had this explained to you? Do i need a handbook to get information into an impaired autistic brain? Are you to be taught like a dog, never using language to communicate itself? After all a dog can not think in language, only translate it to dog thoughts. They understand but do not use or produce (AGAIN!). They correctly process. Understand. Correctly process.
The word you might have wanted to use was two words: fully comprehend. Or grok, if you’re edumacated.
>Did i not already explain this to you?
I'm not trying to understand dog intelligence, I'm trying to understand yours. I already know how dogs think.
again, don't you think it's an odd coincidence you happen to have the smartest dog in the world?
When did i say they were the smartest? I just said they must be smarter than any you have interacted with, or you are not very smart yourself and didn’t see how you were failing to get an animal that does not ask questions to understand a word.
Once more
Dogs understand language (to a point, 4 words in sequence, 1000 word vocabulary max, no words that refer to other words or pure abstractions)
Dogs can not use language
These abilities are wholly separate.
You just can’t get that you can understand language without comprehending it. This is most likely because your self admitted autism leaves you with almost no theory of mind and doing so would require empathizing with an animal that is missing the tangerine sized piece of word producing grey matter that is strongly linked to the one that understands words in your brain.
Autists are well known for struggling with abstract concepts, inference, and imagination. If you can’t lay out human and dog brains as visual diagrams that simplify understanding, comprehension, and application into mechanical processes they literally can’t comprehend what you’re saying.
NTA, but are you an ESL or sole sort of bot? The shit you write makes my brain hurt, and it feels like you can’t just admit defeat, so you change what the argument is about.
>it feels like you can’t just admit defeat, so you change what the argument is about.
yeah, the rope a dope.
I have nothing to win or lose, so I don't see this as a debate. As long as you think I'm trying to "win" you can't ever understand what I'm actually doing.
I mean imagine for a minute talking to someone to learn what they think, even if you don't agree with it.
and then letting them think things you don't agree with and not being hurt by it.
you can't imagine this. You can't do this, and you can't follow a conversation where one or more participants is doing this.
that is also a form of retardation.
we can explain it to you, but we can not understand it for you.
your inability to understand metaphysical concepts only suggests that you might be an actual dog
got a mouse in your pocket or what?
I love it when I explain a thing and people don't understand. Because then I get to try to figure out if we had a problem with my communication or their thoughts and if so, why.
the other misleading tactic I use is framing my comments as an attack on both the schizo I'm talking to and his beliefs.
in reality I don't care what he believes, I want to know WHY he believes it. And the best way to get a response is to give him what he (you) wants. A debate with lots of insults.
in this case I tend to trust his thoughts on dog cognition because if you want to know how an animal thinks, just ask an animal that can talk. Autists are, generally speaking, just simple animals that can tell you how they think.
But my interest is in human epistemology, not canine. And the anon is kind enough to share his thoughts so long as I don't "just admit defeat." As if defeat is even possible in a conversation where my goals are completely different from the person I'm talking to.
imagine Koko the gorilla will talk to you for hours, but first you have to insult her mother
that's basically Wauf.
Koko gets mad because you insulted her mother so Koko insults your mother and expects you to get mad too. You're only interested in epistemology so you pretend to get mad at the insult while noting that Koko has demonstrated TOM.
Koko then asks for oranges and you refuse to give Koko oranges. Koko explains why she needs oranges. You pretend to be swayed by the explanation while continuing to note Koko's TOM and introspection.
After you give Koko oranges she declares victory and insults your mother again, thinking you only care about oranges and mothers. You again pretend to be sad because Koko tricked you and insulted your mother, but you're secretly elated that Koko demonstrated self-awareness and passes the Sally-Anne test.
in fact anons here behave almost exactly like gorillas, but with a slightly better grasp of English. Most of the time they never even realize you don't care about oranges or mothers unless you tell them. And even then they usually don't believe you.
>so you change what the argument is about.
specifically the "argument" is about how dogs, gorillas, and dumb people acquire and defend wrong ideas.
The problem is that there exist any number of existential truths capable of killing wise and honest people.
these truths don't plague dumb or dishonest people.
but if humanity ever expects to move past being generally dumb and deeply dishonest, we need to find a way around these deadly truths. Which starts with understanding where the stupidity and dishonesty arose. Not really why, because that's obvious. If truth will kill a person, then dishonestly is a simple survival mechanism. If knowledge will kill a person, then stupidity is the only way to live.
but that's a trap. We're trapped being stupid and dishonest until we can work our way around the problem either at its source or in its conclusion.
An honest and wise person would see this immediately
Luckily Wauf isn't home to any honest or wise people.
>Luckily Wauf isn't home to any honest or wise people.
it is however home to lots of autistic people and conservative/contrarian types. And these people INSTINCTIVELY know that too much knowledge is a dead end, and caring too much about the feelings of others will kill a person.
But they don't make the leap from instinctively knowing to actually knowing. They don't understand WHY they feel these things, only that they do. A person that understands why they feel they way they do is basically a god compared to them, with the ability to unite the political opposites, or destroy them. Or let them destroy each other and themselves.
you can't just pull a dandelion and kill it, you need to go to the very roots of the problem, or learn to accept that it's not a problem at all. Koko and anon's dog are the very roots. But perhaps not a problem.
Ultimately it doesn't matter in the slightest if I "win" or "admit defeat"
all that matters is if the anon has a consistent set of beliefs and is happy with them. Personally I think he has a very solid understanding of how dogs think, but I don't really care about that. He doesn't understand how he thinks or how I think any more than you do.
but happiness is going to be far more useful to him than knowledge, so that's fine.
>Personally I think he has a very solid understanding of how dogs think
he anthropomorphizes his dog, but since he doesn't really understand human thought he just compares it to his own retarded thoughts.
which in the end works just fine because his brain probably works very similarly to his dog's.
his only real failure is thinking his own brain is working correctly. But convincing him that he's disabled and missing parts isn't going to help him. That's the sort of truth that kills a person.
>That's the sort of truth that kills a person.
and this brings us full circle back to OP
both the question of gorilla speech, and the question of academic's honesty.
because some linguists suggest speech wasn't invented to convey truth, rather primarily to lie. Because we don't need words to point out truths, only to distract from them.
Gorillas and dogs can't speak, and they have very little capacity for deception. Wauf talks constantly and doesn't even try to speak truth.
>how can you tell if someone is lying?
>their lips are moving
this raises the question, if we teach a gorilla to speak, how long before it starts just lying all the time? And the answer is probably immediately because lying has rewards even children understand. The first lie was probably also the first words spoken.
the king wants to know the original human language? It was almost certainly just lies.
>It was almost certainly just lies.
humans get so used to lying to each other they naturally lie to themselves.
and this dishonestly is a barrier to ever knowing any truth. Because if you always frame truth in the context of your own lies, you never see it clearly.
there is nothing to win or lose, there is only truth and the lies we tell ourselves. Koko probably never understood this, so she probably never spoke in human tongue. Animals mostly lack the capacity to just make shit up constantly and then try to live as if it were true.
also you're just confirming what others have said about you.
you don't personally have a normal human brain, so you don't understand the difference between dog thought and human thought. Also you relate to dogs better than people because you think like dogs do instead of like a person.
autism is a hell of a thing.
You’re a retard who lacks any sort of theory of mind and thinks every dog is as retarded as hers. To me these things are self evident. What good is an animal with any mode of communication that can not learn a category?
>predator!
>predator was last week. this doesn’t look like predator.
Say it with me lady:
A dog can learn and understand a word
But a dog can not produce a word
These are independent operations in a mammalian brain
Understanding requires the wernickes area or an analogue
Producing requires the brocas
We can damage a human brain so you can speak but can not understand speech, or so you can understand speech but not speak
Dogs have a primitive analogue to the wernickes area and can learn proper nouns, limited categories, and basic syntax
Dogs can not produce language beyond perhaps a limited set of proper nouns (“food! outdoors!”)
They can not think in language even though they can understand it and translate your words to represent present objects and future action sequences
This doesn’t need explained, it is how the brain works.
Every mammal is like this.
everything you say is completely true and you still missed the entire point.
how about we try this?
Instead of worrying about how dogs are similar to humans you instead try to spot the differences?
I'd bet money you can't.
So you got BTFO and now you’re on to character attacks? I’d rather be autistic than anything like you, toasty roasty. I already told you that dogs don’t ask questions, they don’t form thoughts as language, and they don’t produce language. A dog will never seek confirmation of a words meaning. You have to teach it to them and basically hit them over the head with it. They have no curiosity for the abstract, because that would require thinking in terms of it rather than just being able to translate it to dog thoughts.
In many ways you are like a dog. Not me, or most people without brain damage, just you. Zing.
>So you got BTFO and now you’re on to character attacks? I’d rather be autistic than anything like you, toasty roasty
I'm also autistic.
And seeking to list differences isn't a character attack, I just don't believe you can do it. So I dared you. And you did it. Good work.
what do those differences tell you about a dog's ability to use human language as humans do?
I already explained that dogs can process language into dog thoughts but not the other way around and the basis for that a mechanically minded NPC aka autist aka hylic aka golem should have been able to understand. You’re asking a question I already answered half a dozen times. If only you were as observant as my dog, who does not need me to explain ball in very specific terms 50 fucking times. Most normal people are more observant than a dog but i guess autism is one hell of a cognitive impairment.
very good.
that's the opposite of what you said to start this conversation, so we've made some progress.
you have BTFO yourself.
next you need to learn that dogs read body language more than they hear words, so the dog likely recognizes the ball because you are pointing at it, looking at it, or facing it. Or just repeating the command until they finally get it right and you shut up.
No, believe it or fucking not this is what I have been saying, the dog UNDERSTANDS the words, language. And if they read body language alone why not pick up a turd or a nearby rope? Oh right, they know what a ball is.
>if they read body language alone why not pick up a turd or a nearby rope?
because you have never rewarded them for bringing you turds or ropes.
Oh but you see, i have rewarded them for bringing me ropes. They just understand categories. All dogs except the dumbest pitbull can, if you have the mind required to teach an animal that can not ask a question and has poor inference skills. They most likely will get it after a few balls or ropes.
>Oh but you see, i have rewarded them for bringing me ropes
how often?
as often as they're rewarded for bringing balls?
yes, that's what I wanted to confirm. You don't believe you have the smartest dog in the world. You think dogs are generally much smarter than people give them credit for because people are dumb.
and maybe you're right, but even the smartest dog would be a severely retarded human toddler.
autistic people usually empathize better with dumb animals than with other people.
Pretty weak ad hom coming from someone that admitted to being intellectually disabled.
You’re right.
The dog’s brain is a one way street, the human brain is a roundabout ridden highway interchange system. The dog can understand your words and turn them into their own thoughts about what they know those words mean. They UNDERSTAND. The dog can not think about words themselves. They do not COMPREHEND. Humans usually aren’t aware of this dichotomy until they get into higher learning. Or if they’re autistic, ASD “people” are low on comprehension and can’t always think about thoughts.
and comprehending is needed to spit those words back out because you can do more than just get what they mean - you get how they mean. humans need a whole region of the brain to do this. only some birds and cetaceans can do it. every other animals intelligence is nerfed by lacking this ability.
this one skill is so intrinsic to the human conscious experience that only the smartest humans can imagine a conscious experience without it.
if consciousness is defined by the use of words then you cannot by definition imagine a conscious experience without them.
I think that's part of your problem and part of your genius. You both don't understand how other people use words, and because of that lack of understanding you may perhaps see things they can't. You can't communicate effectively because you're using words wrong, but you can imagine new ideas because you're not bound by the rules of word use.
so what do you think the difference is between understanding and comprehending?
>Pretty weak ad hom coming from someone that admitted to being intellectually disabled.
what are you talking about?
it's well documented fact that many autistic people relate better to animals than people. Some of them relate to neither animals nor people. That's not an insult, just an observation.
my autism is different from yours, which is part of the reason I seek to understand how you think. I was never held back in school because I'm extremely advanced in the use of words and an absolute idiot at reading people. But school grades on use of words, not getting along with people.
you are a retard
they do, in fact you can use "walk" as a command without any special training as a recall+heel, or a recall+proceed to run down your usual route and wait for you to catch up, depending on how your walks go.
maybe your beagle/lab/golden retriever/australian shepherd was a dumb fuck but german shepherds are pretty bright
you're one of those dumb fucks that says things like "dogs do not smile, they do not have happiness, they have excitement, and this thing that looks exactly like a smile and is used in the context a smile would be is called a play face. happiness is a human emotion only we have it."
It's hard to take your dismissal of the philosophical question of how animals experience the world seriously when your explanation of the question shows you don't understand it.
If you actually want informed readers to take you seriously you might begin by learning what it is you're disputing. But then if you understood the problem, you likely would wind up on the side of the "dumb fucks" you're dismissing.
>orange me give.
OSV with implied 2nd-person subject. Because of the rarity of default OSV word order cross-linguistically, it is likely that this language is not OSV by default, but rather topic-prominent with "orange" as the topic.
>hungry.
Similar adjectival constructions exist in topic-prominent languages when the topic is evident from context
>orange eat.
Dropped first-person pronoun
>you! orange give!
Vocative and imperative constructions
>me you.
A zero copula construction likening the speaker and the addressee, perhaps to emphasize kinship and inspire empathy with the speaker's plight
> orange orange orange give.
Likely a reduplicative plural
>eat.
Self-explanatory
Nice 🙂
Pearls before swine. Dumbasses will think just because you use 5 dollar words only known to linguists, that this must also mean we suppose the syntax the gorilla uses is basically humanese and in general just two degrees of separation removed from the writings of Hegel.
In truth, everything you said makes extreme sense. I think such a syntax is essentially just an emergent phenomenon of higher brain structures (such that most placental mammals possess), but we can also allow it just for the primate class without changing the point that gorillas, type-cast into the mold of human language, very likely would understand, use, and in general construct their mental world with the use of this kind of syntax.
I find the reduplication especially interesting. As you posit it, it could be just plural, but could equally also be used to signal temporal urgency or intensity of desire. This is a fascinating insight in how animals think (again, typecast into a string of words -- obviously animals don't have a little narrator internal monologue like wordthinking midwits do).
>GIVE
>ME
>YOU!
Because because there's no syntax they're not saying anything at all?
Weak argument.
if you define speech as pointing to an object and saying the name of it, they're saying something.
but if you think speech includes saying something about that object, then no, there's no way to know if they are or not. Humans fill in the missing parts for them.
if we took humans out of the equation we might get different results. Say, make a program that gives an orange when Koko says "me want orange," but doesn't give an orange when Koko says "me orange now."
but Koko was barely capable of the latter, mostly incapable of the former, and also much better at speech than any other gorilla ever trained. So presumably that's going to fail simply because gorillas aren't built for that kind of thinking, and it's a rare animal that can do it.
an example of this with Koko. Anons were earlier discussing whether dogs can learn a class of objects, specifically balls. Can a dog learn what a ball is to the point where they recognize any ball even if they've never seen it before?
to test this idea Koko was taught the words "all" and "ball." So her handlers could prompt her to bring all balls showing she understood that "ball" was a class of object instead of a name for one object.
she never passed this test afaik, but in a twist of irony she was given a kitten which she called "All Ball." The reader may make of that what they wish.
>The reader may make of that what they wish.
her handlers took it as a joke, which it may very well have been.
we will probably never know because she couldn't actually speak.
I wonder about other classes? Like food, could she learn "food" and then identify "food" even if she never saw that type of food before? Gorillas have to identify food in nature so that might be easier.
i dont think so, like if shes never seen a lemon before, she wouldnt called a yellow orange
The difference is every animal can speak what is basically noun, usually "nouns" with vague meanings. We call them calls because without the context of a whole language what good is calling them a noun?
>SENSE-OF-DANGER
>SENSE-OF-HORNY
>MYFAVORITEMONKEY
Speaking more than that is a major cognitive task. Speaking at all is a major cognitive task. because you don't just have to understand what the words mean, you have to realize something that is more difficult to realize than it sounds: realize that words mean things to other people.
>Can a dog learn what a ball is to the point where they recognize any ball even if they've never seen it before?
Yes. Dogs have more developed language skills than gorillas, which are not especially verbal creatures. Dogs are both descended from a highly verbal animal and artificially selected for language comprehension. We started with an animal that already communicates a lot like a human, with facial expressions, intonation, and gaze following, and 50,000 years later we have some smart dogs.
But I think a lot of dogs are genuinely fucking stupid. As you venture outside the genuinely intelligent - german shepherds, huskies, some border collies - you start running into absolutely braindead cat-tier animals that can't figure out that the mirror is another dog. The debate will rage on forever unless we exterminate the unterdogsch.
>that the mirror isn't another dog
Looking at literally every labrador retriever on earth here.
>But I think a lot of dogs are genuinely fucking stupid.
there is no scientific evidence supporting this and lots of evidence disproving it.
Dogs can be taught how to use buttons, but basically only "hungry", "play", and "walk". Anything more than that is just trickery for tiktok.
lol no
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002396901300026X
i'm sorry, but you're just going to have to accept that dogs are pretty fucking smart. this has unfortunate implications. if cats are barely any dumber than dogs, this means cats are also pretty fucking smart. if horses are a bit brighter than dogs, this means horses are pretty fucking smart. and cows aren't too far off from horses, and if pigs are smarter than the average dog, up there with GSDs/collies, then maybe you should reconsider eating meat, stick to avians, fish, and reptiles since they're probably soulless and mammal supremacy is a based and ethically consistent viewpoint, or be an amoral psychopath.
>i'm sorry, but you're just going to have to accept that dogs are pretty fucking smart
I already knew that dogs/cats/horses/cow/pigs/etc. were smart, I just didn't think they had the brain structures needed for that kind of communication but it seems like I might be wrong? Definitely worth more reading about. Thank you.
>then maybe you should reconsider eating meat
No? Humans are omnivore predators, and not just that but literally the greatest predators to ever walk the earth. We are designed to obtain and consume prey. The conclusion I draw from this is that we should probably be more humane in the way we raise and kill animals for meat. But I'd already come to that conclusion years ago because I'm not an "amoral psychopath" as you say.
>it seems like I might be wrong?
somewhat of a gray area. Some animals can understand syntax, but that doesn't imply that every animal of their species has the same capacity.
And simply understanding syntax doesn't necessarily mean using it in a typically human manner. For example, animals taught human communications almost never ask a question. OP's is one example of an animal that supposedly asked a question, Alex the Parrot is the other example. And in both cases they only asked one question in their entire life afaik.
so some animals are intelligent enough to learn human syntax but basically all of them fail at thinking like humans. They have curiosity about things, but they don't think to ask other minds about those things. They seem for the most part incapable of understanding that they are an individual, and other speakers are individuals, and that other speakers have knowledge they don't have. They fail the Sally-Anne Test and don't think to learn directly from others.
>humans are predators
Humans have to be trained to be predators otherwise they have literally no predatory instincts and don't know what to do with a dead body. All biological and behavioral traits of man indicate that he is in fact a scavenger, a flightless vulture, with a taste for sun-dried meat and bones bashed open on rocks.
>Humans have to be trained to be predators otherwise they have literally no predatory instincts
said nobody that studied starvation ever.
Lmao serious. There is something called prey drive/a predation sequence. Humans don't have one. It's learned, it's culture. A cat doesn't have to teach her kittens to kill things, she just teaches them to kill them better. When wolves play-fight, they are re-enacting the instinctive stalk and chase. Without predatory culture, humans just take pre-existing corpses apart and sniff around for something that looks tasty. They don't naturally know how to hunt. Their instinctive games are all based around beating each other up and stealing from each other, but don't resemble hunting.
Humans did not evolve for the hunt. They evolved for war. As far as diet goes they are natural scavengers that learned to hunt so they could get better food and depend on a long-running culture to do so.
so you think a human isolated from any learning would scavenge meat but not make the logical leap to helping some meat on the hoof die a bit faster?
humans lack a lot of instincts that are replaced by reason. The simple fact that in a primitive environment we need meat to survive, and that every prehistoric human group ever killed animals would seem to indicate you're wrong.
our distant ancestors probably scavenged but the fact that our closest relatives, chimps, also hunt is good indication we always hunted as well, and that the behavior was instinctive at least at first.
Yes. Without any prior culture, humans default to scavengers. Chimp hunting is also learned, but humans have physical adaptations (sharper molars, more tool use, better dexterity) that predispose them to picking apart corpses for food.
Humans have very little natural preference for hunting except for a few outliers that are most likely delusional and when given the chance turn their predation into something like high-level scavenging by farming animals.
Fuck, chimps probably learned to hunt from later humans that figured it out.
>Yes. Without any prior culture, humans default to scavengers.
I think it's more likely that very early humans simply weren't capable of taking larger prey, and modern humans aren't a lot more capable without learned knowledge.
but aside from cases of "wild children," it's not something we could actually test. But on the other hand cows and horses and deer will all kill and eat live prey sometimes, so it seems absurdly unlikely that humans wouldn't also.
anyways, thank you for an interesting insight.
I'm gonna file that with my other "Blue Lagoon" questions like how long it would take modern humans to invent language, clothing, fire, and weapons if they had no cultural starting point.
Just like the movie, I'm assuming that fucking is 100% instinctive.
there was a king once who wanted to test this he wanted to take some newborn babies and raise them so they develop their own language
he thought they would speak the original language of humanity
he did not go through with this plan
we have lots of examples of siblings developing their own languages, particularly in twins. But one twin language isn't the same as another.
so I think the development of language is instinctive, but the form of the language depends on individual environments and needs.
we can also try this easily enough at home.
go out and make a few friends- it helps if you have alcohol
then bring your friends together and get nice and drunk. Do this a few times and you'll find yourself and your friends coming up with a new language both through invention of new words and the abuse of the ones you inherited.
you can do it without alcohol as well, it's just less natural. My wife and I can speak to each other for days just using movie quotes. But we both have abnormally strong memories for words.
>humans have physical adaptations (sharper molars, more tool use, better dexterity) that predispose them to picking apart corpses for food
You don't pick apart a corpse with the back of your mouth, sharper molars are for the consumption of meat regardless of how you obtained it. Also carrion carries a lot of fucking diseases that we are weak to but true scavengers like vultures have no problem with.
Holy shit you are stupid.
During the modern era, humans have less than zero incentive to hunt for food. It's actively banned in many jurisdiction without loicence.
Yet what exactly do you think a solid half of all entertainment and +=90% of video games aimed at both kids and professionals are about? What do humans "default to" without any further prompt and cultural input? Combat. Combat focussed pastimes.
Now, herbivores of course also need to learn how to fight. But humans are not herbivores -- they are omnivores. It'd be retarded statement to claim their combat predisposition is only aimed at fighting off lions.
You’re retarded.
is he retarded though?
I think he's wrong because humans love the smell of cooked fresh meat and fat while finding the smell and taste of spoiled meat generally offensive. Also because there are essentially no scavengers in nature that won't also hunt when they get the chance.
but his question of whether we instinctively hunt is an interesting one.
>if horses are a bit brighter than dogs
I HIGHLY doubt they are smarter than dogs or cats even.
They wanted to believe.