8 ms·

If a lion could speak, would we understand it?

by klank 1y ago

eddythompson80 1y ago
There is nothing really special about speech as a form of communication. All animals communicate with each other and with other animals. Informational density and, uhhhhh, cyclomatic complexity might be different between speech and a dance or a grunt or whatever.
- klank 1y ago
  I was referencing Wittgenstein's "If a lion could speak, we would not understand it." Wittgenstein believed (and I am strongly inclined to agree with him) that our ability to convey meaning through communication was intrinsically tied to (or, rather, sprang forth from) our physical, lived experiences. Thus, to your point, assuming communication, because "there's nothing really special about speech", does that mean we would be able to understand a lion, if the lion could speak? Wittgenstein would say probably not. At least not initially and not until we had built shared lived experiences.
  - cdrini 1y ago
    Hmm I'm not convinced we don't have a lot of shared experience. We live on the same planet. We both hunger, eat, and drink. We see the sun, the grass, the sky. We both have muscles that stretch and compress. We both sleep and yawn. I mean who knows, maybe their perception of these shared experiences would be different enough to make communication difficult, but still, I think it's undeniably shared experience.
    - klank 1y ago
      That's fair. To me, the point of Wittgenstein's lion thought experiment though was not necessarily to say that _any_ communication would be impossible. But to understand what it truly meant to be a lion, not just what it meant to be an animal. But we have no shared lion experiences nor does a lion have human experiences. So would we be able to have a human to lion communication even if we could both speak human speech? I think that's the core question being asked and that's the one I have a hard time seeing how it'd work.
      - cdrini 1y ago
        Hmm, I'm finding the premise a bit confusing, "understand what it truly meant to be a lion". I think that's quite different than having meaningful communication. One could make the same argument for "truly understanding" what it means to be someone else. My thinking is that if something is capable of human-style speech, then we'd be able to communicate with them. We'd be able to talk about our shared experiences of the planet, and, if we're capable of human-style speech, likely also talk about more abstract concepts of what it means to be a human or lion. And potentially create new words for concepts that don't exist in each language. I think the fact that human speech is capable of abstract concepts, not just concrete concepts, means that shared experience isn't necessary to have meaningful communication? It's a bit handwavy, depends a bit on how we're defining "understand" and "communicate".
        klank 1y ago
        > I think the fact that human speech is capable of abstract concepts, not just concrete concepts, means that shared experience isn't necessary to have meaningful communication? I don't follow that line of reasoning. To me, in that example, you're still communicating with a human, who regardless of culture, or geographic location, still shares an immense amount of shared life experiences with you. Or, they're not. For example, an intentionally extreme example, I bet we'd have a super hard time talking about homotopy type theory with a member of the amazon rain forest. Similarly, I'd bet they had their own abstract concepts that they would not be able to easily explain to us.
        cdrini 1y ago
        I would say there's a difference between abstract and complex. A complex topic would take a lot of time to communicate mainly because you have to go through all the prerequisites. By abstract I mean something like "communicate" or "loss" or "zero"! The primitives of complex thought. And if we're saying the lion can speak human, then I think it follows that they're capable of this abstract thought, which is what I think is making the premise confusing for me. Maybe if I change my thinking and let's just say the lion is speaking... But if they're speaking a "language" that's capable of communicating concrete and abstract concepts, then that's a human-style language! And because we share many concrete concepts in our shared life experience, I think we would be able to communicate concrete concepts, and then use those as proxies to communicate abstract concepts and hence all concepts?
  - Isamu 1y ago
    If we had a sufficiently large corpus of lion-speech we could build an LLM (Lion Language Model) that would “understand” as well as any model could. Which isn’t saying much, it still couldn’t explain Lion Language to us, it could just generate statistically plausible examples or recognize examples. To translate Lion speech you’d need to train a transformer on a parallel corpus of Lion to English, the existence of which would require that you already understand Lion.
    - klank 1y ago
      And even, assuming the existence of a Lion to English corpus, it would only give us Human word approximations. We experience how lossy that type of translation is already between Human->Human languages. Or sometimes between dialects within the same language. Who knows, we don't really have good insight into how this information loss, or disparity grows. Is it linear? exponential? Presumably there is a threshold beyond which we simply have no ability to translate while retaining a meaningful amount of original meaning. Would we know it when we tried to go over that threshold? Sorry, I know I'm rambling. But it has always been regularly on my mind and it's easy for me to get on a roll. All this LLM stuff only kicked it all into overdrive.
    - cdrini 1y ago
      Hmm I don't think we'd need a rosetta stone. In the same way LLMs associate via purely contextual usage the meaning of words, two separate data sets of lion and English, encoded into the same vector space, might pick up patterns of contextual usage at a high enough level to allow for mapping between the two languages. For example, given thousands of English sentences with the word "sun", the vector embedding encodes the meaning. Assuming the lion word for "sun" is used in much the same context (near lion words for "hot", "heat", etc), it would likely end up in a similar spot near the English word for sun. And because of our shared context living in earth/being animals, I reckon many words likely will be used in similar contexts. That's my guess though, note I don't know a ton about the internals of LLMs.
      - zos_kia 1y ago
        Someone more knowledgeable might chime in, but I don't think two corpuses can be mapped to the same vector space. Wouldn't each vector space be derived from its corpus?
  - SJC_Hacker 1y ago
    Correlate the vocalizations with the subsequent behavior. I believe this has been done for some species in certain situations. Its also pretty much how humans acquire language. No one is born knowing English or Spanish or Mandarin.
  - nitwit005 1y ago
    Observation has proven enough to understand the meaning of animal calls. People proved they correctly identified, for example, an distressed animal call for assistance, by playing it to their peers in the wild. They go look for the distressed animal. Other calls don't provoke the same reaction.
    - klank 1y ago
      Analogies are always possible. I believe in the philosophical context though, understanding the meaning of something is not possible through analogy alone. Reminds me of the quote: “But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.” ― Peter Watts, Echopraxia
      - nitwit005 1y ago
        There was no analogy in there.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    You might find https://www.lojban.org/files/why-lojban/whylojb.txt https://www.lojban.org/files/why-lojban/whylojb.txt interesting. It is not really about your quote of Wittgenstein, but there is: > In broad terms, the Hypothesis claims that the limits of the language one speaks are the limits of the world one inhabits (also in Wittgenstein), that the grammatical categories of that language define the ontological categories of the word, and that combinatory potentials of that language delimit the complexity of that world (this may be Jim Brown's addition to the complex Hypothesis.) The test then is to see what changes happen in these areas when a person learns a language with a new structure, are they broadened in ways that correspond to the ways the structure of the new language differs from that of the old?
  - RedNifre 1y ago
    That seems a bit extreme, given that a lion also has a mammal brain. I'd expect it to also think in terms of distinct entities that can move around in the environment and possibly talk about things like "hunger" and "prey". I'd expect incomprehensible language from something that is wildly different from us, e.g. sentient space crystals that eat radiation. On the other hand, we still haven't figured out dolphin language (the most interesting guess was that they shout 3D images at each other).
ecocentrik 1y ago
That was a philosophical position on the difficulty of understanding alien concepts and language, not a hard technological limit.
- klank 1y ago
  I'm missing why that distinction matters given the thread of conversation. Would you care to expound?
  - ecocentrik 1y ago
    I've always understood this as less of a hard wall and more of a gradient where: - the % of shared experience/context with a mammal is > than % shared experience with a mollusk - the gradient starts in communicating with other humans and that Wittgenstein wasn't wrong in trying to use technology/science to bridge the context gap, he was just early.
kouru225 1y ago
Knowing lions I bet all they’d talk about is being straight up dicks to anyone and everyone around them so yea I think we probably could ngl
UltraSane 1y ago
We should understand common concepts like hungry, tired, horny, pain, etc.
- johnisgood 1y ago
  Not just the concepts themselves, but their behavioral representation of it.
godelski 1y ago
I don't know about a Lion, but I think Wittgenstein could have benefited from having a pet. I train my cat and while I can't always understand her I think one of the most impressive features of the human mind is to be able to have such great understanding of others. We have theory of mind, joint attention, triadic awareness, and much more. My cat can understand me a bit but it's definitely asymmetric. It's definitely not easy to understand other animals. As Wittgenstein suggests, their minds are alien to us. But we seem to be able to adapt. I'm much better at understanding my cat than my girlfriend (all the local street cats love me, and I teach many of them tricks) but I'm also nothing compared to experts I've seen. Honestly, I think everyone studying AI could benefit by spending some more time studying animal cognition. While not like computer minds these are testable "alien minds" and can help us better understand the general nature of intelligence
- klank 1y ago
  I think the response is generally you are communicating with your cat as an animal, as a mammal. Yes, communication is possible because we too are mammals, animals, etc. But Lion is not just animal, it is not just mammal, it is something more. Something which I have no idea how we would communicate with.
  - godelski 1y ago
    > But Lion is not just animal, it is not just mammal, it is something more. Are you saying "lion" is a stand-in for "an arbitrary creature"? If so, yes, that is how I understand Wittgenstein and it doesn't change my comment.
    - klank 1y ago
      No. I'm saying the areas you point out that you feel you could communicate, are ones in which you share a lived experience with the lion. You are both animals, you are both mammals. You get cold, hungry, thirsty, etc. But lions, and us, are not just animals + mammals. Being a lion or a human means more. Ultimately, there is a uniquely human or lion element. Wittgenstein is saying we cannot communicate this.

If a lion could speak, would we understand it?

by klank 1y ago

If a lion could speak, would we understand it?

There is nothing really special about speech as a form of communication. All animals communicate with each other and with other animals. Informational density and, uhhhhh, cyclomatic complexity might be different between speech and a dance or a grunt or whatever.

klank 1y ago
I was referencing Wittgenstein's "If a lion could speak, we would not understand it." Wittgenstein believed (and I am strongly inclined to agree with him) that our ability to convey meaning through communication was intrinsically tied to (or, rather, sprang forth from) our physical, lived experiences. Thus, to your point, assuming communication, because "there's nothing really special about speech", does that mean we would be able to understand a lion, if the lion could speak? Wittgenstein would say probably not. At least not initially and not until we had built shared lived experiences.
- cdrini 1y ago
  Hmm I'm not convinced we don't have a lot of shared experience. We live on the same planet. We both hunger, eat, and drink. We see the sun, the grass, the sky. We both have muscles that stretch and compress. We both sleep and yawn. I mean who knows, maybe their perception of these shared experiences would be different enough to make communication difficult, but still, I think it's undeniably shared experience.
  - klank 1y ago
    That's fair. To me, the point of Wittgenstein's lion thought experiment though was not necessarily to say that _any_ communication would be impossible. But to understand what it truly meant to be a lion, not just what it meant to be an animal. But we have no shared lion experiences nor does a lion have human experiences. So would we be able to have a human to lion communication even if we could both speak human speech? I think that's the core question being asked and that's the one I have a hard time seeing how it'd work.
    - cdrini 1y ago
      Hmm, I'm finding the premise a bit confusing, "understand what it truly meant to be a lion". I think that's quite different than having meaningful communication. One could make the same argument for "truly understanding" what it means to be someone else. My thinking is that if something is capable of human-style speech, then we'd be able to communicate with them. We'd be able to talk about our shared experiences of the planet, and, if we're capable of human-style speech, likely also talk about more abstract concepts of what it means to be a human or lion. And potentially create new words for concepts that don't exist in each language. I think the fact that human speech is capable of abstract concepts, not just concrete concepts, means that shared experience isn't necessary to have meaningful communication? It's a bit handwavy, depends a bit on how we're defining "understand" and "communicate".
      - klank 1y ago
        > I think the fact that human speech is capable of abstract concepts, not just concrete concepts, means that shared experience isn't necessary to have meaningful communication? I don't follow that line of reasoning. To me, in that example, you're still communicating with a human, who regardless of culture, or geographic location, still shares an immense amount of shared life experiences with you. Or, they're not. For example, an intentionally extreme example, I bet we'd have a super hard time talking about homotopy type theory with a member of the amazon rain forest. Similarly, I'd bet they had their own abstract concepts that they would not be able to easily explain to us.
        cdrini 1y ago
        I would say there's a difference between abstract and complex. A complex topic would take a lot of time to communicate mainly because you have to go through all the prerequisites. By abstract I mean something like "communicate" or "loss" or "zero"! The primitives of complex thought. And if we're saying the lion can speak human, then I think it follows that they're capable of this abstract thought, which is what I think is making the premise confusing for me. Maybe if I change my thinking and let's just say the lion is speaking... But if they're speaking a "language" that's capable of communicating concrete and abstract concepts, then that's a human-style language! And because we share many concrete concepts in our shared life experience, I think we would be able to communicate concrete concepts, and then use those as proxies to communicate abstract concepts and hence all concepts?
- Isamu 1y ago
  If we had a sufficiently large corpus of lion-speech we could build an LLM (Lion Language Model) that would “understand” as well as any model could. Which isn’t saying much, it still couldn’t explain Lion Language to us, it could just generate statistically plausible examples or recognize examples. To translate Lion speech you’d need to train a transformer on a parallel corpus of Lion to English, the existence of which would require that you already understand Lion.
  - klank 1y ago
    And even, assuming the existence of a Lion to English corpus, it would only give us Human word approximations. We experience how lossy that type of translation is already between Human->Human languages. Or sometimes between dialects within the same language. Who knows, we don't really have good insight into how this information loss, or disparity grows. Is it linear? exponential? Presumably there is a threshold beyond which we simply have no ability to translate while retaining a meaningful amount of original meaning. Would we know it when we tried to go over that threshold? Sorry, I know I'm rambling. But it has always been regularly on my mind and it's easy for me to get on a roll. All this LLM stuff only kicked it all into overdrive.
  - cdrini 1y ago
    Hmm I don't think we'd need a rosetta stone. In the same way LLMs associate via purely contextual usage the meaning of words, two separate data sets of lion and English, encoded into the same vector space, might pick up patterns of contextual usage at a high enough level to allow for mapping between the two languages. For example, given thousands of English sentences with the word "sun", the vector embedding encodes the meaning. Assuming the lion word for "sun" is used in much the same context (near lion words for "hot", "heat", etc), it would likely end up in a similar spot near the English word for sun. And because of our shared context living in earth/being animals, I reckon many words likely will be used in similar contexts. That's my guess though, note I don't know a ton about the internals of LLMs.
    - zos_kia 1y ago
      Someone more knowledgeable might chime in, but I don't think two corpuses can be mapped to the same vector space. Wouldn't each vector space be derived from its corpus?
- SJC_Hacker 1y ago
  Correlate the vocalizations with the subsequent behavior. I believe this has been done for some species in certain situations. Its also pretty much how humans acquire language. No one is born knowing English or Spanish or Mandarin.
- nitwit005 1y ago
  Observation has proven enough to understand the meaning of animal calls. People proved they correctly identified, for example, an distressed animal call for assistance, by playing it to their peers in the wild. They go look for the distressed animal. Other calls don't provoke the same reaction.
  - klank 1y ago
    Analogies are always possible. I believe in the philosophical context though, understanding the meaning of something is not possible through analogy alone. Reminds me of the quote: “But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.” ― Peter Watts, Echopraxia
    - nitwit005 1y ago
      There was no analogy in there.
- johnisgood 1y ago
  You might find https://www.lojban.org/files/why-lojban/whylojb.txt https://www.lojban.org/files/why-lojban/whylojb.txt interesting. It is not really about your quote of Wittgenstein, but there is: > In broad terms, the Hypothesis claims that the limits of the language one speaks are the limits of the world one inhabits (also in Wittgenstein), that the grammatical categories of that language define the ontological categories of the word, and that combinatory potentials of that language delimit the complexity of that world (this may be Jim Brown's addition to the complex Hypothesis.) The test then is to see what changes happen in these areas when a person learns a language with a new structure, are they broadened in ways that correspond to the ways the structure of the new language differs from that of the old?
- RedNifre 1y ago
  That seems a bit extreme, given that a lion also has a mammal brain. I'd expect it to also think in terms of distinct entities that can move around in the environment and possibly talk about things like "hunger" and "prey". I'd expect incomprehensible language from something that is wildly different from us, e.g. sentient space crystals that eat radiation. On the other hand, we still haven't figured out dolphin language (the most interesting guess was that they shout 3D images at each other).

ecocentrik 1y ago

That was a philosophical position on the difficulty of understanding alien concepts and language, not a hard technological limit.

klank 1y ago
I'm missing why that distinction matters given the thread of conversation. Would you care to expound?
- ecocentrik 1y ago
  I've always understood this as less of a hard wall and more of a gradient where: - the % of shared experience/context with a mammal is > than % shared experience with a mollusk - the gradient starts in communicating with other humans and that Wittgenstein wasn't wrong in trying to use technology/science to bridge the context gap, he was just early.

kouru225 1y ago

Knowing lions I bet all they’d talk about is being straight up dicks to anyone and everyone around them so yea I think we probably could ngl

UltraSane 1y ago

We should understand common concepts like hungry, tired, horny, pain, etc.

johnisgood 1y ago
Not just the concepts themselves, but their behavioral representation of it.

godelski 1y ago

I don't know about a Lion, but I think Wittgenstein could have benefited from having a pet. I train my cat and while I can't always understand her I think one of the most impressive features of the human mind is to be able to have such great understanding of others. We have theory of mind, joint attention, triadic awareness, and much more. My cat can understand me a bit but it's definitely asymmetric. It's definitely not easy to understand other animals. As Wittgenstein suggests, their minds are alien to us. But we seem to be able to adapt. I'm much better at understanding my cat than my girlfriend (all the local street cats love me, and I teach many of them tricks) but I'm also nothing compared to experts I've seen. Honestly, I think everyone studying AI could benefit by spending some more time studying animal cognition. While not like computer minds these are testable "alien minds" and can help us better understand the general nature of intelligence

klank 1y ago
I think the response is generally you are communicating with your cat as an animal, as a mammal. Yes, communication is possible because we too are mammals, animals, etc. But Lion is not just animal, it is not just mammal, it is something more. Something which I have no idea how we would communicate with.
- godelski 1y ago
  > But Lion is not just animal, it is not just mammal, it is something more. Are you saying "lion" is a stand-in for "an arbitrary creature"? If so, yes, that is how I understand Wittgenstein and it doesn't change my comment.
  - klank 1y ago
    No. I'm saying the areas you point out that you feel you could communicate, are ones in which you share a lived experience with the lion. You are both animals, you are both mammals. You get cold, hungry, thirsty, etc. But lions, and us, are not just animals + mammals. Being a lion or a human means more. Ultimately, there is a uniquely human or lion element. Wittgenstein is saying we cannot communicate this.