You’re wrong. I’m a great ape and I can understand abstract language.
Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
The entire study of great apes and sign language has been based on flawed methodology and subjective and biased interpretation of very small data sets.
Its interesting that apes can recollect abstract symbols. It’s even kind of interesting that they can to some extent recollect hand gestures. But it is nothing more than symbolic association at its absolute best. Calling it language is a fundamental misrepresentation of what is taking place. Apes already possess several kind of language comparable to symbolic association, stuff like emotive language and body language and expressive language. There is no substantive evidence that they are capable of understanding and using an abstract language.
What has largely happened in so called ‘studies’ on ‘sign language’ in great apes, has been a lot of animal abuse and fundraising for animal abuse predicated on vague notions of how inspiring the idea of talking apes is. They can’t talk. They are nonetheless very interesting creatures and we should be fascinated by them even without them having the ability to speak human language.
bunchberry@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Lemminary@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You big, hairy ape! Look at you over here, with your big brain and your big ass. So much abstract thinking, and you ain’t even got a prehensile tail!
krooklochurm@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
kazerniel@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Tangentially related: the fucked-up experiments they were doing on dolphins, like giving them LSD or keeping one in a flooded, human-style house and trying to teach it English: The dolphin who loved me: the Nasa-funded project that went wrong | The Guardian
content warning:
spoiler
it involves a caretaker routinely jerking off the dolphin she lived with, then the project got shut down, and the dolphin was kept in so bad circumstances that it committed suicide after a few weeks
Mediocre_Bard@lemmy.world 9 minutes ago
If they had taught me about this in junior high then I would have 100% been interested in hard science. Instead they taught me that if I don’t follow diligent documentation requirements my teacher would try to eat an unwrapped bag of bread.
stray@pawb.social 1 day ago
You might like the novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. I personally prefer to go into books without knowing much about them, so I will put the premise in a spoiler tag:
the premise
It’s about a woman who was raised from birth with a chimpanzee as her twin sister, as she tries to figure out why her sister suddenly disappeared from her life when they were young, and where she is now.
It has a fairly comic tone, which is very welcome given all the trauma.
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
But it is nothing more than symbolic association at its absolute best
Have you ever had a pet that you were close to? I think you’re right that it’s cruel to study them though.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 hours ago
Ive had many pets. None of them have ever exhibited the ability of abstraction. Thats not an insult to their ability to understand my emotions or whats happening around them, their brains are just literally not designed to engage in the kinds of communication humans are capable of. They could not have the conversation you and I are having right now, they are neurologically not capable of it. Humans are uniquely capable of this.
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
None of them have ever exhibited the ability of abstraction.
First of all, isn’t science always testing and studying? Why and how can you make that statement so confidently? You don’t know this for sure.
Second, couldn’t this just be bias on your part? I’ve had dogs that could speak our language the best they could. Granted, these were very smart dogs, so they might have been outliers. But your dogs could have been dumb as rocks too.
Third, you’re like that archaeology meme with the obsidian in the rafters. It might just be you.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 hours ago
Sorry you lost me with the archeology memes, ill take your word for it lol.
I said exhibited, that already implies that I dont know for certain. I am saying that there has never been any evidence provided to me that my pets, or anyone else’s pets, have ever communicated using structured abstract language to communicate. I think believing that animals have a secret ability to communicate in non-symbolic ways is basically a conspiracy theory. There is nuance to what we would define as symbolic and what we would define as structured abstract language, but overall I think this holds true even with very generous definitions for those terms.
Communication through posturing, facial expressions, basic vocalizations, pheromones, can all be used to communicate some ideas that are complex in some ways. You can communicate to someone who knows you very well just be showing them a subtle facial expression that they know you well enough to pick up on. We are especially good at communicating emotions this way. I dont think that anyone would argue those modes of communication are as robust as, say, English. How would we have this conversation through purely posturing, facial expressions, vocalizations and pheromones? Can we convey these abstract ideas through those things that are unstructured and based on what is essentially our ability to pattern much external stimuli? Can you present my arguments to your dog? Can you show that your dog can be made to understand the arguments I am making about language?
plyth@feddit.org 17 hours ago
and are not meant to live lives in concrete cages
Neither are we. It must be the language that makes it bearable.
humorlessrepost@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
You misspelled drugs and orgasms.
Rooster326@programming.dev 12 hours ago
Young people that have well less drugs and orgasms, and there’s a whole lot more concrete. What does this mean?
MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 12 hours ago
This reminds me of an excerpt in David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs”, where he quotes a sailor from like, the East India Company or something.
Something along the lines of “Many suspect the monkeys of the island can speak, but wisely choose not to, knowing they would be put to work.”