I am interested in taking ideas from historical costuming and applying them to modern garments (“history bounding”) and something that keeps jumping out at me is how smart people in the past were, especially regular, working people. In modern times, people tend to act like people were stupid just because modern medicine and science didn’t exist, but if you study enough to understand some of the reality of historical people’s lives, there are some really nifty solutions. It makes me think a lot about “intelligence”, and how limited our understanding of it is if we are so unable to think of pre-modern people as intelligent.
That’s a big tangent to your comment, but it’s ultimately heading in the same direction. I’m also jazzed to see cognitive science continue to increase its understanding of non-human intelligence; it’s really cool to see what we can discover when we stop projecting ourselves so hard onto other creatures.
beefbot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
*can’t use language as much as we can: AS FAR AS WE CAN CURRENTLY TELL. Which isn’t all that much tbh
Me, I think birds are already there, full nouns & verbs. And I highly suspect insects have language systems too. I don’t mean some loose definition like like ants and chemical markers, or emotional expressions.
I mean what linguists mean: units of expression- sound (hand shapes, in signed langs) which recombine to signify different things, in a productive way, allowing for level upon level of transmission of thoughts. It’s a high bar to qualify as human language. And I think probably some nonhuman animals have it, and we’re just not listening closely enough.
But the closer we look.
(And yes there’s a Ted Chiang story about this)
rockerface@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Large parrots are in fact as smart as a toddler. African Greys, apparently, can memorize human language words (just the sound, no grammar or anything complex like that) and apply them to identify objects, colors and materials - even to objects they see for the first time!
And even smaller birds like budgies usually know the sound of their own name and can even assign “names” in form of sound sequences to other birds and humans they live with. You wouldn’t think they have enough brain size for that, but somehow they do
flicker@lemmy.world 4 months ago
My cat 100% has a name for every human he meets, and he can even say those names in higher or lower registers (and volumes) depending on how he’s addressing that person.
I tell people this, and they think I’m insane. I even point out the sound that means that specific person’s name, and they don’t bother to learn it!
Temba, his arms wide.
gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
DNA is language, my dude. it’s like programming code.
beefbot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
interesting thought …I’m curious - who would be talking to who, in this framing of the idea ?
gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
well it’s more like a script, a book or library basically. It’s not so much the transport of information, but the storage of information.
flora_explora@beehaw.org 4 months ago
Is it? It’s probably more like binary code for computers that our machines run on but that we as individuals cannot comprehend. But you cannot call it a language as individual organisms are not able to use it as such.
Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
How do you figure that DNA/RNA isn’t language? It’s a system of abstract symbols that carry information, it uses highly complex syntaxes, there are even different dialects, large parts of it is higher level than Assembly Languages, and it can carry context between organisms.
Limiting your definition to organisms is shortsighted. Fully sapient organelles, computers, crystals, superorganisms, or whatever else could could create vast galaxy spanning civilizations with dizzyingly deep culture and art, and you’d argue that they don’t use language because they’re not specifically a certain kind of individual?
gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
Yeah well I guess it depends on whether you call bytes on a computer a language.
What if those bytes represent characters that compose language that carries meaning? Because precisely that happens in DNA. An individual fraction of DNA might not carry much meaning, but in its sequence (ATGCCAT…) it encodes blueprints, and therefore meaning.