UNSPOKEN MINDS: The challenges of animal translation
New technology may or may not help us to communicate with animals. But even the attempt at translation suggests a deepening of respect for them, and a willingness to free ourselves from our human preconceptions and prejudices.
PHILIP BALL: Many animal lovers look upon the prospect of… speaking with and understanding animals with hope: they think that, if only we could converse with other creatures, we might be inspired to protect and conserve them properly. But others warn that, whenever we attempt to communicate with animals, we risk projecting our ideas and preconceptions onto them. We might do this simply through the act of translation: any human language constrains the repertoire of things that can be said, or perhaps even thought, for those using it… In 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel published a seminal paper called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Bat life, Nagel argued, is so profoundly different from human life that we can never truly know the answer to that question.
Our understandings are shaped by our human concepts; the only way to know what it is like to be a bat is to be a bat, and to have bat concepts. Even if we don’t or can’t know exactly what it’s like to be a bat, we can have some understanding of how bat minds work; we can understand that bat life is lived aloft, sometimes upside down, and partly through echolocation. Still, in Nagel’s view, something is left out: the experience itself. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously put it, if a lion could talk, we could not understand him — our human minds would not share the sensory and conceptual landscape that lion-talk would express.
Today, animal-translation technologies are being developed that use the same “machine learning” approach that is applied to human languages in services such as Google Translate. These systems use neural networks to analyze vast numbers of example sentences, inferring from them general principles of grammar and usage, and then apply those patterns in order to translate sentences the system has never seen… The “father of the Internet,” Vint Cerf; and the cognitive psychologist and marine-mammal scientist Diana Reiss — seeks to use new technologies to connect intelligent species such as dolphins, elephants, and great apes to one another and to us… But other researchers, following Nagel, doubt that genuine translation can be easily achieved between species that don’t share the same basic perceptual and cognitive processes…
Not all animal minds are equally different. It stands to reason that, mentally speaking, we have more in common with other primates than with octopuses and squid: the last common ancestor we share with chimpanzees lived six to eight million years ago, whereas the last we may share with octopuses lived in the Precambrian seas around six hundred million years before that. In “The Descent of Man,” Charles Darwin argued that there is “no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties,” and that the emotions of those animals were directly comparable to the ones that we experience. Darwin may have been indulging the Victorian tendency toward anthropomorphization, but it isn’t hard to discern a shared mentality with some of our animal cousins…
It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that great apes can learn to communicate with humans in very sophisticated ways. Koko, a gorilla who lived in a preserve in the Santa Cruz Mountains until her death in 2018, learned many words in a modified version of American Sign Language… The vocabulary used by Koko… and other apes can be not just concrete but emotional. The animals don’t just ask for this or that object; they can learn to convey sadness, for instance, through hand gestures mimicking the flowing of tears… In 2013, Herzing and her team at the Wild Dolphin Project used a machine-learning algorithm called Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (chat), designed to identify meaningful signals in dolphin whistles. The algorithm picked out a sound within a dolphin pod that the researchers had earlier trained the dolphins to associate with sargassum seaweed—a clumpy, floaty plant that dolphins sometimes play with. The dolphins may have assimilated the new “word,” and begun using it in the wild…
With species to which we are more distantly connected, it becomes even harder to establish common ground. Slobodchikoff, who is an expert on the communications of prairie dogs, said that “the time has come for people to understand that what we recognize as reality is not necessarily what other animal species recognize.” For example, Slobodchikoff said, “bees and some birds see in the ultraviolet range of the visual spectrum, but we don’t. Bats, dolphins, dogs, and cats hear sounds in the ultrasonic range, but we don’t.” Dogs have vastly more smelling capacity than we humans do. Although Slobodchikoff insists that animals “have language, perceive time, have emotions, think, and plan,” he also argues that “each animal species has key differences that make it unique.” We are as distinct as we are alike…
If we could speak to them, dolphins wouldn’t understand the metaphor of a glass being half full or half empty. But how much does that matter?… If, in fact, we find ourselves unable to fully reconstruct another creature’s mental world, it may be enough just to acknowledge the reality of what we can’t articulate. In other ways, even basic communication may be of value. Some of our mistreatment of other species is obviously callous and selfish, as in factory farming, but some of it arises from a communications breakdown. Dogs are often surrendered to shelters… because people have trouble “reading and understanding the signals with which they are trying to communicate with us.” And, by changing what we believe about the minds of animals, even attempts at communication may affect how we think of them as legal entities.
More than a hundred experts have signed a declaration urging the banning of octopus farming on the grounds that these “sentient and sophisticated” animals should not be kept in “sterile” and “monotonous” environments. Octopuses have long been denied the consideration and welfare that we give to vertebrates, but many marine biologists now agree they should be seen as possessing minds. Organizations such as the Great Ape Project and the Nonhuman Rights Project are seeking to extend minimal legal rights to certain animals such as great apes, elephants, dolphins, and whales… New technology may or may not help us to communicate with animals. But even the attempt at translation suggests a deepening of respect for them — and a willingness to free ourselves from our human preconceptions and prejudices. SOURCE…
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