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Canadians don’t ask questions either. They just make statements, and then add “eh” to the end of the sentence.
Canadians and apes have a lot in common, is what this article is telling me.
Thats not how eh is used
You’ve met Canadians, eh?
Oh ya, everyday lol
I mean, it sort of is, but only for the specific question of asking for agreement with the preceding statement.
“This weather, eh?”
“The Leafs actually have a chance this year, eh?”But not like “What’s your favourite colour, eh?” (Unless, maybe, it’s in the context where it’s obvious, like someone decked out head-to-toe in pink.)
Haha yeah I always thought it was like the Japanese or Portuguese “Ne?” , or British “In’nit?”
It’s like a statement followed by a “You agree too, right?” Lol
A Canadian friend told Americans do the same thing, we just put our word at the beginning.
“Hey, get off my car!” “Get off my car, eh!”
Not sure if he was being serious though.
Scientists speculate that this is why no ape has ever been on Jeopardy.
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 kinds 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.
The really frustrating part is that they shouldn’t have to speak with us for us to feel compassion towards them. The really disgusting part is that wild animals were being abducted from the wild and raised in deplorable conditions while essentially being tormented by disgraced researchers trying to prove that they could talk. They’re very well suited to their natural environment (which we are destroying) and are not meant to live lives in concrete cages on the other side of the world being prodded and clicker trained to make vague hand motions. It’s just animal cruelty under the guise of scientific research.
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 taught English and put to work.”
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
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.
You’re wrong. I’m a great ape and I can understand abstract language.
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!
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.
and are not meant to live lives in concrete cages
Neither are we. It must be the language that makes it bearable.
You misspelled drugs, tv, and orgasms.
Young people that have well less drugs and orgasms, and there’s a whole lot more concrete. What does this mean?
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.
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.
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.
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?
If you compare a 2 year old and a really smart dog, they’re about the same in their reasoning skills. So yeah, I’ve had arguments with 2 year olds and dogs.
Again, you’re saying you personally haven’t had those experiences, so you might be an outlier.
Your first statement is entirely unrelated to the discussion at hand, so I dont even really know why you said it.
I’m saying I’ve never even heard of it. I would love to see a qualitative analysis of ‘arguments’ with dogs. I have never seen any evidence whatsoever that anything even approaching actual language comprehension is happening. Understanding some words and sentences is not the same thing as language comprehension. Do they understand the meaning of the terms? Can they infer new things if terms have been rearranged? Do they understand the structure of language? No. They definitely cannot. They are capable of pattern matching human vocalizations though, especially as they relate to themselves and things in their immediate environment. Thats not the same thing as language. I’m very sorry if you do not understand the nuance between those 2 things, or if you genuinely believe any of your pets could speak English. Theres nothing I or anyone else can say to convince you otherwise if youve already decided that your subjective emotional experience with your animals leads you to believe they have English language speaking skills.
When I crate my dog she will sometimes run away and hide. Her position is that she doesn’t want to go in the crate and my position is that I want her to go in the crate. Other times she agrees and just goes in the crate. This is an example of what an argument with a dog can look like.
I really hope you’re not a working scientist.
The argument that apes have never asked a question “is a classic example of overstatement,” said Heidi Lyn, a professor at the University of South Alabama’s Comparative Cognition and Communication Lab at the Department of Psychology and Marine Science.
“There is plenty of evidence of apes asking questions, although the structure may not look exactly like humans asking questions,” Lyn explained.
https://www.snopes.com/articles/467842/apes-questions-communicate/
If a chimpanzee looks its handler in the eyes and points to a banana, it may be interpreted that the ape is asking to have the banana. This, Hobaiter said, shows apes are capable of asking questions.
Obviously not in the spirit of the question. No curiosity, no attempt to learn about what’s going on around them. The article has no examples of real questions, so to me I’d say the meme rings true.
Yeah, when my cat meows, it is “asking” for snacks. But it’s not inquiring about snacks, or curious about where the snacks come from or why cats enjoy snacking so much.
Granted, many humans don’t ask such questions either, but that’s because intellectual acuity is on a spectrum also occupied by non-human animals, at least in the realm of being an incurious dumbass.
That one sign language gorilla asked about sleep pictures.
My cat has asked where my wife is. She has a very specific meow for each of us that she uses when she’s looking for us. One day while my wife was at work, cat meowed for my wife. Told the cat she’d be home on a couple hours. Cat curled up by the window, satisfied. Next time it happened, I teased her and tried to play with her. She kept wandering around the house looking for my wife until I told her she was at work. Smart little bastard.
Your cat’s breath smells like cat food.
There’s your “Loading screen game tip” for today lol.
How do you know your cat isnt curious, is it survival bias. All the curious cats died
Cats don’t need to ask questions about the world because they are scientists and will figure it out for themselves if they don’t get shown the answers. They know where the snacks come from, at least in regards to their own world, that’s why they come running when they hear the package.
They knock stuff over to see what happens. They meow for treats to see what happens. They sit on your face to wake you up to see what happens. They get into things just to see what’s in them.
And when the result is something they want, they try it again to see if the result is consistent. Reproducible.
That’s why the best way to get a cat to stop doing something they do to you is to ignore them. They meow to wake you up for food? They do that because it’s been working. Stop responding, and the behavior will also stop.
What you are doing is anthropomorphizing an animal’s behavior and ascribing intent behind the action without having any substantial basis for that claim.
Cats are intelligent, yes, but what you have described is completely devoid of any understanding of animal behavior or psychology.
Well of course he is. He’s not a cat.
It’s not that cats can’t ask questions. It’s that they can’t ask abstract questions. That’s quite different.
They can, but they don’t know how to dumb it down enough for their minions to understand.
I think there are several separate cognitive abilities needed to ask questions. Curiosity (which is very common), complex communication (much less common), and advanced theory of mind (exists on a spectrum, you need not only awareness of your own mental state, or metacognition, but awareness that others have a mental state that is distinct from your own. Humans actually develop this ability slowly throughout childhood, and it goes through stages). Though there are other species with similar traits, it might well be the case that humans are the only living species in possession of all of them simultaneously.
Pay closer attention, they are communicating all the time. We had a cat family of five, and we’re down to the last one, a 17 yo. She has an extremely wide vocabulary, and absolutely asks for water, food, snacks, cuddles, etc.
You know when you sit down with food, and they want to get a sniff of it? What is that, if not “Hey, watcha got? Is it good? Can I have some? Just a sniff?” They aren’t deep, philosophical questions, but they are still questions.
They are asking questions and communicating all day long, if you only pay attention to them.
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The assertion was that no gorilla has ever asked a question, not that they’ve never asked a GOOD question. Asking if they can have a drink of water, or something to eat, is a question. A simple one, but still a valid question. It didn’t say they have never asked a philosophical question, and I wouldn’t expect them to.
I replied to the wrong person. Sorry
asking to have the banana
Yeah that’s just a quirk of the English language in that “ask” means both inquiring, trying to learn information from a response, and request, a communication to another that the “asker” wants something.
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That’s crazy. You think monkeys aren’t curious about the world around them?
They just don’t look to humans for answers, they look to humans for treats
Well, curiosity comes in different stripes. Investigating your environment is one thing. Asking second-order questions is another.
“May I have food?” vs “Why am I here?” and “What is the nature of consciousness?”
To be fair a lot of people don’t ask the latter questions either
“Why are we here?”
“One of life’s great mysteries isn’t it? Why are we here? I mean, are we the product of some cosmic coincidence? Or is there really a God, watching everything? You know, with a plan for us and stuff? I don’t know man, but it keeps me up at night.”
“What? I mean why are we here, in this box canyon in the middle of nowhere?”
Oh man, RvB reference in the wild after all these years. Warms my heart.
if you wake up in a compound, catered to your every need by weird alien captors, “why am I here?” is a pretty obvious question.
You ask the aliens why you are there, meaning the cell they imprisoned you, and they tell you how their species created humans and what humans purpose is. You immediately go catatonic by the revelation.
The information that aliens created us for some particular purpose is empirically interesting but normatively insignificant.
They already understand the second order questions though. Why would they ask the humans?
They know what’s outside their enclosures, they know they’re there because the humans want them there, they know strange humans like to see and interact with them through the glass. They just don’t care, so long as they have their tribe around with things to do and they get tasty food
Animals understand existence better than humans do. They understand life and death better than we to. Our higher intelligence makes second order questions complicated because we put ourselves through mental gymnastics
We should be asking apes about the meaning of life, not the other way around
Second-order questions aren’t just the prosaic things any intelligent creature would ask, such as “why am I here?” or “what do you want from me?”
but also the more esoteric, “what sort of creature are you?” And “what sort of creature am I?”
Animals (and, indeed, most humans) don’t ask (or don’t really understand) second-order questions very well because that requires abstraction, which is the sort of reasoning that takes enormous amounts of education and curiosity.
but also the more esoteric, “what sort of creature are you?” And “what sort of creature am I?”
I agree, but that is the kind of question they do think about. Koko was “a wonderful gorilla person” in her own words
There’s a dog that uses one of those word button mats that thinks small dogs are cats, dogs are dogs, and that she’s a human (or that her owner is also a dog, she’s convinced she’s the same as her owner and always gets confused when it’s explained otherwise)
They don’t ask, because they already know what they think. They aren’t confused about where they stand in the world, it’s learning human categorization that confuses them
I don’t want to conflate the pragmatic use of tools or manipulation of the environment with questions about the meaning of life. Even most humans can’t do the latter. We have a lot of depressing research showing that most people can barely engage in abstract reasoning at all, let alone effectively.
I think nearly every sentient creature can be depressed and understand how badly life is going. But that’s different.
I have no idea if they’re curious about the world around them. But that’s also not the question at hand.
It is the question at hand. It’s a question about the mental process of animals
The question isn’t are they curious - we know they are. The question is why they don’t ask humans questions when you teach them how to speak
The answer is - it’s because you’re not speaking gorilla, the gorilla is learning a foreign language, which it learned by being motivated by food.
Animal languages have a different grammar to human languages. When they ask questions, they often do it by making statements to be agreed with or corrected. They might even disagree, and assert the statement again in reply
You have to meet animals halfway… Well, really like 10% of the way since they’re the ones learning to speak to us in our languages
These people aruginf against the intelligence of animals would fit right in with people who encounter savages on their voyages.
That label was based on cultural differences and these fools are too ignorant to see they are making the same mistake across the difference in species.
It’s quite fascinating. Maybe if we give them treats they can be trained to recognize their superiority only exists in their mushy little brains.
Lol right? It’s crazy how far on a limb they go, despite interacting with dogs
How often do we talk about how dogs want this or that, how they’re thinking of doing something “bad”, how they look so guilty they tell on themselves
But yeah, nothing going on up there. It’s all projection, they’re just dumb animals and humans are super extra special
By that standard, my dog is as smart as a gorilla
Hi, it’s me, your dog, woof woof.
I have transcended the limits of my species and have learned to type utter doggerel into the glowing rectangle woof woof
Yeah, the moment I read that, I thought it sounded like bullshit. I doubt there’s a database of every sign language interaction with apes that proves that no ape has ever asked a question.
Also
apes have never asked one question
WE ARE APES. We ask questions all the time.
Ook, ook-ook?
Yes, sir. The reference desk is right over there. But you’d know that, being the Librarian, right?
Ook.
What did you say?!
I’m pretty confident most scientists studying animals have stated that apes have never asked a question. It’s pretty clear on record that only two ever have, both African Grey parrots.
And yet the scientists that did those studies stated that the animals never asked a question. Those are all other researchers claiming after the fact that questions were asked.
This right here. Humans assume so much based on their experiences and interpretations. It’s infuriating the assumptions we make. “That turtle just eats, sleeps and shits! It’s clearly not intelligent! It’s never read The Hunger Games!” goes back to working to afford a place to eat, sleep and shit while also subjugating others, inciting wars, destroying the planet and reading The Hunger Games
Imagine a fucking gorilla turning to the scientist and ask:
Does this unit have a soul?
Now I’m sad…
Well I ain’t never asked a gorilla nothin neither
Robin Williams had Coco ask if he would lift his shirt for her. And then she grabbed his nipples.
She probably thought he was another gorilla. He was one hairy mf
Sounds more like a request / command than a question.
Good. They will never question how we treat them. Then they can’t rise up and kill us all.
Is this true? I was listening to a lecture of I think it was a linguist on apes using sign language, saying that the evidence for them actually understanding language is… not great. Like it appear they just sign until their carers gets the right/expected answer. That they may want to say ‘apple’, but not finding the word, they can’t describe the shape, color, just random words util they hit the correct one, or something like that.
Afaik yes, although I remember reading that (I think) Koko sort of asked something (I think it was “what color” or something like that). But at the same time I remember reading about similar criticism you mentioned, that Koko’s signs were often quite random and the caretakers often tried to make fun of the situation that “she’s just joking”.
I should find that article …
Edit: I don’t know if it was exactly this artice but it was similar
https://bigthink.com/life/ape-sign-language/
Edit 2: or this
Yes, that is the one! Koko and “just joking” I recognize from that lecture.
Longest non-human primate sentence on record:
Give Orange Me Give Eat Orange Me Eat Orange Give Me Eat Orange Give Me You
Hello fellow American. This you should vote me. I leave power. Good. Thank you, thank you. If you vote me, I’m hot. What? Taxes, they’ll be lower, son. The Democratic vote for me is right thing to do Philadelphia, so do.
That is pretty impressive. Where is it from?
I’m pretty sure that was Bukowski
Not asshole enough for him
NO, baaaaad ape. Me better you no good. I win you lose whyareyoulikethis. No. bad ape. Existence is suffering.
Like that?
Pelcan mouth is good place for baby Put baby Pelican mouth now
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Proving that Trump supporters don’t count as human.
That’s just not true. Most of them simply aren’t interested in communicating with humans, they just care about the reward
That’s what made Koko special. She was interested in communicating with humans, and her conversations were wild. It got existential
You have a severe case of anthropomorphizing animals plus a stark lack of education on animal behavioral sciences. You have zero idea what you’re talking about.
Koko’s “conversations” were gibberish that the scientists conducting the experiments interpreted with extreme bias. They wanted there to be meaning in what the gorilla was doing so they over-interpreted it as if there was. It was a heavily flawed experiment.
Bullshit. You just don’t speak any animal language
I can tell you what a dog is thinking at any given moment. They’re so expressive I can dictate it in real time. They tell you where and how they want to be pet, they can understand time and remember names
Koko was barely special. She spoke a form of sign language, and she enjoyed interspecies communication enough to devote time towards it. That’s what is rare
Do you understand how much more they’ll have to say when we crack their language? Because it’s coming
Lol. You are like the epitome of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s amazing how confident you are in your ignorance.
LMAO okay then. My comment will age like wine, your’s will age like milk
Meet back in 5 years?
K bud. Go back to school. Take it from someone who focused on animal health and behavior during their degree path in wildlife conservation. You’re full of shit.
Onion News Network - Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday
Everything is so sad today
Never once? Not even “what’s for dinner”?
To be, or not to be?
well, kinda yeah. Just jumbled and weird:
Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you.
is the longest recorded sentence
Ishmael aims to expose that several widely accepted assumptions of modern society, such as human supremacy,
Click link, go to “anthropocentrism”.
Bro I can believe people are smarter than other animals and still not believe we’re the best or most valuable or worthiest or anything like that.
I know dogs are not as smart as me, but they’re sure as fuck better people than me.
Congratulations on that incredibly profound title OP. You should become a professional quote maker or something equally enlightened.
