[mabub24]

"If a lion could speak, we could not understand (verstehen)[0] him."

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations

[0] Ironically, there is disagreement over the best translation of verstehen. Understand and comprehend have some conceptual overlap, but also some distinctions. The general idea is, though, of understanding in a greater, more all encompassing sense that is only possible when someone/something is no longer alien.

[coldtea]

"We would [understand the Lion]. We're flexible and can get into different perspectives, and we have been close to animal living ourselves for hundreds of thousands of years, plus we watch nature and learn about how lions live and what they do. The lion would have difficulty understanding us, as our world is a superset of its world" - coldtea

[Mawr]

Yeah, I think we'd be just fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky

> Nim's longest "sentence" was the 16-word-long "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you."

[pavlov]

We could just agree that "to forestand" is a new word that means the same as German "verstehen", and maybe eventually it actually would.

[Koshkin]

I do not believe this would make sense. The German 'ver-' has nothing in common with the English 'fore-'.

[mwattsun]

How would one even attempt to communicate with an octopus?

Alien intelligence: the extraordinary minds of octopuses and other cephalopods

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/28/alien-in...

[runnerup]

More seriously, I think humans and other mammals generally can learn to share an “animal” language which uses repetition for bidirectional training (animal to human, human to animal).

Elements used for prediction include: - Predictable timing, both circadian and in relation to circumstantial events - body language - sound patterns - touch patterns - performative actions with environmental objects

It’s not so much a “universal” language, but rather that mammals seem to share some semi-universal ability to train each other in these cues and learn them. They can be used for surprisingly rich inter-species communication and over time both parties move a lot of the inference and signaling to their subconscious, no longer even taking active brain power to decipher intent and meanings.

I’ve also done this when I was working very closely with just myself and one other person and neither of us spoke the others language but we had to get the job done for 8-12 hours every day. We established a system of different grunts and cues that we used first for several weeks. Once that was fluid and we could communicate everything that we needed to, we started replacing/connecting the established grunts with our own language words and that’s how we taught eachother the others’ language. At least for the domain of our work.

I have no idea if any of these would be possible with cephalopods but I feel like if we had children and baby octopuses raised together they may find reasonably robust ways to communicate intent, feelings, and find the ability to create novel games to play with eachother.

[jdmichal]

It's OK, Contact prepared me for this. We should use math. Have we tried strobing a 2-3-5-7 sequence at one, and see if it gives us 11?

(The above is meant in jest, of course.)

[avisser]

> The general idea is, though, of understanding in a greater, more all encompassing sense that is only possible when someone/something is no longer alien.

I would put forward "grok" as a translation. Your use of "no longer alien" evokes that word all the more.

[jamiek88]

Funny how a fictional word, ostensibly Martian, can come to have colloquial meaning in English, even to those who haven’t read the book.

Shakespeare and Aesop… and Heinlein.