[klank]

If a lion could speak, would we understand it?

[godelski]

I don't know about a Lion, but I think Wittgenstein could have benefited from having a pet.

I train my cat and while I can't always understand her I think one of the most impressive features of the human mind is to be able to have such great understanding of others. We have theory of mind, joint attention, triadic awareness, and much more. My cat can understand me a bit but it's definitely asymmetric.

It's definitely not easy to understand other animals. As Wittgenstein suggests, their minds are alien to us. But we seem to be able to adapt. I'm much better at understanding my cat than my girlfriend (all the local street cats love me, and I teach many of them tricks) but I'm also nothing compared to experts I've seen.

Honestly, I think everyone studying AI could benefit by spending some more time studying animal cognition. While not like computer minds these are testable "alien minds" and can help us better understand the general nature of intelligence

[GuB-42]

Cats are domestic animals, and dogs are even more.

You probably didn't adapt to understanding cats as much as cats have adapted over millennia to be understood by humans. Working with and being understood by the dominant specie that is humans is a big evolutionary advantage.

Understanding a wild animal like a lion is a different story. There is a reason why most specialists will say that keeping wild animals as pets is a bad idea, they tend to be unpredictable, which, in other words, mean we don't understand them.

[klank]

I think the response is generally you are communicating with your cat as an animal, as a mammal. Yes, communication is possible because we too are mammals, animals, etc.

But Lion is not just animal, it is not just mammal, it is something more. Something which I have no idea how we would communicate with.

[CamperBob2]

I'm much better at understanding my cat than my girlfriend

Huh. Apparently attention isn't all we need in order to parse that sentence.

[ecocentrik]

That was a philosophical position on the difficulty of understanding alien concepts and language, not a hard technological limit.

[klank]

I'm missing why that distinction matters given the thread of conversation.

Would you care to expound?

[eddythompson80]

There is nothing really special about speech as a form of communication. All animals communicate with each other and with other animals. Informational density and, uhhhhh, cyclomatic complexity might be different between speech and a dance or a grunt or whatever.

[klank]

I was referencing Wittgenstein's "If a lion could speak, we would not understand it." Wittgenstein believed (and I am strongly inclined to agree with him) that our ability to convey meaning through communication was intrinsically tied to (or, rather, sprang forth from) our physical, lived experiences.

Thus, to your point, assuming communication, because "there's nothing really special about speech", does that mean we would be able to understand a lion, if the lion could speak? Wittgenstein would say probably not. At least not initially and not until we had built shared lived experiences.

[UltraSane]

We should understand common concepts like hungry, tired, horny, pain, etc.

[johnisgood]

Not just the concepts themselves, but their behavioral representation of it.

[kouru225]

Knowing lions I bet all they’d talk about is being straight up dicks to anyone and everyone around them so yea I think we probably could ngl