Edward Gibson: belief

Transcript context

…I met a guy named Aza Raskin, who does a lot of cool stuff, really brilliant, works with Tristan Harris on a bunch of stuff, but he was talking to me about communicating with animals. He co-founded Earth Species Project where you’re trying to find the common language between whales, crows and humans. And he was saying that there’s a lot of promising work that even though the signals are very different, the actual, if you have embeddings of the languages, they’re actually trying to communicate similar type things. Is there something you can comment on that? Is there promise to that in everything you’ve seen in different cultures, especially remote cultures, that this is a possibility or no? That we can talk to whales? I would say yes. I think it’s not crazy at all. I think it’s quite reasonable. There’s this sort of weird view, well, odd view, I think that to think that human language is somehow special. I mean, maybe it is. We can certainly do more than any of the other species, and maybe our language system is part of that. It’s possible. But people have often talked about how, like Chomsky, in fact, has talked about how human, only human language has this compositionality thing that he thinks is sort of key in language. And the problem with that argument is he doesn’t speak whale, and he doesn’t speak crow, and he doesn’t speak monkey. They say things like, well, they’re making a bunch of grunts and squeaks. And their reasoning is like, that’s bad reasoning. I’m pretty sure if you asked a whale what we’re saying, they’d say, well, I’m making a bunch of weird noises. Exactly.…

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