> At the Earth Species Project, that data comes in the form of sounds, motion, and video recorded in either the wild or captivity, sometimes with accompanying annotations from biologists on what the animal was doing at the time and in what context.
Has anything similar been done for human vocalizations (aka spoken language)? Text is obviously so much more efficient, and so much more abundant, so even for human speech this sounds like a challenge.
> If we decide that it does, then conveniently there's no way for the animals to dispute it.
Not at all. You can construct tests to see if the animal's behaviour is consistent with what the network say they are "saying". You can go and check if what information you receive through it is consistent with the observed reality.
You can test that behavioural differences observed between individuals show up in the translation. For example a dog who you know is hurt, or old is probably less chipper than one who just chased a squirrel. Observers of animals often notice that some individuals are more timid while others are more curious/adventurous. One would expect that their vocalisation also reflects of this difference in personalities.
It's not like we just slap a network together and we call it done. If the translator says Lassie is saying that Timmy has fallen down the well you might as well check the well, but if Timmy is not there then this might be a translator failure.
I agree that "translating" what they are trying to say could result in accurate conclusions.
But I don't see what that has to do with my comment. Are you explicitly a radical behaviorist, or do you think animals have internal experience?
Suppose that instead of a dog, we were talking about a human with dementia in a nursing home. Do you think that not being able to witness your own condition to a doctor would put you at a disadvantage?
In the absence of a feedback mechanism, the virtue and the intelligence of people who are in control of a system do not count for much.
> Are you explicitly a radical behaviorist, or do you think animals have internal experience?
You will have to use smaller words with me, or explain your vocabulary, if we are to have a discussion.
> But I don't see what that has to do with my comment
You said these things in your original comment: "If we decide that it does" (here I presumed "does" mean AI let us understanding animals) "then conveniently there's no way for the animals to dispute it."
That is what I'm disagreeing with. There are many ways animals can dispute us understanding them.
Imagine a scenario that we have a gadget which is supposedly translating horse body language and vocalisations to human language. You step up to a big black mare and use the gizmo. It tells you that the horse wants scratches behind its ear. You reach out, but oh horror it was a complete mistranslation. The horse was in distress by you approaching and is completely spoked by you reaching for their ear. It reacts, bites your hand, kicks you and drags you through the mud. That is how you realise that the gizmo's understanding of horse communication is less than perfect. That is the feedback mechanism.
You said there is no way, and here is one way they can do it.
> Suppose that instead of a dog, we were talking about a human with dementia in a nursing home. Do you think that not being able to witness your own condition to a doctor would put you at a disadvantage?
Sure. But animals are not dementia patients and being at a doctor/vet is not the only scenario we can test our understanding of them.
>You will have to use smaller words with me, or explain your vocabulary, if we are to have a discussion.
Sorry, I was alluding to B.F. Skinner, but I used the term "radical behaviorist" because I didn't want to get drawn into a discussion of him in particular.
I think it's a known term, although I'm not sure whether anybody self-identifies as such or if it's more of a caricature by opponents.
I threw it out there, thinking if you did recognize it, and identified yourself as one or as not one, I would learn more about how it is used.
>But animals are not dementia patients and being at a doctor/vet is not the only scenario we can test our understanding of them.
"...is the best we can do" is what I see you arguing, and I'm neither affirming nor denying it. It's not relevant to my interests or the intent of my commenting, is all.
I seem to recall a (possibly recurring) news item about the poultry industry wherein it explains that non-egg laying chicks are being disposed of in huge shredders, alive. I am certain an industry expert would say that is the best alternative. What does anyone do all day but try to figure out the best way to do things at work?
If someone suggests that being shredded might be unpleasant, and you coincidentally work in the industry, you might be concerned that you are being judged as immoral, or that they are on a crusade to stop people eating meat, or otherwise react to an attack on your lifestyle, ethics, and self-image.
But maybe (in my case) I just have a bit of a pre-occupation with acknowledging unpleasant aspects of reality, because I worry that people who rationalize treating living creatures that way might shade over to denial of facts and develop faulty intuition about other situations.
>being at a doctor/vet is not the only scenario we can test our understanding of them.
The reason I wrote "to a doctor" was just that I was reaching for a viscerally urgent or critical situation in my example, not because communicating one's mental state is uniquely relevant in medical situations. It could just as well be "saying goodbye to a loved one".
One conception of empathy is feeling what someone (or some creature) is feeling, that is, accurately modeling what they feel.
On the other hand, in reality, all anyone can know for sure is if they get positive reinforcement for using their model of others' feelings.
In any situation of unequal power and/or imperfect communication, there is a danger that the person with power gets positive reinforcement that is detached from reality, without the possibility of correction.
I would guess that the sounds animals make are highly context-dependent in a multimodal fashion. We will likely be able to detect some correlations, but decoding larger vocabulary seems unlikely.
This is potentially huge. LLMs have shown how they can encompass patterns unknown to its creators and effectively use it. If for some reason, we can actually start seeing something resembling higher thought patterns in animals, that can up end society.
But still, we already had lots of evidence how some animals like cetacean and primate are potentially sentient. Many people just don't want to admit it and we can't convince them that human isn't anything special. In the end this may just be another piece of proof on a pile that get ignored.
Not OP, but same here. I feel I am a sentient person only when fully concentrated. But when relaxed, it's stochastic autopilot, both in speech and actions
I believe I've seen an article touching this topic here, long before GPT. Will link if I find it
Sentience is usually defined as the ability to perceive/feel things.
One way to see this is that sentience and language processing are just two aspects available to us in consciousness.
We are also not identical to our thoughts or feelings, but most people never pause to contemplate this.
I suspect the autopilot you describe is really closer to our default state, but it’s easier to notice when in a calm state and the “me-ness” of actions/thoughts doesn’t feel so strong.
What's really interesting is that most of us feel we're our "best selves" when we reach a state of flow. We're in the zone. We're totally non-self-conscious.
The only description I've ever seen of consciousness that makes any sense is that it's a kind of condition monitoring system for our minds, a cross-check evolved to catch some of the cognitive mistakes that the main machinery of our minds tend to make from time to time. And because our whole brain is linked into this system, including itself, we get that infinite regress of omphaloskepsis that we call "consciousness."
Personally, I feel I'm at my most "conscious" when I'm in a flow state. I'm laser focused on one thing, but I'm actively thinking about that thing very hard!
I don't do a lot of metacognition (thinking about my thinking) while I'm in a flow state, which maybe was your point. But I can think about my prior flow state thinking after the fact, and I'm aware of how much my mind was working, and what that felt like.
Hows this for a definition. Its not a definition of consciousness per se, but its a definition of the specific consciousness "you" in the general case: you are whatever you get in return when you ask yourself who you are. Consciousness thus defined exists entirely within the communicative medium.
In other words, consciousness is an emergent phenomena that happens in a system of sending messages when eventually an agent starts sending messages to itself. "you" are the voices in your head not attributed to anyone else.
What you're describing is a lack of volition ("free will"), not sentience. Even on autopilot, you still perceive things, meaning sensations and things constantly appear in your mindscape, right? That is sentience.
I don't think it's meaningful to say that something capable of stopping belief in it's own sentience does not possess sentience, at least not without some creature linguistic torture of the definition of sentience.
I do, however, appreciate your point and agree with the spirit of your post, if not the exact content.
I definitely feel like I am two 'selves' - one of which is capable of rational thought, foresight, rational modeling of the world around me, etc. That self is probably running things 25% of the time. The other self is emotional, understands the world intuitively for all of the benefits and drawbacks that carries, and seeks short term satisfaction of needs above all else.
I don't mean this in a hand-wavey new age holistic way, I mean it in a very concrete sense. I can detect that change in myself when I switch from the 'monkey pilot' to the 'human pilot'. Mindfulness and concentration is required to bring the human back. I think I have below average executive functioning skills, and I spend a lot of my 'human pilot' time thinking about how I can stay in this mode longer but it's not trivial to make that happen.
I think my 'human pilot' is definitely sentient. My 'monkey pilot' might not be depending on the definition.
I applaud you for your honesty, introspection, and open mindedness.
If anything, LLMs have exposed our inconsistency in how we ground sentience, consciousness, and subjective experience. At times we thought we were talking about the same things, but we've clearly have been tossing terms about.
LLMs have, at least/last, given us the opportunity to reexamine important social ontologies. Better late than never.
We still have surprisingly widespread belief in outdated ideas like young earth creationism or a literally flat Earth. Evolution is rejected by broad swathes of the American population despite even the Catholic church having incorporated it into its mythology. I think if anything the backlash is a constant, true believers have no problem already living in a parallel reality that denies our own.
Why would we fight wars over whether specific animals are sapient? We have no trouble killing, imprisoning and torturing humans. Sapience is a philosophical distinction, not a practical one.
Currently we tolerate the enslavement of animals but that becomes harder and harder to the point that some people might want to fight others on their behalf.
That's not a hypothetical. The Animal Liberation Front exists. But that's a small group of people that mostly attacks labs and farms. That's a very different scale and mode than a literal war.
Currently we tolerate the enslavement of humans but contrary to popular narratives about the US Civil War, we haven't fought any wars specifically to end slavery of other humans. We have had successful "slave rebellions" (e.g. Haiti, which continues to pay the debt imposed by their former slave masters for "damages and economic losses" to this day) but anti-slavery sentiments among those not in the demographic directly suffering from slavery never went quite that far. The anti-colonialist coup in Portugal was fueled more by the military's resentment over the forever-war required to suppress the colonies than any sympathy for their cause of liberation. The US Civil War was a reaction to the attempted secession of its then-member states rather than specifically their stance on slavery.
It's plausible that we'd see acts we'd consider terrorism in the name of animal liberation (arguably some of the ALF's past actions fit into this category) much like we have seen with other liberation movements. But as this is a struggle entirely led by those not themselves in the group of the oppressed, the dynamics are different from most civil rights struggles. Arguably even the abolition of formal slavery in most countries had less to do with zealous support from non-slaves and more with economic factors making slavery less appealing. And even then the countries only got away with slavery in their own mainland while still happily continuing to benefit from overseas slavery, much like we now mostly hide animal suffering in farms, closed trucks and meat processing factories rather than back alleys and town squares.
Actually it is spot on and very practical. All of those examples you give are typically preceded by a strong 'dehumanization' phase, which allows us to overcome the inhibitions that we have ingrained against doing those things to humans.
Sure, but dehumanization is explicitly used to other specific out-groups of humans. Extending our understanding of sapience to other animals than humans would do the opposite of dehumanization. I don't think we'll see a future pan-sapientist Zimbabwe invade Botswana to liberate their zebras or anything like that. Empathy is generally easier as a tool for peace than war.
"Sentient" is more about senses. There seems to be a bit of disagreement and overlap, and the way they throw the murky "conscious" into the definitions doesn't help.
It's easier to eat a creature that you don't think of as "sentient" or "sapient" (or "cute")… Although, if it's delicious enough, many humans will overlook even those and sometimes will even pay exorbitant sums of money for the privilege of eating something "rare".
To be fair the Hebrew version use the word "remesh" which is not clearly translated to "everything that moves", but more to "invertebrates" or "insects" (I do not know what the author of Genesis actually meant, but the point is that it is not a clear translation).
Additionally, in Genesis 1:24-26, remesh is listed among other types of animals such as beasts of the land and birds of the sky, so it is pretty clear that it is not meant as all animals. In these phrases remesh appears in the English translation as "creeping thing".
Not sure that Gen 1:24-26 is listing 'remesh' as it's own category of life or just being poetic. I'm not a Hebrew scholar though, just using interlinear.
Quote from the CIO: "Even before the release of popular generative AI tools like Bard, large language models were helping address highly complex research questions."
Was this written in a parallel universe where OpenAI never released an LLM?
Eyyy it's my buddy Aza Raskin :) Met him in 2018 on my first visit to the US, very cool guy. I remember being quite skeptical about his project but these days ML seems more than capable of meeting the challenge.
Sometimes I wish I was in the Americas because it is the center of technological development on this planet but I also like free healthcare and laid back life in Australia, which can feel stagnating at times.
Same as it already handles "speak like a pirate" and "in the style of Shakespeare" and "Python" and "Hungarian". From the perspective of the AI these are all just "dialects and accents".
As long as it will have enough data containing the different accents and dialects it will be able to handle it no problem.
The issue is that LLMs' handling of "speak like a pirate" is evaluated by humans with a preconceived idea of what coherently expressed pirate-style responses should look like (and their outputs significantly improved by human feedback loops). We also have linters, compilers and interpreters to evaluate correctness of code and reject stuff that's borrowed syntax from the wrong language.
I can't see any obstacle to an LLM ingesting a database of squawks and emitting squawks which may or may not be in relevant patterns consistent with how a particular flock of birds communicate, but I can't see the birds advising us on whether it's using them idiomatically or not.
We could use the interactions to understand more about them and how they communicate. If we can make "ChatGPT for elephants" (i.e. something that could respond to them with a statistically probable response), we can observe how different communications affect their behaviour much more easily because we could ensure one side of the conversation is always 'talking'. Research like this has already led to us being able to identify various language-like articles from different animals, normally alarm calls because it's very easy to see the response to them.
There is also a phenomenon in LLM research where a comparatively tiny amount of a language confers unexpectedly high fluency to a model which is otherwise intelligent in its main language and able to transfer that knowledge over. For example, an LLM needs to be trained on a lot of text to become intelligent in the ways modern LLMs are, which means English text because there's so much of it. But if you then train that LLM on a comparatively tiny amount of another language, like Catalan, it doesn't behave like a model that was trained on that tiny sample of Catalan alone, even when it's only speaking in Catalan. Instead it is nearly as intelligent as it is in English, just in a different language. What that means is that we don't necessarily have an impossible task in front of us in order to get enough human-translatable "language" from any given animal. We may only need to get a surprisingly small amount that we understand for an LLM to be able to generalise and come closer to 'fluency' in that language, which is going to expand the amount of data we have access to by a lot. It's an interesting area of research and I hope it gets expanded on
There's no reason to think we couldn't use a chat-GPT for [insert animal] to communicate with them. The idea is that cGPT would be translating for us and vice versa. But that doesn't mean we understanding what is being conveyed exactly.
We can begin to record what we need. we likely won't need that much because language competence bleeds over as long as it's being trained on a wealth of other languages as well.
I feel this might need some new form of 3D input to get it right. Our grasp of speech made us lazy: The core of what we want to communicate can be captured in sound and therefore words (and hence you can read and understand this). 'Communicating' with my dog is a multi-cue affair, involving pointed looks, head tilts, specific wags and a lot of emoting. I doubt you could consistently pick all that up from (2D) video alone.
I remember reading a while back a study (or theory, or SomeJunkLikeThat™) where dolphins (and possibly whales?) may very well communicate with other dolphins directly in 3D via their sonar capabilities, so that right there could be yet another need for 3D input (and output) in a whole different way than might be expected, presuming they hope to use this idea with dolphins and other sonar capable sea mammals. And then you have bees that communicate with each other through complicated "dances". Fun stuff…
Seems like a pretty big problem that you don't know when any of your data is valid. What if every single whale or cat speaks a different language? It's not like animals have English class.
They don't necessarily have shared "language". Cat meows are for one person (their owner) while they use body language and other sounds to communicate with each other.
this can be more terrible. If we don't let human baby contact to another human, they will lose ability of language. how many puppy take from their mother at first day after birth?
The post goes into this in some detail. In human languages, the embeddings for specific concepts seem to follow very similar geometric relationships no matter what language. If that holds across species, then you could use geometric similarity to map animal embeddings to human concepts.
Also, since chatbots just output "meaningful" strings of tokens based on a string of input tokens, you can build a chatbot that can "talk" to animals without us necessarily being able to understand it. But sure how useful that would be, but interesting nonetheless.
ML researchers would get a lot of interesting ideas from Ed Yong's book: "An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us"
It goes through the extraordinarily diverse sensory systems of all animals. In the push for at-the-edge, exteme-low-latency, low-resource "intelligent" agents, mimicking some of these system may lead to cool systems.
As usual with these type of threads, for those interested in the subject of animal intelligence, I suggest reading "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" by Frans de Waal.
We should approach animal intelligence and communication with humility.
A lot of it is based on smell, body language, and signals we don't pay attention to. I don't think any animal has been shown to tell stories, but obviously they share information in other ways. Only a handful of individuals have demonstrated some kind of ability to understand a story (macaws and koko the gorilla).
For anybody interested in animal intelligence, that's the focus of my newsletter.
That's a great place to look for story-telling, I just don't think it's been shown yet (I would love to be wrong about that). If you could decode in their language something about characters taking actions, time and place, past and future, that would be pretty incredible.
Go to another country where you don’t speak the language and try to communicate. You’ll do it with gestures, body language, facial expressions, grunts, tones - not words. I’m guessing that’s a lot closer to how animals communicate than spoken language.
Animals do tell stories. Let's take a dog for example:
The dog is out in the wild, away from it's pack. Ever see your dog smell something, or find something it finds interesting? Often, they will rub on it, or roll around in it. They do that so they have a record they can take with them.
When said dog returns to their pack, their body holds these records. Their movements communicate their mood and the entire thing is a tale of the day.
Another example I had happen was my cat.
I would come home and the cat would want to get in the car. Then, if I got up to move, she would put a paw out, like "hold on a moment" and then she would inspect me everywhere, sniffing, looking at me, etc... The cat wanted my story! Where I went, was it the same strange animals and people, or different, when I last ate, and all sorts of stuff.
In the evenings, that same cat would come to me, want to cuddle up in the evening and would be near my face, so I tried the same thing and guess what? It's a damn solid story! I now can smell my cat, watch it's movements and get a good sense of it's activity for the day.
Back to the dogs. Having returned to the pack, the dog could tell the story of animals it encountered, possible food sources, enemies and other things by the scents it carried home to share with the others.
In my view, our biggest struggle understanding animals comes down to both how much they are like us, just in simpler form, and how we fail to see that due to our higher complexity taking us away from basics that make more sense than we know. And with some animals, they are just very different from us, whales, dolphins, octopus and the like.
All that said, I agree with you! Humility and an open mind are key to understanding animals better. Frankly, the same tools help us understand one another better.
Yes, there's something interesting going on there with smells and body language. It's a matter of how flexible you want to be with the word "story". In a strict sense, there needs to be who, what, when, where, why, and how. I think some of those elements are there for other animals, but maybe not all of them, and maybe not an ability to ask clarifying questions.
Given some time observing, smelling, listening, one can get a pretty great sense of the day!
One other thing I should say is animals are like us, just simpler. Their every move communicates! They lack the layers of abstraction needed to make it otherwise.
I can gather a lot from a few minutes spent close, feeling, watching, smelling, watching the cat move and vocalize.
I find the whole thing remarkable! And it was the cat who educated me!
If I pull up in the car and do not roll my window down, I get the look. If I do, then she is happy to jump in and exchange events of the day, essentially adding me to her story.
The question sometimes happens. Usually, it is that paw on my chest when I get up to leave. Looks for all the world like, "hold on, I haven't got it all yet, or "this is new, WTF?
Don't get me wrong. Not all animals are that high functioning. We have a couple and in my experience the more we try to interact and the less inhibited we are about all the ways, rubbing, smelling, etc... the more a higher functioning animal will respond with their own efforts.
I only wish I had this insight earlier in life! My animal interactions are far more rich than they were before.
Yes, let us flex these things a little and appreciate these beings here with us.
Of course not, because in any case, a training set is needed, and it will not be built by the animals themselves, but by people who ask questions like: "Can generative AI lead us to understanding animals?".
"
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
"
Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadHas anything similar been done for human vocalizations (aka spoken language)? Text is obviously so much more efficient, and so much more abundant, so even for human speech this sounds like a challenge.
https://youtu.be/aYjlgS-s-Rs
I had the same reaction to the idea of legal personhood for natural features of the landscape.
Am I too jaded?
Not at all. You can construct tests to see if the animal's behaviour is consistent with what the network say they are "saying". You can go and check if what information you receive through it is consistent with the observed reality.
You can test that behavioural differences observed between individuals show up in the translation. For example a dog who you know is hurt, or old is probably less chipper than one who just chased a squirrel. Observers of animals often notice that some individuals are more timid while others are more curious/adventurous. One would expect that their vocalisation also reflects of this difference in personalities.
It's not like we just slap a network together and we call it done. If the translator says Lassie is saying that Timmy has fallen down the well you might as well check the well, but if Timmy is not there then this might be a translator failure.
> Am I too jaded?
Yes.
But I don't see what that has to do with my comment. Are you explicitly a radical behaviorist, or do you think animals have internal experience?
Suppose that instead of a dog, we were talking about a human with dementia in a nursing home. Do you think that not being able to witness your own condition to a doctor would put you at a disadvantage?
In the absence of a feedback mechanism, the virtue and the intelligence of people who are in control of a system do not count for much.
You will have to use smaller words with me, or explain your vocabulary, if we are to have a discussion.
> But I don't see what that has to do with my comment
You said these things in your original comment: "If we decide that it does" (here I presumed "does" mean AI let us understanding animals) "then conveniently there's no way for the animals to dispute it."
That is what I'm disagreeing with. There are many ways animals can dispute us understanding them.
Imagine a scenario that we have a gadget which is supposedly translating horse body language and vocalisations to human language. You step up to a big black mare and use the gizmo. It tells you that the horse wants scratches behind its ear. You reach out, but oh horror it was a complete mistranslation. The horse was in distress by you approaching and is completely spoked by you reaching for their ear. It reacts, bites your hand, kicks you and drags you through the mud. That is how you realise that the gizmo's understanding of horse communication is less than perfect. That is the feedback mechanism.
You said there is no way, and here is one way they can do it.
> Suppose that instead of a dog, we were talking about a human with dementia in a nursing home. Do you think that not being able to witness your own condition to a doctor would put you at a disadvantage?
Sure. But animals are not dementia patients and being at a doctor/vet is not the only scenario we can test our understanding of them.
Sorry, I was alluding to B.F. Skinner, but I used the term "radical behaviorist" because I didn't want to get drawn into a discussion of him in particular.
I think it's a known term, although I'm not sure whether anybody self-identifies as such or if it's more of a caricature by opponents.
I threw it out there, thinking if you did recognize it, and identified yourself as one or as not one, I would learn more about how it is used.
>But animals are not dementia patients and being at a doctor/vet is not the only scenario we can test our understanding of them.
"...is the best we can do" is what I see you arguing, and I'm neither affirming nor denying it. It's not relevant to my interests or the intent of my commenting, is all.
I seem to recall a (possibly recurring) news item about the poultry industry wherein it explains that non-egg laying chicks are being disposed of in huge shredders, alive. I am certain an industry expert would say that is the best alternative. What does anyone do all day but try to figure out the best way to do things at work?
If someone suggests that being shredded might be unpleasant, and you coincidentally work in the industry, you might be concerned that you are being judged as immoral, or that they are on a crusade to stop people eating meat, or otherwise react to an attack on your lifestyle, ethics, and self-image.
But maybe (in my case) I just have a bit of a pre-occupation with acknowledging unpleasant aspects of reality, because I worry that people who rationalize treating living creatures that way might shade over to denial of facts and develop faulty intuition about other situations.
>being at a doctor/vet is not the only scenario we can test our understanding of them.
The reason I wrote "to a doctor" was just that I was reaching for a viscerally urgent or critical situation in my example, not because communicating one's mental state is uniquely relevant in medical situations. It could just as well be "saying goodbye to a loved one".
One conception of empathy is feeling what someone (or some creature) is feeling, that is, accurately modeling what they feel.
On the other hand, in reality, all anyone can know for sure is if they get positive reinforcement for using their model of others' feelings.
In any situation of unequal power and/or imperfect communication, there is a danger that the person with power gets positive reinforcement that is detached from reality, without the possibility of correction.
But still, we already had lots of evidence how some animals like cetacean and primate are potentially sentient. Many people just don't want to admit it and we can't convince them that human isn't anything special. In the end this may just be another piece of proof on a pile that get ignored.
I believe I've seen an article touching this topic here, long before GPT. Will link if I find it
One way to see this is that sentience and language processing are just two aspects available to us in consciousness.
We are also not identical to our thoughts or feelings, but most people never pause to contemplate this.
I suspect the autopilot you describe is really closer to our default state, but it’s easier to notice when in a calm state and the “me-ness” of actions/thoughts doesn’t feel so strong.
The only description I've ever seen of consciousness that makes any sense is that it's a kind of condition monitoring system for our minds, a cross-check evolved to catch some of the cognitive mistakes that the main machinery of our minds tend to make from time to time. And because our whole brain is linked into this system, including itself, we get that infinite regress of omphaloskepsis that we call "consciousness."
I don't do a lot of metacognition (thinking about my thinking) while I'm in a flow state, which maybe was your point. But I can think about my prior flow state thinking after the fact, and I'm aware of how much my mind was working, and what that felt like.
In other words, consciousness is an emergent phenomena that happens in a system of sending messages when eventually an agent starts sending messages to itself. "you" are the voices in your head not attributed to anyone else.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4AHXDwcGab5PhKhHT/humans-who...
I do, however, appreciate your point and agree with the spirit of your post, if not the exact content.
I definitely feel like I am two 'selves' - one of which is capable of rational thought, foresight, rational modeling of the world around me, etc. That self is probably running things 25% of the time. The other self is emotional, understands the world intuitively for all of the benefits and drawbacks that carries, and seeks short term satisfaction of needs above all else.
I don't mean this in a hand-wavey new age holistic way, I mean it in a very concrete sense. I can detect that change in myself when I switch from the 'monkey pilot' to the 'human pilot'. Mindfulness and concentration is required to bring the human back. I think I have below average executive functioning skills, and I spend a lot of my 'human pilot' time thinking about how I can stay in this mode longer but it's not trivial to make that happen.
I think my 'human pilot' is definitely sentient. My 'monkey pilot' might not be depending on the definition.
If anything, LLMs have exposed our inconsistency in how we ground sentience, consciousness, and subjective experience. At times we thought we were talking about the same things, but we've clearly have been tossing terms about.
LLMs have, at least/last, given us the opportunity to reexamine important social ontologies. Better late than never.
Currently we tolerate the enslavement of humans but contrary to popular narratives about the US Civil War, we haven't fought any wars specifically to end slavery of other humans. We have had successful "slave rebellions" (e.g. Haiti, which continues to pay the debt imposed by their former slave masters for "damages and economic losses" to this day) but anti-slavery sentiments among those not in the demographic directly suffering from slavery never went quite that far. The anti-colonialist coup in Portugal was fueled more by the military's resentment over the forever-war required to suppress the colonies than any sympathy for their cause of liberation. The US Civil War was a reaction to the attempted secession of its then-member states rather than specifically their stance on slavery.
It's plausible that we'd see acts we'd consider terrorism in the name of animal liberation (arguably some of the ALF's past actions fit into this category) much like we have seen with other liberation movements. But as this is a struggle entirely led by those not themselves in the group of the oppressed, the dynamics are different from most civil rights struggles. Arguably even the abolition of formal slavery in most countries had less to do with zealous support from non-slaves and more with economic factors making slavery less appealing. And even then the countries only got away with slavery in their own mainland while still happily continuing to benefit from overseas slavery, much like we now mostly hide animal suffering in farms, closed trucks and meat processing factories rather than back alleys and town squares.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sentient:
Adjective
sentient (comparative more sentient, superlative most sentient)
1. Experiencing sensation, thought, or feeling.
2. Able to consciously perceive through the use of sense faculties.
3. (loosely, chiefly science fiction) Possessing human-like awareness and intelligence. Synonyms: sapient; see also Thesaurus:self-aware
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sapient:
Adjective
sapient (comparative more sapient, superlative most sapient)
1. Attempting to appear wise or discerning.
2. (dated) Possessing wisdom and discernment; wise, learned.
3. (chiefly science fiction) Of a species or life-form, possessing intelligence or self-awareness. Synonyms: sentient; see also Thesaurus:self-aware
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sentient:
adjective
1. having the power of perception by the senses; conscious.
2. characterized by sensation and consciousness.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sapient:
adjective
1. having or showing great wisdom or sound judgment.
2. having or showing self-awareness
Cant we then just wait for animals to develop an ai that translates to our languages?
Genesis 9:3 "Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything."
Additionally, in Genesis 1:24-26, remesh is listed among other types of animals such as beasts of the land and birds of the sky, so it is pretty clear that it is not meant as all animals. In these phrases remesh appears in the English translation as "creeping thing".
https://biblehub.com/hebrew/remes_7431.htm
Was this written in a parallel universe where OpenAI never released an LLM?
Same as it already handles "speak like a pirate" and "in the style of Shakespeare" and "Python" and "Hungarian". From the perspective of the AI these are all just "dialects and accents".
As long as it will have enough data containing the different accents and dialects it will be able to handle it no problem.
I can't see any obstacle to an LLM ingesting a database of squawks and emitting squawks which may or may not be in relevant patterns consistent with how a particular flock of birds communicate, but I can't see the birds advising us on whether it's using them idiomatically or not.
Wouldn't this be totally pointless? What's the use of a ChatGPT for elephants if it doesn't allow us to communicate with them?
There is also a phenomenon in LLM research where a comparatively tiny amount of a language confers unexpectedly high fluency to a model which is otherwise intelligent in its main language and able to transfer that knowledge over. For example, an LLM needs to be trained on a lot of text to become intelligent in the ways modern LLMs are, which means English text because there's so much of it. But if you then train that LLM on a comparatively tiny amount of another language, like Catalan, it doesn't behave like a model that was trained on that tiny sample of Catalan alone, even when it's only speaking in Catalan. Instead it is nearly as intelligent as it is in English, just in a different language. What that means is that we don't necessarily have an impossible task in front of us in order to get enough human-translatable "language" from any given animal. We may only need to get a surprisingly small amount that we understand for an LLM to be able to generalise and come closer to 'fluency' in that language, which is going to expand the amount of data we have access to by a lot. It's an interesting area of research and I hope it gets expanded on
There could of course be regional languages or dialects in more intelligent social animals just like humans.
No, but they have parents. I am sure they have taught languages. Just ask any cat lady who will swear their cats understand them.
I'd be more concerned that different regions have different languages and we'd need to control for that.
Also, since chatbots just output "meaningful" strings of tokens based on a string of input tokens, you can build a chatbot that can "talk" to animals without us necessarily being able to understand it. But sure how useful that would be, but interesting nonetheless.
It goes through the extraordinarily diverse sensory systems of all animals. In the push for at-the-edge, exteme-low-latency, low-resource "intelligent" agents, mimicking some of these system may lead to cool systems.
A lot of it is based on smell, body language, and signals we don't pay attention to. I don't think any animal has been shown to tell stories, but obviously they share information in other ways. Only a handful of individuals have demonstrated some kind of ability to understand a story (macaws and koko the gorilla).
For anybody interested in animal intelligence, that's the focus of my newsletter.
what's going on there?
https://www.amazon.com/Are-Smart-Enough-Know-Animals/dp/0393...
The dog is out in the wild, away from it's pack. Ever see your dog smell something, or find something it finds interesting? Often, they will rub on it, or roll around in it. They do that so they have a record they can take with them.
When said dog returns to their pack, their body holds these records. Their movements communicate their mood and the entire thing is a tale of the day.
Another example I had happen was my cat.
I would come home and the cat would want to get in the car. Then, if I got up to move, she would put a paw out, like "hold on a moment" and then she would inspect me everywhere, sniffing, looking at me, etc... The cat wanted my story! Where I went, was it the same strange animals and people, or different, when I last ate, and all sorts of stuff.
In the evenings, that same cat would come to me, want to cuddle up in the evening and would be near my face, so I tried the same thing and guess what? It's a damn solid story! I now can smell my cat, watch it's movements and get a good sense of it's activity for the day.
Back to the dogs. Having returned to the pack, the dog could tell the story of animals it encountered, possible food sources, enemies and other things by the scents it carried home to share with the others.
In my view, our biggest struggle understanding animals comes down to both how much they are like us, just in simpler form, and how we fail to see that due to our higher complexity taking us away from basics that make more sense than we know. And with some animals, they are just very different from us, whales, dolphins, octopus and the like.
All that said, I agree with you! Humility and an open mind are key to understanding animals better. Frankly, the same tools help us understand one another better.
Having discovered this dynamic through careful observation of my animals, story seems appropriate. A session with the cat yields:
Who: Me
What: Trip away from pack
When: Today, more days maybe
Where: Various places, work, car, outside places
Why: Who knows what the cat thinks. She does differentiate a trip away from a food run
How: in that moving thing
And me with the cat:
Who: Cat
What: romp in flower beds or play with squirrels (they leave a different scent and the moss on the trees helps) Fight with that other cat.
When: recently
Where: grassy yard, trees, across the street
Why: Cat bored playful finds squirrels. Enemy cat entered our territory, etc...
How: On foot, maybe through fence.
Given some time observing, smelling, listening, one can get a pretty great sense of the day!
One other thing I should say is animals are like us, just simpler. Their every move communicates! They lack the layers of abstraction needed to make it otherwise.
I can gather a lot from a few minutes spent close, feeling, watching, smelling, watching the cat move and vocalize.
I find the whole thing remarkable! And it was the cat who educated me!
If I pull up in the car and do not roll my window down, I get the look. If I do, then she is happy to jump in and exchange events of the day, essentially adding me to her story.
The question sometimes happens. Usually, it is that paw on my chest when I get up to leave. Looks for all the world like, "hold on, I haven't got it all yet, or "this is new, WTF?
Don't get me wrong. Not all animals are that high functioning. We have a couple and in my experience the more we try to interact and the less inhibited we are about all the ways, rubbing, smelling, etc... the more a higher functioning animal will respond with their own efforts.
I only wish I had this insight earlier in life! My animal interactions are far more rich than they were before.
Yes, let us flex these things a little and appreciate these beings here with us.
" We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. "
Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod