41 Comments

1. Ron Hardin:

Actually lions do talk and we do understand them. Ask a good trainer.

Vicki Hearne has a chapter on Wittgenstein’s Lion in Animal Happiness.

I don’t know where the cover gloss “moving” wound up on her books after she died. Her critics don’t understand her any more than they do lions.

She’s pretty much take-no-prisoners philsophically.

Jun 28, 2009 - 8:17 am 2. wretchard:

I wonder if Wittgenstein could ever have envisioned lions talking about Taco Bell Steak Grilled Taquitos?

Jun 28, 2009 - 8:21 am 3. Alexis:

I have sometimes imagined what would happen if some technologically advanced race of aliens (less related to us than bread mold) descended upon humanity with the purpose of saving our eternal souls by bringing us the Good News of a religion from some far off galaxy…

Then imagine if rival cultures from the same race of aliens descended upon humanity bringing rival versions of their salvation religion, with each sect branding all the others heretical. As a human, figuring out which alien salvation religion would happen to be the true faith may be difficult.

Jun 28, 2009 - 9:41 am 4. PA Cat:

intelligences that are dissimilar to ours.

Actually, cat intelligences may not be as dissimilar as some others. The National Cancer Institute has a Cat Genome Project as part of its Laboratory of Genomic Diversity. “Our research focuses on development of the cat as an animal model for human hereditary disease, infectious disease, genome evolution, comparative research initiatives within the family Felidae, and forensic potential.”

http://home.ncifcrf.gov/ccr/lgd/comparative_genome/catgenome/index_n.asp

Part of the Cat Genome Project is the Genome Annotation Resource Fields, aka GARField (complete with photo of a cat contemplating a diagram of its genome):

http://lgd.abcc.ncifcrf.gov/

As for Wretchard’s comment that cat intelligence does quite well, especially in the area of solving ‘puzzle boxes’, experiments in which they are placed in an enclosure but from which they can escape by manipulating objects in a defined sequence, generations of cat owners have cursed Edward Thorndike (1874-1949), the inventor of that cat puzzle box experiment and its associated term “learning curve.” Ask any human owned by a cat how quickly the little fiends can figure out how to escape from a cat carrier when it’s time to visit the vet.

Jun 28, 2009 - 10:37 am 5. bogie wheel:

Now I wonder: what were the two cats saying?

Perhaps the easier question would be, what were they NOT saying?

If there is any correspondence at all between vocalization and (near) simultaneous behavior, then we can probably deduce that the “two cats talking” were not exchanging hostile or threatening words, based on body language, and the act of grooming at the end of the video. Chirps, which you hear a lot of in the vid, are a sort of combination of meow and purr. While a purr is not a guaranteed friendly communication 100% of the time, it is thus more often than not.

So we are probably in the right ballpark if we eliminate negative connotations for the cat talk. Beyond that … well, it’s still very much cat mystery.

BTW, immediately after first reading this post, I went and played vid, full screen, for the, ahhhh, non-brightest of my three cats (part tabby, part Somali). He was intensely interested (but only in the curious sense – no hissing or pawing) for about 3 views and then the video lost its magic for him.

I did not even bother screening the video for the smarty-pants cat. This guy is on the quick-Rubik’s-cube-solver level of cats. Figuring out how to open drawers, cabinets and, yes, even the freezer in search of food is a mere placeholder for his real thrill — live, 3D scurring prey. Somehow a 2D video of other cats just wouldn’t compete.

Jun 28, 2009 - 10:52 am 6. Mario Sanchez:

The first human downfall in this train of thought is trying to translate the communication into teh rough equivalent of words that can be recorded like human words. The idea that spoken language and written language can be equivalent is a distinctly human one, and not very accurate. A male may speak the written words “that is a nice dress” to a female, and yet may express at least 4-5 different thoughts based on the tone and body language. Similarly, some films can be watched on mute – or in a different language – without losing any of the critical information about the story.

Similarly, one of the gratest pleasures o fliving with a dog has been to learn the “language” of a different species, the subtle communication mechanisms they use – eye contact, eye contact avoidance, whale-eye look, squinting, blinking, ears alert, ears relaxed, ears pulled back, mouth closed & relaxed, mouth tightly closed & tense, mouth open & tense, forced rapid panting, rythmic panting, posture when sitting or lying or standing or walking or running, the direction or intensity in which she leans. All those elements of body language carry unbelievably rich meaning that may not be extremely useful to humans living in modern cities, but extremenly useful to predatory social animals.

Jun 28, 2009 - 10:53 am 7. PA Cat:

I suspect my previous comment is awaiting moderation because Wretchard’s filter thinks a cat wrote it.

#5 bogie wheel– I showed the video to my oldest (14 in September) cat, a no-nonsense Margaret Thatcher type of boss kitty. Her reaction: the cats in the vid must be French, the way they chatter.

My other two cats are far more fascinated by baseball (live or videos) than by watching other cats on the screen. Go figure. Maybe there is something about a small group of humans running around a green area resembling the outdoors that brings out their hunting instinct.

Jun 28, 2009 - 11:09 am 8. bogie wheel:

Re: alien communication -

It’s funny that you posted this thread in that I just yesterday re-watched (for 2nd time since it originally came out) the movie “The Iron Giant,” based on the children’s story by Ted Hughes (minus certain elements like the outer-space dragon). The movie suffers not just from idiotarian politics, but from idiotarian sci-fi concepts as well.

The Giant is supposed to be child-like in his intelligence. Ex-squeeze me, but why would a being capable of interstellar travel (or one tasked with interstellar travel by others) be that primitive, except perhaps to flatter the vanity of the human audience?

The Giant is shown using human-language words, in proper grammatical fashion, that he has not heard before. How is this possible, esp. given his child-like intelligence?

The filmmakers were essentially going for a sci-fi version of the sympathetic interpretation of Frankenstein’s monster. I get that. And they wanted to capture the gee-wowee-whiz excitement a young boy would feel if he discovered such a thing (my own giant robot!!!!!). I get that, too. But the execution was just oh-so-wrong on so many levels. Ugh. And I am not even, by any stretch of the Asimov imagination, what one could label a sci-fi fan; hence, I have pretty low standards when it comes to accepting forays into this genre. But basic logic would be nice.

Jun 28, 2009 - 11:14 am 9. Ernie G:

For those who were wondering what the cats were saying, there’s a translation video posted:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JynBEX_kg8&feature=fvw

Sample dialogue:

“You never listen.”
“Since when?”
“Since always…someone’s coming. Act like a cat.”
“Meow.”
“Purr.”

Jun 28, 2009 - 11:43 am 10. Mongoose:

My dog loves music.

When I put something on she likes she will go over a sit by one of the floor speakers,
and she is finicky about it–mostly Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy and Mozart.

When she was young, she would try to sing along. She still occasionally makes a throat sound that I take to be a hum of sorts.

When she was young when I was playing at home she would sit under the bench and attempt to sing.

Just sharing my happiness? Perhaps, but she is also known to do it when she stays over at other people’s houses.

Does she have some sort of sense of beauty? Could just be some vibration she finds soothing, but then is that not was music is at some level?

What does it mean if she does have a sense of beauty?

Jun 28, 2009 - 11:51 am 11. Mongoose:

Wretchard: Perhaps we should first concentrate on finding a way to communicate to Liberals first?

Jun 28, 2009 - 11:56 am 12. PA Cat:

11 Mongoose

I think at least some animals have a sense of beauty. My cats are music lovers, too, as long as it’s Bach or Pachelbel or something close to the Baroque. They also like Gregorian chant and Native American flute music– no attempts to hum along (that I can detect, anyway), but they lie on the floor and do what looks like cat yoga to the rhythm of the music. I don’t think it’s a bid for human attention, either– I’ve gone out of the room and come back a few minutes later to find them still listening to the music with their bodies.

Jonathan Edwards considered beauty to be God’s primary moral quality, even more so than justice. So why shouldn’t creatures other than humans have a sense of their Creator’s beauty (per Wretchard’s remarks about a Creator)?

Jun 28, 2009 - 12:05 pm 13. John Lynch:

Larry Niven wrote about this problem. His contention was that humans communicate with alien intelligence all the time. We have two sexes, huge numbers of animal species, and children and adults. We talk to intelligences very different from us all the time.

Now, what if an alien didn’t have that experience at all? Or the curiosity to understand other intelligence at all?

Jun 28, 2009 - 12:25 pm 14. bogie wheel:

Mario –
Just for kicks … what is a “whale-eye look”?

When you see only one side of the dog’s face (i.e., one eye), and that eye rolls at you?

Had many dogs as a kid, trying to remember the nuances of doggy behavior ….

Jun 28, 2009 - 12:39 pm 15. Talnik:

As a complete novice regarding this sort of thing, my observations have lead me to believe cats “spoke” with body language, using vocalizations as puctuation.

Jun 28, 2009 - 1:53 pm 16. Derek:

>what is a “whale-eye look”?

What my wife calls ‘crazy cow eyes’. Imagine a whale surfacing and looking you over with one eye, without moving his body much.

Usually a precursor to some mischief in our household.

Derek

Jun 28, 2009 - 2:29 pm 17. Marie Claude:

animals recognize better the sounds than an image on a screen, their sight isn’t so precise as ours for what we are able to discern ; it is said that their world is in black, grey and white shapes, sounds, vibrations, and almost odors, which they can analyse better than us.

They also can recognize the shapes of their fellow like

We have 3 Boston-terriers, my hubby is an agility competitor, the dogs are quite happy to meat their other fellows, and more if they are of the same race.

In these 2 videos, probably the cats were first attracted by the sound, then they perceive the other cats image, and wanted to rejoin them, may-be they like social cats compagny ; it’s like for the humans, some like exanges with the others, some are more misantropic.

Jun 28, 2009 - 2:42 pm 18. ambisinistral:

I would think the fact that they couldn’t smell the other cats would mean they didn’t really think they were interacting with other cats at all. They were playing a different game with what they saw.

Jun 28, 2009 - 3:07 pm 19. PA Cat:

17 Marie Claude

You are right that some cats like the company of other cats even though cats are not pack animals like dogs. Sissy Willis (who lives in the Boston area) has posted photos of her sweet Tiny on the front porch with a gentleman cat from the neighborhood named Earl Grey.

http://sisu.typepad.com/sisu/2009/06/for-thy-love-is-better-than-catnip.html#comments

Vive l’amour!

Jun 28, 2009 - 3:08 pm 20. Robohobo:

Mongoose @ 10: “Wretchard: Perhaps we should first concentrate on finding a way to communicate to Liberals first?”

You will have better luck with either cats or dogs. Maybe the odd chimp rather than Liberals.

Jun 28, 2009 - 3:17 pm 21. linda seebach:

Enough cats recognize other cats’ image on screen that the Infinite Cat Project has collected more than 1,600 of them in a sequence of pictures of cats watching pictures of cats . . . ( http://www.infinitecat.com )

I don’t think dogs do this, do they? But they do other things that cats apparently haven’t acquired the ability to do, despite both species having been domesticated for millennia.

Jun 28, 2009 - 3:31 pm 22. nelson:

There’s no 100% coincidence between language and communication. A lion’s roar, though no formal, articulated language in any way, communicates quite well what it means. On the other hand, it is arguable that we use language more often just to think silently than to communicate our thoughts.

According to Steven Pinker, the brain uses its own language (Mentalese he calls it) to think and then translates it in the conventional tongues (English, Portuguese, Tagalog)to verbalize it and make it communicable.

Now, complex creatures that we are, we would need language even if not to communicate, but only to formulate the empirical problems we are faced with in some degree of workable abstraction. There’s for us, however, since we are social beings, an evolutive advantage in being able to translate our mentalese inner monologue into English and/or other tongues.

But what about non-social higher animals (some mammals and birds) that have complex brains but are, for instance, lonely hunters? If the difference postulated by Pinker is valid, they could perfectly well have their own Mentalese without translating it into communicable tongues.

By the way it is quite likely that our species was already using mentalese for some time when, thanks to some random mutation, oral language became possible giving us, thus, the tool we needed to form more complex and dynamic societies.

Jun 28, 2009 - 3:47 pm 23. Mario Sanchez:

bogie wheel:
The “whale-eye” is when the head is facing one away, but the eyes are looking at you out of the extreme corner of her eye. Like she’s watching you carefully but ready to dart off any second. Could mean fear or uneasiness, but as Derek said maybe she’s just getting ready to do some mischievous disobeying of the pack leader.

Jun 28, 2009 - 4:25 pm 24. buckets:

“I can haz CHEEZBURGER?!?!”

Somebody had to say it…

Jun 28, 2009 - 4:49 pm 25. nelson:

Btw, my dog loves to hear me singing. Problem is: she’s the only mammal I know who does.

Jun 28, 2009 - 4:53 pm 26. Marie Claude:

Pat Cat, your cat are beautiful some kinda sort of “chartreux” (blue-grey fur) or mixed with persians’ ?

I am a bit aware of pet’s and or animals, and for long they were my only game co-players (or my brothers for fighting ). I always have been living among some, my father had a farm, kinda the common sense of the country side. My mother was kinda mother Theresa for the wild cats, and I remember passing whole afternoons to observe them and trying to domesticate the youngers.

Jun 28, 2009 - 6:54 pm 27. buddy larsen:

re cross-species chatting, don’t forget Chuck Jones’ cautionary tale!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGE8wVTvHF0

Jun 28, 2009 - 7:34 pm 28. Marie Claude:

Nelson, I have been living about 1 year an a half in UK, and after six months there, I was surprised to think in english for what you quoted “mentalese” so verbal languages as the pragmatical expressions that we use for our needs (be them sophisticated), and are only a conventional and a cultural tool, that impregnates our mental for communicating with our environment, and this is also why the social words don’t reflect our deep “being”, but a transposition of the image of it that we want to show ; al right, there are persons who can’t cheat, but these are mainly poetical ones, that are very sensible and hurted

But what about non-social higher animals (some mammals and birds) that have complex brains but are, for instance, lonely hunters? If the difference postulated by Pinker is valid, they could perfectly well have their own Mentalese without translating it into communicable tongues.

they have their inner world of images with whom they discuss

By the way it is quite likely that our species was already using mentalese for some time when, thanks to some random mutation, oral language became possible giving us, thus, the tool we needed to form more complex and dynamic societies.

umm, their mentalese expression is in our caverns. Settlements made our ancestry think about a religion,and communicate with words, otherwise how can you define something that should be a common rallyement, that you can’t see but feel, no drawings can’t, or each one can have his own interpretation, thus words were needed to defiene a common moral agenda,and thus that would become what we understand as a culture.

thinking about the surburbs, that are my topics discussions somewhere else, isn’t it obvious that these persons living in a peculiar environment reinvented their own codes, words languages, clothes, sounds…, wich we the “educateds” find “barbaric”. That means that the environment is determinating for the means of expression

Jun 28, 2009 - 7:41 pm 29. Marie Claude:

Buddy, the frogs are your mentalese obsession

Jun 28, 2009 - 7:50 pm 30. Fat Man:

We had cats. They never displayed any interest in television images. My theory was that if they could not smell it, and sense it moving (by hearing vision and whiskers). They didn’t think it was real.

Jun 28, 2009 - 8:07 pm 31. buddy larsen:

have been, MC, ever since the hormones and Bridgette Bardot hit me at the same time

Jun 28, 2009 - 8:11 pm 32. nelson:

Marie Claude,

I spent 3 years in France, but kept on thinking in my native languages. It probably changes from individual to individual.

What’s interesting about the oldest cave paintings we know is that they are not entirely abstract fantastic, geometric or something: they, in a way, depict real or, rather, plausible things.

Any articulated language, whether communicable or not, would have to be able to operate at a certain level of abstraction (for instance, the concept of cat, any or every cat in contradistinction to this cat, that cat or my cat) and to produce new meanings through endless recombination.

It works like this: we have the concept of “cat” (from having, for instance, seen this cat and then generalizing from it), the concept of “red” (from having seen blood) and the concept of “four” (from having counted some of our fingers); a real language must allow us to formulate something new, previously unseen, like “four red cats”.

As far as I know, cats cannot say or express this (an articulated sequence of numeral, adjective and noun), but can they think/imagine it?

Jun 28, 2009 - 8:32 pm 33. Marie Claude:

can they think ? umm, not like us, but they have sentiments like us !

I remember a black cat, called “Mitzou” he was my choice and favorite “play-boy ; when we had invitees he used to parade like a deainous macho in front of them. Also when we had the opportunities to take a few days or a week off, an employee of my hubby used to come to our home and feed him, he was a real tiger and jumped at him and scratch him when he entered into our home. Idem when I came back, he showed me that he was anger at me,in jumping at my back legs too. I had to pass some time with him to calm him. So this was his way, to show me that he loved me and that he didn’t appreciate that I left him alone.

Jun 28, 2009 - 8:54 pm 34. Marie Claude:

parade like a disdainous…

Jun 28, 2009 - 8:56 pm 35. Brooks:

Anyone who has been owned by a kitty knows that they understand we’re enormous, smelly and stupid kittens that need a lot of help.

Jun 28, 2009 - 8:59 pm 36. Marie Claude:

3 years in France and you couldn’t manage to think in french, umm I suppose you were to reactive in criticizing

Jun 28, 2009 - 9:08 pm 37. nelson:

“I suppose you were too reactive in criticizing”

well, surely it was somewhat annoying having to explain twice weekly to the same barman at the same bar for three long years that what I wanted was a glass of white wine, not a glass of white wind

the French, well, at least the Parisians never actually leave high school (the lycée) and tend to behave like older students who see it as their duty to correct the younger students’ mistakes, specially when it comes to matters of spelling

Jun 28, 2009 - 9:45 pm 38. presbypoet:

I am owned by a particularly intellegent Tonk. He has understood English from a young age. We learned that if we were taking him to the vet, we needed to spell words. If not, he would like a Ninja, vanish, until after the appointment. One of the reasons for naming him Ninja.

I realized just how smart he was when he started speaking recognizable English. He would stick his head around the corner of my office and say: “Hello”. The H was pronounced with an m sound, but it was clearly hello. This is not a one time thing. He also has “now” down very well. Used when he thinks it is time for food.

The most astonishing example of how much he knows was when he wanted food about an hour before it was time, and i told him I would feed him when my son called to be picked up at the train station. About an hour later, my son called. As I hung up the phone, behind me I heard, “Now?” from Ninja. True story.

Our other cat shows no signs of intelligence. But that may just that he hides it better.

When I was growing up, we had a parrot who used to yell “cat” when he saw one out the window, and the dog would rush to the window and start barking. We realized the parrot had a somewhat vicious sense of humor when he would sometimes yell cat even when there wasn’t one, just to watch the dog rush to the window. As far as we could tell, the dog never caught on.

Jun 28, 2009 - 11:10 pm 39. Marie Claude:

“the French, well, at least the Parisians never actually leave high school (the lycée) and tend to behave like older students who see it as their duty to correct the younger students’ mistakes, specially when it comes to matters of spelling”

Parisians are our culture lecturers too

Jun 29, 2009 - 5:57 am 40. LarryD:

This spin-flip transition of a hydrogen atom from electron state spin up to electron state spin down can specify a unit of length (wavelength, 21 cm) as well as a unit of time (frequency, 1420 MHz). Both units are used as measurements in the other symbols.” Wittgenstein’s aphorism suggests aliens would speak as we do because they “do” mathematics the same way.

Actually they were chosen because we expect aliens would “do” physics. Physics should be the same, regardless of how alien they are, because they live in the same universe and have had to deal with the same way things work.

Jun 29, 2009 - 10:00 am 41. weSwinger:

Mathematical symbols as a means of communication with alien (from other cosmos) species is at the center of Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, “Anathem”. Highly recommended, but be prepared for intellectual challenge.

The sequence of “The Sparrow” and “Children of God” by Mary Doria Russell are wonderful tales of the consequences of 1st encounters with new worlds and species. These books focus on the impact of evangelizing new worlds.

Jul 1, 2009 - 9:24 am

Sorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.