When is communication actually intelligent speech?

[Justin Swanton]

We had another thread that wandered into this turf and after a bit animal rights became an issue.

With all due respect to animals and without infringing on any rights (I have a pet cat who is very fond of me and I of her), it might help to define what exactly 'intelligence' is in the strict sense.

I propose this definition: intelligence is the ability to think about something that itself cannot be reduced to a pure sensory impression or memory.

So dogs have an array of barks that indicate a threat from the air or ground. These barks stir up a sensory memory/impression of a threat - they switch on a certain part of the dog's memory or instinctive programming, which in turn provokes an appropriate response. This is not intelligence in the strict sense of the word.

A human writes on a piece of paper: "All generalisations are false, including this statement". He is conveying concepts that cannot be reduced to a pure sensory memory/impression. In other words, he is conveying a collection of abstract ideas, and with them an implicit irony, itself also an abstraction. This is intelligence.

Demonstrate that an animal is capable of communicating and understanding abstract ideas like this and you have intelligence in animals in the strict sense of the word. But thus far I have yet to come across any example of it.

One final point: animals of course are capable of intelligent behaviour, sometimes very intelligent behaviour, like weaver birds building their intricate nests or beavers a dam or ants an anthill, but does that mean they are intelligent? Did a bunch of weaver birds gather around a stretch of flat, sandy ground and sketch with a twig their blueprint for an ideal nest? Did they try different variations before hitting on the best formula? No they didn't. They are programmed to build a nest in a certain way and in no other, and they are incapable of varying or improving their nest design according to circumstances or taste - which would be a sign of true intelligence.

 

[Mouse]

Should it be limited to vocal only? Humans have a huge range of visual communication methods, even if we often treat it as secondary and don't always formally teach/learn it like we do vocal. Indeed learning to read body language is often seen as a specialist skill in humans, whilst in many other species its quite clear that its as important as the vocal parts of language.

Yes and it's been proven that dogs can understand human body language and facial cues. Dogs also have a language that they use only for us.

Dolphins name each other.

The ego of humans is astronomical. The vast majority think we are the most intelligent, most important, most fantastic, wonderful thing on the planet. Yuck.

 

[Overread]

A lot of it is the religious influences on early sciences which then carried through to a lot of scientific papers for a long while. Plus there's a huge amount of complexity that we just don't get and that we've needed computers and machines to help us come to understand.

Even vocally we can only hear a certain range of sounds and our hearing can only discern so much. Animals that make use of complex calls can often be making sounds we cannot hear at speeds and ways that we cannot easily or even tell apart. It's not until we can hear the whole sound and then from further study also come to understand what the animal can hear as well then adding context (which is very hard as you've got to start trying to interpret a situation in the animals viewpoint which could have multiple possibilities) before you can start to build up the language.

 

[Onyx]

A human writes on a piece of paper: "All generalisations are false, including this statement". He is conveying concepts that cannot be reduced to a pure sensory memory/impression. In other words, he is conveying a collection of abstract ideas, and with them an implicit irony, itself also an abstraction. This is intelligence.

I think the bolded paradox demonstrates more about what isn't intelligent about speech rather than what is. Speech isn't a mathematical or even vaguely logic encoding of information, it is a highly evolved methodology for expressing social hierarchies and dominance. It evolved more as a peaceful trade-off for more physical and clumsy expressions of social politicking, which is why it is so useful for creating highly motivational communications that, at their core, contain virtually no information.

Anyone who has spent any time with a borderline or histrionic personality disordered person becomes intimately familiar with just how manipulative language can be with actually communicating any new or useful information. Yet, such speech is deeply affecting - language is intimately entangled in our emotional perception of social order and personal relationships.

In contrast, human language is almost useless for transmitting vital human skills. Skills are learned by demonstration or trail and error, and instructions on how to construct a physical something rely on unstated appeals to already acquired skills, including the skill of using instructions.

Human language cannot encode physics or mathematics at all. None of our deepest held scientific understandings can be expressed accurately in language, while we use language commonly to express paradoxical sounding ideas that result from languages total inability to capture the nature of reality:
"Light is a wave and particle."
"You can know the location or speed of a particle, but not both."
"The cat is neither alive nor dead until we open the box."
"If we could travel faster than light we could see the edge of the universe."

Those statements don't exist because physics is tricky, but because human speech is not, implicitly, "intelligent".


I personally struggle with this constantly. While my real life self gets along very well with human beings and am thought to be warm and charming, the text version of Onyx has a hard time predicting what social coding readers will attempt to divine out of statements I make about non-social scientific matters, or whether the pace of a dialogue about those matters will exceed some unstated, but popularly observed, social limit on how often it is okay to reply to a conversation about factual matters without giving the impression that my ultimate goal of the communication is to establish social hierarchy.

Speech is not intelligent. It is a tool of social manipulation that best expresses concepts like racism or paradox while being much more useful for dispelling the validity of fact than transmitting it. We swim in speech like fish in water, admiring its flexibility and expressiveness while being totally handicapped by its capricious and fallacious relationship to all realities that are not lingual in nature.

This relationship between language and rational cognition is so intense that the ability to perform certain perception skills is limited or expanded just by the language you speak. This is a decent article that outlines some of that. (Lera is a close friend, but didn't expect to see her quoted when I was looking for this article and had forgotten that this is her study area.)
Does the Language We Speak Affect Our Perception of Reality?

Speech is mutually agreed-upon technology that we use to influence each other to greater degrees of normative behavior, not a divining rod of cognition. People who deal in real facts are endlessly struggling against the nature of human speech to transmit those facts intact. I think it would be hell to be climate scientist.

 

[Parson]

@Onyx .... I agree with the article that language does most certainly affect our perception of reality. And of course language itself isn't intelligent, but the ability to use it in a way that expresses our understanding of the non-physical world has to show sentience, whether it's the lowest common denominator for it or not is an open question.

I agree but am also worried that when you say that language is best at promoting things like racism. I think that it is also indispensable in combating things like racism. Naming our intentions and explaining our actions helps others to understand us in a deeper way than simple observation would. If I simply associate with those of other "race" than mine without naming my esteem for them. My actions are only little better indicator of what I am doing and feeling than words would be without the actions.

 

[Ursa major]

it is a highly evolved methodology for expressing social hierarchies and dominance.

While I'm not sure that I agree with Justin Swanton's definition of intelligence.... I can't see how the reasons why speech arose matters if it has subsequently become more than a way of expressing social hierarchies and dominance, which it most definitely has.

 

[Justin Swanton]

I think the bolded paradox demonstrates more about what isn't intelligent about speech rather than what is. Speech isn't a mathematical or even vaguely logic encoding of information, it is a highly evolved methodology for expressing social hierarchies and dominance.

No. Speech is an assemblage of verbal symbols that refer to specific realities, i.e. it most definitely is an encoding of information. It can be used to maintain social hierarchies and dominance though I would think that social hierarchies are maintained either by force (the alpha male dominating the tribe) or by custom - and custom is maintained by behaviourial habit rather than by speech: treating the boss with respect, deferring to his will, etc.

It evolved more as a peaceful trade-off for more physical and clumsy expressions of social politicking, which is why it is so useful for creating highly motivational communications that, at their core, contain virtually no information.

If this is true then the great majority of scientific treatises, articles, manuals, etc. are largely filled with rubbish: biology, history, physics, chemistry, astronomy, and so on. Is that what is being affirmed here? Does the post I am replying to 'contain virtually no information'? Or is this a misuse rather than a normal use of speech?

Anyone who has spent any time with a borderline or histrionic personality disordered person becomes intimately familiar with just how manipulative language can be with actually communicating any new or useful information. Yet, such speech is deeply affecting - language is intimately entangled in our emotional perception of social order and personal relationships.

Speech can be used to tell lies and manipulate people, sure, but that's an abuse of speech and not its primary function. Lies are effective precisely because people commonly accept that one tells the truth with speech. Speech is meant to convey truth, i.e. valid information.

In contrast, human language is almost useless for transmitting vital human skills. Skills are learned by demonstration or trail and error, and instructions on how to construct a physical something rely on unstated appeals to already acquired skills, including the skill of using instructions.

I agree that language is weak for conveying precise and complex spatial relationships which are important for certain human skills. You can't do architecture just with speech; you need plans. But that doesn't mean speech is useless for transmitting all human skills. Cookery works just fine with print. And even skills that require diagrams or physical demonstration also need speech as an aid to learning. A craftsman doesn't just show his apprentice what he is doing - he also tells him how to go about doing it.

Human language cannot encode physics or mathematics at all.

A water molecule is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom? One plus one equals two? The symbols used in physics and mathematics are derived from written language and are in fact an extension of language. They are words; they express concepts and realities that all words express.

None of our deepest held scientific understandings can be expressed accurately in language, while we use language commonly to express paradoxical sounding ideas that result from languages total inability to capture the nature of reality:
"Light is a wave and particle."
"You can know the location or speed of a particle, but not both."
"The cat is neither alive nor dead until we open the box."
"If we could travel faster than light we could see the edge of the universe."

Those statements don't exist because physics is tricky, but because human speech is not, implicitly, "intelligent".

Of course we can express our deepest scientific understandings in language - science uses language, albeit specialised language, all the time. The point about language is that no single word can adequately express the total reality of something like the nature of light, so we need several words that express several concepts that together build up a more complete understanding of what light is. The more complete understanding may not be a total understanding but sure as sure without language we would not reach the understanding we have.

And obviously we can put together words to express something that doesn't exist. "The sun is green with a pattern of purple spots." "The moon is made of green cheese." That doesn't disqualify speech; it just shows that something is wrong with the thinking of the individual doing the talking.

I personally struggle with this constantly. While my real life self gets along very well with human beings and am thought to be warm and charming, the text version of Onyx has a hard time predicting what social coding readers will attempt to divine out of statements I make about non-social scientific matters, or whether the pace of a dialogue about those matters will exceed some unstated, but popularly observed, social limit on how often it is okay to reply to a conversation about factual matters without giving the impression that my ultimate goal of the communication is to establish social hierarchy.

One can't talk about everything to everyone all the time, naturally. I don't discuss the finer points of Polybius's Greek with my colleagues at work because it won't interest them. If I talk about the World Cup that will get much further. That doesn't mean that language is manipulative or power-mongering, just that there is a time and place for everything.

Speech is not intelligent. It is a tool of social manipulation that best expresses concepts like racism or paradox while being much more useful for dispelling the validity of fact than transmitting it. We swim in speech like fish in water, admiring its flexibility and expressiveness while being totally handicapped by its capricious and fallacious relationship to all realities that are not lingual in nature.

Question: is your post - itself entirely composed of language - an example of social manipulation and of the dispelling of the validity of fact? Speech can be used to lie or manipulate people, just like a baseball bat, designed for a popular game, can be used to dash out someone's brains. But if speech is primarily meant to lie and control, then nothing that anyone says can be believed or trusted and human society immediately disintegrates.

This relationship between language and rational cognition is so intense that the ability to perform certain perception skills is limited or expanded just by the language you speak. This is a decent article that outlines some of that. (Lera is a close friend, but didn't expect to see her quoted when I was looking for this article and had forgotten that this is her study area.)
Does the Language We Speak Affect Our Perception of Reality?

I agree that our understanding of reality will be a certain extent be condition by the vocabulary we have, but only to a certain extent. Every language supplies the tools an individual needs to think on a basic level, enough to allow a human intelligence to function.

And I dispute that language limits our ability to think: the whole point about specialised vocabularies as found in disciplines like the sciences is that as rational cognition grows so words are created to express the new concepts. If the human mind needs more verbal symbols to express its understanding, it invents them. No problem there.

Speech is mutually agreed-upon technology that we use to influence each other to greater degrees of normative behavior, not a divining rod of cognition. People who deal in real facts are endlessly struggling against the nature of human speech to transmit those facts intact. I think it would be hell to be climate scientist.

I think it's the opposite: speech is a divining rod of cognition, not an agreed-upon technology that we use to influence each other to greater degrees of normative behaviour. Normative behaviour is enforced by customs and sanctions more than by speech. You break the law, you go to jail. Jail is what conditions respect for the law, not a bunch of words.

 

[Overread]

Language is vastly more than social dominance.
Bees use the language of dance to show other bees the location of key resources.

That is one popular example, but many animals use language to share information. There are people (not many) who understand many birdsongs well enough that they can not only tell when an alarm call is being made, but what danger it refers to (which can even get down to species level alarms. Studies on ground hogs shows that they can communicate not just that people are around but use different sounds for different coloured shirts they are wearing. A dog is equally capable of bringing their water bowl to you for water and their food bowl for food.

I think the whole concept of social dominance in nature got overblown when the book on wolf hierarchy was published and everyone latched onto the whole "alpha" mentality. That being big and strong and the best and being in charge meant bullying all the rest. Further studies (by the same author) proved that he was totally wrong, however popular casual understanding has yet to catch up. Indeed I think the whole dominance thing is often used as a very casual "I've no idea why they do that but I'm going to say its dominance".


Language is also very capable of being used to transfer skills; we do it every day in schools. Yes we need reminding and sometimes a diagram is required, that isn't a limit of language but more how our brains work. The average person cannot hold a perfect mental image that is scientifically accurate to be able to then use that to calculate and measure things from. Yes there are some who can do this and those who work with such measurements nad work for a long time can achieve a level of mental capacity to also achieve it. Two such people could communicate very advanced concepts to each other without issues. Get two accountants together and they can talk maths and finance at a very high level and communicate, through words, complex equations and such. Sure communicating this to people who are less familiar requires more support and work, but that isn't language's limitation. Indeed the written word is language just as the book, the sound, the visual hand motions etc... are all language. I even started this post with a visual language from bees and if you ever work around people and horses or cattle you'll see them pick up on body language from the animals very readily.

Even if you've got your own pet you can pick up on it; learning when a cat is saying "yes I wnt petting" or "no if you touch me your hand is DEAD!"

 

[Onyx]

Language is vastly more than social dominance.
Bees use the language of dance to show other bees the location of key resources.

I agree. But I was speaking about "human speech" not "all language".

Human speech is auditory, by definition. We can encode speech into other mediums, but its natural form is spoken and heard.

If this is true then the great majority of scientific treatises, articles, manuals, etc. are largely filled with rubbish: biology, history, physics, chemistry, astronomy, and so on. Is that what is being affirmed here? Does the post I am replying to 'contain virtually no information'? Or is this a misuse rather than a normal use of speech?

The majority of scientific journal articles use speech as preamble and summary, and then present the scientific information using symbolic non-speech encodings, like mathematics or the symbology of chemistry. Since people need to be able to talk about mathematics, mathematicians have created words like "derivative" to refer to processes that can't take place in speech, and really can't even be defined with speech. Most physics concepts also are extremely difficult to define with speech, like "momentum", and give rise to misunderstandings like "centrifugal force". But math and science concepts are relatively straightforward in symbolic logic languages like mathematical notation or vector diagrams. In contrast, a word like "care" or "dominate" are totally impossible to represent in any sort of symbolic logic, but are easy to speak about.

Human speech can be used to direct our attention to concrete things, but it can only refer to signifiers of them. In contrast, human speech needs no visual reference to emotional concepts, as those are its bread and butter.

So we have evolved some very complex work-arounds to use speech to refer to the physical world, but we are always referring or making analogies to do so. And in that process we warp and confuse the intended meanings, like when we try to speak about time and can only do so by thinking about distance.


Language isn't there to create lies, and I wasn't saying that is its intent. But language didn't evolve to allow people to better track game, knap stone or teach herbology - it arose as a social glue to express feelings and social relationships. Since then we have continued to use it to talk about symbolic processes that are not speech, but we do so realizing that we run the constant risk of being misunderstood in a way that a word like "hate" is not going to misunderstood. That is why doctors, scientists, engineers, pilots and lawyers sound so strange when they are speaking professionally - they are using a highly adapted type of speech that contains a lot more encoded referrers than ordinary speech because they are really appealing to symbolic logical codes that the lay person isn't immediately privy to.

Speech is very flexible - you can express the same thing multiple ways, which makes speech more interesting and emphatic. But speech is also riddled with things like homonyms that cause endless confusion, and speech has little grounding in the physical world. Speech is really good at expressing allegiance and emotion. Speech is very poor for expressing method, location or force.

I totally reject the idea that someone who has never seen a stove, pan, knife or wisk could learn to cook from reading a recipe. Cooking is another activity that relies heavily on visual examples, heavily referential terminology and hands-on experience to execute a recipe.

So while we all admire the fun things we can express with speech, most of us give it way too much credit as an information medium, which is large part of the reason that people can so easily reject science and reason - neither can be stated in a way that demonstrates veracity because they only ever refer to data. So we use other speech to rhetorically dismantle ideas that never really existed in human speech, and then believe that we have shown the actual data to be false by doing so. Philosophizing is, unfortunately, mostly wanking. We have largely fallen into the trap of believing that our most immediate communication channel doesn't severely warp meanings, so we struggle to live in a scientific age using a language built for emotional transmission. It is like a blind person doing interior decorating using texture analogies to color as a method for a paint scheme - it might work sometimes, but will largely be an inaccurate muddle. The modern world arose despite speech - we learned to trust other languages that are much more precise and applicable to our needs.

For me, human speech is not "intelligent" in the normal sense. A good orator is an artist that can talk without reference to facts for hours. A good scientist will always struggle to translate their knowledge into speech.


For writer's, this is a fantastic situation. Would the book Use of Weapons work if name (and therefore identity) of the main character wasn't so easily applied to two characters through the indeterminate nature of speech? Would a FTL story be any fun if the logical impossibility of going "faster than light" wasn't as easy to express as simply putting those three words together? Speech allows us to lie about nearly everything in a way that a symbolic logic like math simply does not. That's why we use speech to make art, and we don't use speech to build nuclear reactors.

 

[Onyx]

I just want to say that I realize I am not forwarding a theory about human speech that anyone is likely to be really comfortable and happy with, so I do not intend to get in trouble trying to vigorously defend it. We take enormous pride in our ability to express - language takes up a large amount of our brain case. In that, speech is very similar to peacock plumage - an integral communication system the peacock has evolved to signal its fitness for mating. The question is really whether huge, colorful feathers or the many synonyms for "affection" are really making the peacock or us better at the job of being alive and reproducing, or whether they are somewhat pointless adaptations that are largely self perpetuating. There is only one animal on earth with the level of speech we have, but there are lots of birds that seem to be able to mate without fancy plumage, and there might be a lesson in that.

 

[Parson]

The modern world arose despite speech - we learned to trust other languages that are much more precise and applicable to our needs.

I could not disagree more with this statement. Without speech there would be no modern world. Human advancement is a social construct. Language allows us to work together for a common cause, without it we are reduced to instinctual responses. No working together yields very little advancement and no lasting advancement. Human individuality at its extreme edge is an open door to full fledged anarchy and all of its attendant woes. The give and take of language helps to blunt the extreme edge of individuality. Social conformity at its extreme edge is an open door to utter stagnation of civilization and advancement. The give and take of language helps blunt that as well.

 

[Onyx]

I could not disagree more with this statement. Without speech there would be no modern world. Human advancement is a social construct. Language allows us to work together for a common cause, without it we are reduced to instinctual responses. No working together yields very little advancement and no lasting advancement. Human individuality at its extreme edge is an open door to full fledged anarchy and all of its attendant woes. The give and take of language helps to blunt the extreme edge of individuality. Social conformity at its extreme edge is an open door to utter stagnation of civilization and advancement. The give and take of language helps blunt that as well.

I think what I meant by "modern world" needs clarification: I'm talking about the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. Human beings use speech, there is no way around that. But human beings have stymied their own progress by overwhelming actual reason with it's rhetorical speech analogs. The most egregious would be the arguments of Aristotle that managed to kill mathematical and experimental science in favor of "pure reason", which was a speech-based load of garbage that took 2000 years to be defeated.

The "modern world" is largely the result of non-speech theoretical systems like property law, mathematics, chemistry and physics overwhelming embedded rhetorical systems like superstition, Aristotle's version of 'science', the authority of the Church and the right of kings to allow actual reason to cause change.

We wouldn't be human without speech, but we would still be in the Middle Ages if we hadn't found an antidote for its worst offenses. Arguments against evidence based symbolic systems pop up all the time, trying to drag the progress of real reason to a halt - social philosophies like Fascism and Communism, religious fundamentalism, spiritualism, radical conservatism, conspiracy theories and racial xenophobia are all systems that are very effective in destroying civilization because of their alogical rhetorical power. Human speech is ideally suited to do what science cannot; make the argument that the evidence of our eyes is less important than the power of words, if the words "sound" right. And the words of the Communist Manifesto (for instance) were so powerfully appealing that a billion people betrayed the evidence of their eyes for a 'logic' of words that falls apart as soon as you try to apply it practically.


And just so you don't take my comments the wrong way, I am not attacking faith in God. But I am attacking the rhetoric that states that Scripture is an antidote to science. The Scopes trial was ultimately decided in 1968 when the Supreme Court applied the legal system to defeat the rhetorical argument that "the word of God as revealed in the Bible took priority over all human knowledge." That is an argument that appeals to us do to the power of speech, not because it is implicitly rational. Speech allows irrational statements to have a power they could not in any other symbolic system.

Human speech got us only so far before it dragged at reason with its irrational core. The search for symbolic systems other than human speech have allowed us to emerge from the dark ages.


BTW, I think this is a very nice example of a rhetorical statement that feels very convincing but is actually not an appeal to the reason of evidence: "Human individuality at its extreme edge is an open door to full fledged anarchy and all of its attendant woes." I wouldn't say you are right or wrong, but only with human speech could you make such an pronouncement without any evidence and have it 'sound' reasonable. There has never been a period of "extreme human individuality" and resulting anarchy to draw this conclusion. But it feels okay to say it, doesn't it?

 

[Ursa major]

We seem to be straying a very long way from the question asked in the original post -- which, apart from anything else, was about the communicative ability of animals other than human beings -- so I wondered if it might be useful to take us back to the original post.

I've decided that it would, so here it is:

A day or so ago I was watching a documentary which dealt in passing with Prairie Dogs. They said that prairie dogs have quite an extensive array of "barks" which spoke of danger, where the danger was (air or ground) and how dangerous the threat was.

This was quite a bit more information than I expected a prairie dog could convey and made me wonder where the line was between passing information and intelligent speech.

Does it come when two can disagree? When one party can express something which is not physical and have the other understand? The ability to create humor?

Just wondering especially what you S.F. author types thought about this.

 

[Justin Swanton]

Onyx has opened up vast and interesting topics in this discussion: the nature of speech, the value and effect of philosophy (the idea that Aristotle stymied mathematics and experimental science really amuses me), the influence of the Church on human knowledge, the nature of civilisation, and so on. Way too much for a single thread. So yeah, better to leave it.

Re the nature of intelligent speech, we have to work out what 'intelligent' means before coming to any conclusions about whether animals have it in the same way humans do. And I suspect that's also going to be a case of agree to disagree. Anyhow I've already given my 2c earlier in the thread. So go for it folks.

 

[Justin Swanton]

The ego of humans is astronomical. The vast majority think we are the most intelligent, most important, most fantastic, wonderful thing on the planet. Yuck.

One needs to have an accurate idea of what wild animals are really like, not just trained household pets who look up to their owners as parents. For example, cannibalism has been recorded in every species that is not strictly herbivore. Senseless killing and brutality is common among members of the same species. Naturalist Lyall Watson did a good job of documenting this in Dark Nature.

Modern people tend to have an idealised vision of the natural world because they don't live in it. But I never saw any attempt to create an idealised vision of humans. We know exactly what we are.

 

[Graymalkin]

Not about intelligent communication but related to definitions of intelligence. And just downright amazing.

 

[Alan Aspie]

And more about intelligent goo...

 

[Ray Zdybrow]

"There was a guy. long ago, who trained a gorilla to be a waiter at his house, the butler. He did surgery so Mr. Gorilla could stand up straighter, gave him a shave, and no-one the wiser. "
Was the guy's name Doctor Morrow or something similar?

 

[Ursa major]

Are you perhaps referring to The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells?

I've neither read the novel nor watched the film(s) based on it, so can't say whether or not there's a gorilla in it, or them.

 

[Parson]

Are you perhaps referring to The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells?

I've neither read the novel nor watched the film(s) based on it, so can't say whether or not there's a gorilla in it, or them.

There is none of that in H.G. Wells story.