Important Philosophical Questions + POLLS

General Chat
1757

Oh gotcha, I didnt realize the question was specifically about rejection. It does seem unfortunate.

I’m not sure food service is a great analogy though. If you get a free meal, they usually aren’t going to upsell you. And if you find out a meal isn’t working for you, it’s not hard to walk out and grab a burger instead.

I think a closer analogy might be subscription service like internet or phone lines. You’re paying as long as you’re still using the service, they may increase prices, and it’s quite annoying to switch down the line.

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1758

I don’t think his point is that only humans communicate, but that we took it to a level not seen anywhere else.

We talk and write, not only about concrete things (“that person stole our food”) but also about abstract concepts, like a story about that stealing food is bad. And then we can bond over the shared idea that stealing food is bad. Then multiple of these shared ideas eventually turn into a constitution or the 10 commandments, development of science, etc.

But I have studied ant system communications a little bit (for AI use), and ants do communicate a lot too. And given their numbers, maybe they are the dominant life form on earth, and not humans. :smile:

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1759

This reminded me of this

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1760

I have yet to meet a domesticated animal that doesn’t side-eye a certain aunt of mine, while she got two men to marry her and more than a dozen women to consider her a best friend.

The animals have been infinitely smarter so far.

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1761

… to a level that we cannot yet recognize anywhere else :wink:

Meanwhile it seems that elephants use their trunks also for deixis, that dogs understand more than just the tone of our speech, etc.

The more we look, the more we see.

Also, it has been very practical for humanimals to deny non-human animals’ cognition — and as we are still leading a horrible war against the other animals (as can be seen in our division between wild animals, “livestock”, and pets) it would be a surprise if they’d aid us in understanding their languages, no?

1762

Do you all read “5-ary” as in something of arity 5 as “five-ary” or “quinary” or “pentary” or something else?

1763

If I read it as written, I would read five-ary and be confused. If I were using it myself I would say and write quinary.

1764

I think “n-ary” is normal to write, isn’t it? at least when sufficiently high n are under consideration? or is that only used for number bases and not arity?

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1765

Yeah for whatever reason n-ary triggers better in my brain than 5-ary does :man_shrugging: could just be me though

1766

Binary, ternary, quaternary, five-ary.

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1767

I think I’ve realized that I don’t understand the difference between arity and valency

EDIT: oh, they’re synonyms; arity is more common in math, valency is more common in linguistics

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1768

I agree that there’s much to discover how other species communicate, and the way we treat animals shapes how we look at, or down on, animals.

This point is also made in Sapiens. After building community through communications, we used that power to eradicate the other Homo species, and eradicate flora and fauna. The invention of industrialised farmed animals is the latest form of mass cruelty.

That said, I think this illustrates that the distinguishing feature of humans is their effective communications. Cruelty is not unique to humans. Motivating infinite numbers of strangers to work together to a single goal (religion, nations, etc) is unique as far as we know.

Maybe. But livestock and pets are human creations, any strategic hiding of language would’ve been bred out. Wild animals might evolve to hide their signals better, but only if that helps them evade humans. For most, it’s probably not even relevant, because humans either don’t care, or our threats (climate change, sonar, heat vision) bypass communication altogether.

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