[wombatmobile]

Thank you for sharing those comments, jbotz.

> We don't know how common or rare sentience and consciousness are in the Universe, but because of the Octopus I believe that if ever we do encounter non-terrestrial sentience we'll have no trouble recognizing it and will find that we have enough in common to establish communications and a relationship.

And... what of terrestrial sentience?

[wtetzner]

> Although first we'd do well to do a better job at communicating with and respecting the many non-human sentient beings on this planet.

[BurningFrog]

Respecting aside, I don't think we have that much to talk about with other intelligent Earth species.

[blaser-waffle]

"Yo, squid guy, what do you think about Seinfeld?"

[...silence...]

[p1esk]

You would get same response from me

[wombatmobile]

How?

[nico_h]

Gorillas can use sign language, dogs can use speaking buttons, I’m sure dolphins or orcas could be taught something we would recognise as language, maybe even chimpanzé

[powersnail]

In the case of Gorilla, I think it wasn't quite the level of sign language that it learned, but vocabularies and phrases.

I had a psychology professor who was part of the research teaching Koko sign language. And according to him, what Koko learned was really impressive, more than they anticipated. But it was still fundamentally different from human language.

It was a long time ago, and I don't recall what exactly was lacking. It could be on the lines of grammatical structures, that for Koko, there was no difference between "not want banana" and "want banana not". She didn't have an idea of what the negation was directed at. In the eye of linguistic psycholinguistics, the difference wasn't trivial.

In contrast, human children, even with limited vocabulary, could grasp and even invent grammars.

[crooked-v]

> In contrast, human children, even with limited vocabulary, could grasp and even invent grammars.

The most prominent example would be Nicaraguan Sign Language, which was spontaneously invented over only a few years by deaf schoolchildren, ages four to sixteen, who had little or no other language.

[JackFr]

https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/koko-kanzi-and-ape-lang...

The science isn't there for gorillas communicating like humans. No publications, no data and Robin Williams anecdotes instead. If there was something there one would think there would be more scientists doing research down that path.

[robertfw]

There's quite a bit of speculation that dolphins, orcas, and sperm whales are already using communication with sufficient complexity to be seen as language.

Here's a great talk that sent me on a recent youtube dive on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH9boP9pksM

[discreteevent]

I think it was the sleeve notes of "Stop making sense" by Talking Heads that had a lot of little aphorisms and one of them was something like: 'Dolphins are very smart but they don't want to talk to us'

[wombatmobile]

Ha! How about... other people?