[charcircuit]

>To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds

Why? With modern AI there exists unsupervised learning for translation where you don't have to explicitly make translation pairs between the 2 languages. It seems possible to eventually create a way to translate without having to have a teaching process for individual words like you describe.

[srean]

Teach the meaning and understanding of 'chrome red' to a chilf blind from birth.

[pizza]

https://www.boredpanda.com/color-descriptions-blind-people/

[Teever]

How do we explain things like plasma and UV to anyone?

[charcircuit]

This can easily be done by giving that prompt to chatgpt and allowing the child to ask it follow up questions.

[ht-syseng]

The word is just a 'pointer' to the underlying shared experience, so I don't think you could; the kid would come away thinking red is the same thing as the feeling of splinters or the warmth of a sunset, which isn't what red is, those are just feelings maybe associated with red. That said - I'm actually pretty confident we'll be able to have basic "conversations" made of basic snippets of information with dolphins and whales in my lifetime. Maybe not complex grammatical structure we identify with, but small stuff like: "I'm hungry". I'm not sure if dolphins could understand "fish or octopus for dinner?", because they might not have any idea of a logical 'OR', and perhaps they might don't even differentiate between fish/octopus.

We do share (presumably) experiences of hunger, pain, happiness, the perception of gradations of light and shape/form within them, some kind of dimensionally bound spatial medium they exist in as an individual and are moving through - though of course they might not conceive of these as "dimensions" or "space", they would surely have analogs for directional words - although given they aren't constrained to live on top of a 2D surface, these might not be "up", "down", "left", "right", but something in the vein of "lightward" or "darkward" as the two main directions, and then some complicated 3D rotational coordinate system for modeling direction. Who knows, maybe they even use quaternions!

[srean]

Very poetically put and absolutely agree.

For the subset of shared experiences and emotions this should be possible, not only that, I feel that we must try (as in, it's a moral/ ethical obligation).

Training an ML on dialogues alone will not be enough. One would need to spend a lot of time to build up a wealth of shared experiences, so that one can learn the mapping/correspondence.

[srean]

That might only get to a point that there is an understanding that something called "chrome red" exists. But for a blind child who isn't exposed to the concept of vision, let alone color. It's just a name and relations with other names. That lacks semantics.

Without grounding in some form of experience one can learn grammar and syntax but not understanding. "Chrome red" is a whole lot easier to teach than say the concept of "jealousy" when that's not part of a shared world of experience.

It's possible to learn a dictionary without understanding any of what those words mean. Dictionary just gives relations among the dictionary words themselves. That's it.

It takes a sensory or emotional experience to ground those words for learning.

Nouns are easy because you can point and teach, that there is a correspondence with the word 'apple' and the physical object that you are experiencing now. Abstract concepts emotions are much harder. There the need for shared experience is much stronger.

There's quite a bit of recorded knowledge for these things. Experiences of Hellen Keller. There's a story of a deaf man who could use sign language, but had an overwhelming and tearful experience in his thirties when it finally clicked that the sign for a 'door' has a correspondence for a door that his teacher was pointing at. Till that point, signing was just some meaningless ritualistic ceremony that needed to be mastered for social acceptance.

[charcircuit]

I'm not sure what you are trying to argue. That it's impossible to translate between blind and sighted people because they don't "truley" experience color? That's clearly not the case. Even with emotions different languages independently came up with words for them and we can still translate between those languages.

[srean]

I elaborated here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43684124

> Even with emotions different languages independently came up with words for them and we can still translate between those languages.

Of course. That's a no-brainer that different human languages have come up with names for experiences they share.

The hard part is learning the correspondence between say two nouns in different languages that mean the same thing.

Its perfectly possible for an unsupervised ML to use the French word 'rouge' in a French sentence but the notion that 'rouge' corresponds to 'red' in English has to come from some shared grounded experience/emotion.

The French word x word relationship graph has to get connected to the English word x word relationship graph.

BTW for people born deaf and blind it's an enormous challenge just to get to the point where the person understand that things have names. For example for Hellen Keller, it was a very non-trivial event when it finally clicked that the wet sensation she was feeling had a correspondence with what her teacher was writing on her arm. They were lucky that wet was an experience that was common between her and her teacher, lucky that Hellen Keller could experience wetness. Someone or something has to play the same role for dolphins and us. Just a corpus will not suffice.

[GeoAtreides]

imagine thinking qualia can be described and understood... with words! lol lmao