[cdrini]

Hmm, I'm finding the premise a bit confusing, "understand what it truly meant to be a lion". I think that's quite different than having meaningful communication. One could make the same argument for "truly understanding" what it means to be someone else.

My thinking is that if something is capable of human-style speech, then we'd be able to communicate with them. We'd be able to talk about our shared experiences of the planet, and, if we're capable of human-style speech, likely also talk about more abstract concepts of what it means to be a human or lion. And potentially create new words for concepts that don't exist in each language.

I think the fact that human speech is capable of abstract concepts, not just concrete concepts, means that shared experience isn't necessary to have meaningful communication? It's a bit handwavy, depends a bit on how we're defining "understand" and "communicate".

[klank]

> I think the fact that human speech is capable of abstract concepts, not just concrete concepts, means that shared experience isn't necessary to have meaningful communication?

I don't follow that line of reasoning. To me, in that example, you're still communicating with a human, who regardless of culture, or geographic location, still shares an immense amount of shared life experiences with you.

Or, they're not. For example, an intentionally extreme example, I bet we'd have a super hard time talking about homotopy type theory with a member of the amazon rain forest. Similarly, I'd bet they had their own abstract concepts that they would not be able to easily explain to us.

[cdrini]

I would say there's a difference between abstract and complex. A complex topic would take a lot of time to communicate mainly because you have to go through all the prerequisites. By abstract I mean something like "communicate" or "loss" or "zero"! The primitives of complex thought.

And if we're saying the lion can speak human, then I think it follows that they're capable of this abstract thought, which is what I think is making the premise confusing for me. Maybe if I change my thinking and let's just say the lion is speaking... But if they're speaking a "language" that's capable of communicating concrete and abstract concepts, then that's a human-style language! And because we share many concrete concepts in our shared life experience, I think we would be able to communicate concrete concepts, and then use those as proxies to communicate abstract concepts and hence all concepts?