> We attribute intelligence to humans, most of which are barely able to parrot what they hear from each other. I don't see why being generous to animals is any kind of a problem...
Barely? Humans have an incredibly unique ability to constantly create new sentences, infinitely many of which can express the same idea. That is a unique facet of the human brain.
Being snide about humans doesn't make apes any more intelligent. They simply don't have the same linguistic capabilities.
>They simply don't have the same linguistic capabilities
Which has nothing to do with them being intelligent or not.
It would be awesome to see aliens land here with blatantly superior technology, but they have no linguistics at all. Finally everyone would stop thinking you can't have intelligence without linguistics.
Seems unlikely to me, but of course this is all pure conjecture. If human history is any lesson, we've only been able to increase our levels of technology because of positive feedback loops facilitated by our ability to communicate. Could you build a better $technology without the relevant domain knowledge, passed down to you through human language? I seriously doubt it. Instead of making incremental improvements, you'd have to come up with the entire concept from scratch.
Edit: Individuals may be smart with or without language. I believe that to be an open question. But technology is the domain of culture, and communication between individuals (diffusion and reuse of ideas, especially) becomes a lot more important.
Of course, I left it vague - who knows, maybe the aliens (i.e. any life form) are communicating in ways we can even detect?
Maybe we're simply not intelligent enough to realize that our own form of communication is actually very primitive, and a sign of little intelligence, not great intelligence.
The claim he made is that people think intelligence requires linguistics - he then goes on to say that aliens may be communicating in some different way that doesn't require linguistics.
At any rate, a number of the arguments made in this thread are absolutely absurd. Of course intelligence doesn't require linguistics - linguistics is merely one of the markers of intelligence.
And of course creatures can communicate without language - it happens in nature every day.
Linguistics is about communication. Language is not spoken language. That is the common definition. The absurd comments in this thread are those which confuse communication and linguistics to that involving just sounds.
That only makes sense if you conceive of language as primarily an instrument of communication rather than of thought; that is, language is merely communication turned up to eleven. What inclines you to believe that's the case? That isn't to say that a "mechanism" for symbolic thought needs to resemble human language in any particular way, at least as far as serialization goes.
The entire concept of a "symbol" is a very human thing -- there are no natural symbols outside the human mind (except maybe inside of a computer, a human invention). Do you need to use symbols in order to organize matter into "technology"?
Edit: it occurs to me that DNA/RNA are made of natural symbols, which is a pretty good argument for symbols being important.
I think all of this is explained by a linguistics 101 course (I have seen a few excerpts of one lecture).
A good reason to use symbols in communication is for reliability (which is needed in the DNA). With a discrete set of symbols you have most likely no degradation (instead some recovery occurs -- like when you interpret a poorly written letter), and with a small chance you understand a completely different symbol. This stops error propagation.
Moreover, symbols allow for easy combination, which expands indefinitely the vocabulary with a fixed cost.
I see language as a sort of 'programming' that we acquire. If it's like software, it should require relatively compatible hardware in order to run the program.
You see much the same sort of thing with people who are language-deprived at an early age. Leaving "Genie"[1] out of the mix (because it has been argued by at least one of the people who studied her that she was probably impaired in areas other than language—though I'm inclined to believe that her other cognative impairments were as likely to be the result of language deprivation as the cause of her language impairment), we have seen similar problems with real grammar among the Nicaraguan deaf community: the kids who were older when the schools for the deaf opened never developed a language capacity in the same way that the really young children did. (It has to be kept in mind that Nicaraguan Sign Language[2] is essentially a spontaneous creole developed by the kids themselves from the rough pidgin mimicas each child brought into the community from home. The grammar of the language came from usage in the school community; it wasn't externally imposed, and isn't related to any of the French-derived sign languages.) Hawaiian Creole English ("Pidgin" to its speakers) can also be demonstrated to be largely the creation of children, building upon the true pidgin (with no consistent grammar) their parents, who came from a variety of quite different languages communities, spoke.
You might think that things like this might reinforce the idea that language capacity is innate in humans, and that it differs in qualitative (and not merely quantitative) ways from communication in other species, but people are still wrapped up in some combination of strict behaviourism and the tabula rasa on the one hand and cultural constructionism on the other hand that they can't seem to see the data sitting in front of them. I don't think we'll get very far until we accept that the communicative aspect of language is merely a lossy format for serializing and transmitting internal data structures that may or may not have any correspondence with physical realities (apart from neuronal state). "A language" is just an agreed-upon format, like JSON, XML, or Gerry Sussman's "everything is a Lisp" notation(s), but without that config file, the general-purpose serializer/deserializer library is just unreachable code.
This reminds me of the way Big Brother is working on a new language that doesn't have words for things you're not allowed to do - if there's no word for it, how can you think about doing it?
Intelligence aside, a mortal species probably can't have advanced technology without language. You need some way to pass knowledge on when someone dies.
What do you mean "incredibly unique?" And what is the value in expressing the same thing in so many different ways? I don't see how you can argue that saying the same things over and over is intelligent.
>They simply don't have the same linguistic capabilities.
They are really not very different from us in terms of linguistic abilities. Our linguistic abilities are mostly a matter of socialization of history.
I mean that no other species has the ability to do the same.
> And what is the value in expressing the same thing in so many different ways? I don't see how you can argue that saying the same things over and over is intelligent.
Saying the same thing over and over again is not "intelligent." But being able to produce an infinite set of linguistic expressions which express the same idea is atomically indicative of a higher order of linguistic creativity than anything any other species is capable of. I'd say that qualifies as intelligence.
> They are really not very different from us in terms of linguistic abilities. Our linguistic abilities are mostly a matter of socialization of history.
I'm going to have to disagree in a major way with this. Humans have an innate, generative grammar that allows for a completely different system of communication and thought than that of animals. Animals, at best, may have something like words. But they do not have grammar. That's huge.
> Feral humans won't be much smarter than an ape.
Difficult to judge which would be "smarter." Secondly, not sure what argument you're making. You're saying that our linguistic abilities are not very different than apes, because they are socializations. But you also claim that humans without language are roughly as intelligent as apes. So, if language does not correspond to intelligence, does that imply that feral humans are just as intelligent as normal humans?
Feral humans lack language because the brief period of time in which the human brain greatly expands its linguistic learning capabilities (infancy and young toddler-hood) is spent in isolation -- critical linguistic facets of the brain are never exercised. That period of development does not come back. Their brains are simply underdeveloped, in a fundamental way. I'd say that qualifies as less intelligent.
I'd recommend picking up "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker.
> I mean that no other species has the ability to do the same.
Dolphins likely can. They're capable of inventing novel tricks, and then communicating the behavior with a different dolphin, proven by them doing the same new trick in synchrony without either having seen it before. They are also capable of communicating abstract concepts to dolphins in a separate partition of the tank who they can "hear" but not see. We don't know if their language has an equivalent of "sentences", I guess, so you may be technically correct, but I find it hard to imagine a method in which the complex and abstract concepts Dolphins have been shown to communicate only have a single or small finite number of representations.
Captive Dolphins can also understand syntax in human sentences. They understand the difference between "get the hoop and then the ball", and "get the ball and then the hoop". And they can generalize this to different concepts and numbers of clauses, and tend to act confused if the sentence is egregiously ungrammatical. They also understand future and past tense, and the difference between a statement and a question. Is it likely that they would understand our language so well if they didn't have something fairly similar of their own, if they hadn't developed language capabilities at a young age? They seemingly have a better ability to understand human language than feral children.
Finally, there is evidence that the Shannon entropy of dolphin language is at least 3-4. Human languages are around 8-9, but not enough data has been collected to know that the Dolphin language isn't more complex, and captive Dolphins may have less sophisticated communication than wild ones. In any case, I think even if their language is effectively determined by only 3-4 letter sequences (their "alphabet" is about the same size as English - ~27 whistles) rather than 8-9, that's still complex enough for me to doubt your claim that language capabilities are unique to humans.
>But being able to produce an infinite set of linguistic expressions which express the same idea is atomically indicative of a higher order of linguistic creativity than anything any other species is capable of. I'd say that qualifies as intelligence.
The key ingredient in this kind of activity is using existing terms in new ways through analogy. It's not just introducing new linguistic expressions. That non bulgero sammi solon be intelligence, because new words don't mean anything unless there's an understanding already backing them.
>But they do not have grammar. That's huge.
Do they need it? Do we need it? How much of it do we need? Have you made proper consideration for non-verbal grammars (like possibly in bees?)
People like to talk about human intelligence like you could drop a baby in the jungle and it'd develop nuclear physics and ride out on a hovercraft. Just consider how frequently people claim quantum physics is unintuitive (as though classical physics didn't take many millennia to understand!) If you strip away our current environment and culture, you are left with a creature who has a slight advantage over apes -- and if you run that advantage for 200,000 years, the difference between humans and apes will magnify into vast differences in behavior, even if the underlying machinery doesn't change.
>Feral humans lack language because [...]
There were first humans who had language. There were early humans who had not yet started to use grammar and had proper socialization. Would you consider them significantly more intelligent than apes? Why or why not?
You mean wild children? They're brain-damaged by lack of key stimulation in critical developmental periods. They're not healthy members of the species, so the species can't be judged by how they behave.
Normal humans grow up with other humans, and learn language from those humans. Normal humans are socialized.
Barely? Humans have an incredibly unique ability to constantly create new sentences, infinitely many of which can express the same idea. That is a unique facet of the human brain.
Being snide about humans doesn't make apes any more intelligent. They simply don't have the same linguistic capabilities.