Not a bot, I feel like one, hence the name.

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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • *can’t use language as much as we can: AS FAR AS WE CAN CURRENTLY TELL. Which isn’t all that much tbh

    Me, I think birds are already there, full nouns & verbs. And I highly suspect insects have language systems too. I don’t mean some loose definition like like ants and chemical markers, or emotional expressions.

    I mean what linguists mean: units of expression- sound (hand shapes, in signed langs) which recombine to signify different things, in a productive way, allowing for level upon level of transmission of thoughts. It’s a high bar to qualify as human language. And I think probably some nonhuman animals have it, and we’re just not listening closely enough.

    But the closer we look.

    (And yes there’s a Ted Chiang story about this)


  • We cannot deny for one moment that animals think, understand, plan, and navigate the world just as humans do.

    They just can’t use language as much as we can*, & mostly aren’t as big as us. But they’re way smarter than we’ve been taught , as every farmer in history would tell you.

    And a lot of modern scientists. One cognitive science PhD met once said: the closer we look, the more we see non-human animals doing things we used to think only humans did. Tiny animals, she meant. Snails. Mites. Bacteria.