In 1964, through happenstance and incredible luck, I became Gregory Bateson’s assistant as he tried to understand the communications and behaviors of captive Spinner Dolphins. I spent hours watching and listening to the animals as Gregory Bateson tried to explain to a kid how the World worked.1 He had huge patience, and it must have been frustrating at the time. I have no memory of what we may have learned from the dolphins, but that experience has been life-changing in so many ways.
All that came rushing back the other day, when I heard about CETI, the “Cetacean Translation Initiative”2. It is no accident that SETI and CETI are pronounced the same way. The latter is an on-purpose attribution to the original3. They are both trying to establish communications with “Aliens”. The Initiative has been receiving a lot of attention as a result of an article about the application of Artificial Intelligence to understanding whale chatter.4
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Modern artificial intelligence is proving adept at learning languages. It can learn vocabulary, and it can structure utterances and responses based on well-rehearsed models, but at this point could AI produce the following?5
• An Oxford comma walks into a bar where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.
• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a co*cktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”
• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
• A question mark walks into a bar?
• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."
• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
• A synonym strolls into a tavern.
• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
• A dyslexic walks into a bra.
• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony.
When I learn a language away from the classroom, I assume the teacher lives in basically the same context as I do. To learn a language, basically in situ, requires a context understood by both parties. A piece of bread is a piece of bread, a mother is a mother, and a shade of red is some sort of red. When I learn a language away from the classroom, there is generally a great deal of hand-waving, pointing, and demonstrating. Very few whales will be hand-waving.
What if the parties do not share hand-waving, and operate in unshared contexts, understood and perceived with different sorts of senses? Will CETI end up with a list of words, and perhaps hints of grammar but with little or no meaning? If I were expert at morse code and received a transmission in the Urdu language, I could pick out, and put in order, anglicized letters, maybe even form words, but absent the sender’s context, it would all be meaningless to me.
I am incredibly excited by this project and just wish I were younger and smarter. I do not want it to fail. I really want us to communicate in a meaningful fashion with whales, and maybe we will. I hate this analogy, but I can think of none other. I am terribly afraid we will end up like an individual, blind since birth, memorizing the names of colors, and even using them appropriately to some degree but never being able to recognize “red”.
No matter how tenuous CETI is, it is a project incredibly wonderful in many ways. There is a fascinating, bigger idea here. Whales, dolphins, sharks, sea turtles, salmon, migrating birds, bees, and a hundred other organisms, including our best buddies the dogs, have sensitivities, sensors, and stimuli that you and I have no clue about. They live in a context that you and I cannot share. Sure, with some technology, we can match them, but what that does is simply translate from one context to another: a compass needle rather than a force field. Translation always loses something from the original.
The Whale lives in its universe as does each and every life-form. We share big chunks of a universal universe, but it is humbling to think about all that life moving through the same moment of time in multiple contexts, or universes, parallel to mine that I cannot see, cannot know, and cannot directly experience. Every time we begin to think humans are the brightest and the smartest, atop a some sort of hierarchy, Nature calls us down and says, “No, the World is flat.”
1) https://batesoninstitute.org/gregory-bateson/
2) https://www.projectceti.org/
3) Kolbert, Elizabeth (September 4, 2023)."Can We Talk to Whales?". The New Yorker. RetrievedMay 16, 2024.
or
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/18/talking-to-whales-with-artificial-enterprise-it-may-soon-be-possible
or counter argument
https://theconversation.com/are-we-really-about-to-talk-to-whales-229778
4) Sharma, P., Gero, S., Payne, R.et al.Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations.Nat Commun15, 3617 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47221-5)
5) Understand, this is not mine. I stole it from whom I do not and cannot know. Lots of variations are available on the internet.
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