Talking with Animals

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare, Chris Lear and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing talking to the animals. Nick, go for it.

Speaker B: 00:00:28

Yeah, so animals, right? You love them, I love them. They're furry, they often have hilarious numbers of legs. Great little creatures, aren't they, animals? Well, so far you've described Peter Coghill, but keep going. But the question is, would you like to have a chat with one of them? Would you like to talk to an animal? Well, there might be a chance of doing this in the next couple of years if Project SETI succeeds. So this is an interdisciplinary sort of multinational project to try and use machine learning to decode sperm whale language. So sperm whales talk in these little sentences, apparently, called coders, and they're basically clicks, which apparently makes it a bit easier for computers to sort of, or at least to try and analyse. And so this project is going to try and see if we can translate sperm whale language into human language. What might we learn? Who knows? All sorts of exciting things. So I think we want to talk about whether or not the idea of talking to animals makes any sense, what the purpose of doing so might be, what we might learn, and probably which animals we'd really like to have a chat to if we had a chance.

Speaker A: 00:01:52

Because, of course, immediately that begs the question, you know, what are these sperm whales talking about? Where the fish are, I expect. Yeah, I think that's it. I mean, is it just going to be as simple as that? Are they just really boring? That's more or less

Speaker C: 00:02:06

what humans kind of talk about most of the time. Yeah. Like where the discounts are, and what's hot on Instagram, isn't it? Yeah. That's kind of the extent to which that's

Speaker B: 00:02:14

something you can... Yeah, you can imagine a sort of sperm whale scientist cracking human language and going up to the average human and saying, oh, you know, what do you think about the problem of existence or that kind of stuff? Most people probably don't really care. You know, most people just, you know... And they might ask the human, where's all

Speaker A: 00:02:31

the fish? And we don't know. Well, I know where the fish are. They're in the sea. Get

Speaker B: 00:02:37

back into the sea, you idiot sperm whale. What are you doing in Haringey?

Speaker A: 00:02:43

Yeah, well, let's weigh in. Chris, I want to bring you in. I don't know. Yeah, go for it. What are your initial thoughts on all of this? Well, for me, the question here is whether language is any more than just behavior. That's why I'm kind of wondering whether language is any more than just behavior, because we can actually, we can communicate quite well with animals. Anyone who has a dog communicates pretty well with that dog. Even... We can tell what a lot of animals are kind of thinking, just by watching them, without really talking to them or even listening to them. Also, I'm not sure which language is better to use, whether we should be teaching the animals our language or learning theirs. I've got a funny feeling we're better off learning theirs. But the interesting thing is whether the language is any more than just kind of slightly complex behavior. In other words, whether you need to be one of those things to really understand it, or whether kind of a computer can fundamentally understand it by listening for long enough. Look, let's go into that more. So you said it's whether a question of whether language is just more than behavior, right? And even if we could understand the language, could we really actually still understand the language? Would it help us at all? And perhaps the answer is no. I want to hear more about that. Is there an understanding gap? Because there are two things that occurs to me. One is that we can more or less understand animals, up to a point. And we could also more or less understand people who don't speak English, up to a point, let's say, I mean, the only language I speak is English. But I can understand other people to some extent. But also, so we can understand people who don't have our language, and animals and other things which don't have a language by observing behavior and so on. And also, we can misunderstand people who do have our language quite grievously. And this is very common. As we all know, if we're, let's say married. It's extremely common to know someone quite well, but still misunderstand what they mean when they say something like, do you want to, you know, go and fetch someone from the station? These things can be misunderstood quite easily. And what I guess, what I find interesting is, is the way meaning is transferred. And whether we and people that as far as I can tell, people don't really know where the language has something inbuilt, whether grammar is sort of fixed into our brains in some way, which means that it would be very hard for a computer to, to do it, or whether it's just learnt over time.

Speaker B: 00:05:58

But I think isn't there quite a lot of evidence that, you know, there are specialized brain structures that deal with language in humans that don't sort of seem to have an equivalent in other animals. I was just thinking you're, you know, you, I think there is a difference in communication and meaning things. And I think, as Chris says, obviously we can communicate without necessarily using sort of language in itself. We can do it so you can communicate with the dog and get a dog to do things for you without having to make it understand exactly what you're, you know, trying to achieve. You could, you know, do all the kind of social elements of language, presumably do that with a dog, stroke, pat it on the head and that kind of stuff, you know, dog stuff and various other kinds of things like social signaling and, you know, communicating emotions with dogs and all of those kinds of things. I think the one big glaring hole in all of that is being able to mean something. So in other words, to sort of think of a state of affairs and transfer that to someone else's brain, which we can do with human language, but we, I don't feel like we can do it with an animal. So in other words, you know, the fact that I believe something is true, I can make you understand that you can, I can make you understand what state of affairs I'm proposing is true. And if, and if we're planning to do something together, you know, I can tell you what state of affairs we're working towards and all of that. So I don't think animals can mean things. Well, at least as far, we've never discovered an animal who could mean something, you know, all of their communication does all kinds of other stuff, but it doesn't seem to be able to mean things.

Speaker A: 00:07:39

Okay. That's an interesting point. I want to come to you, Peter, but is it, what sounds like what you're saying, Nick, is, I mean, is we can't talk to a dog about the latest episode of Star Trek or we can't talk to a dog about the existence of God, whether, you know, whether I believe it, where the dog believes it. So, but that's not, that's because that's not language, is it? That's to do with imagination, isn't it? And it's, I think, and to do with, and maybe that is specific

Speaker B: 00:08:08

to humans. Yeah, well, we don't, we don't know if dogs don't, if dogs don't in some way have thoughts about those. Yeah. But the point is that they don't seem to express them to one another.

Speaker C: 00:08:18

So, yeah, yeah. Well, they're related, sort of related thing. There are species of birds, I think in the J family, so magpies and that those kind of birds, which have, they, they express concepts of future planet, the future by planning for, for things. So, when, when food is more available, they hoard more of it and that sort of thing. So, they, I think it's, I think it's that behavior, but they, they, they, they have a concept of, like, times are good and there's, but times might not be so good in the future. So, they have, they form, there's, they're expressing some belief about the now, you know, now versus hypothetical futures. But do they talk about it? I, well, they, they, but they, they exhibit the behavior. So, they, so other Js would be able to observe that behavior. So, that would, that I would, I would cast that as, as some form of communication. I think it is tricky because you sort of think, well, there's, there's the idea

Speaker B: 00:09:18

of a code where, you know, you, we, if we agree on a code or evolve a code where, you know, when I flap my arm in a certain way, it means that there's food in that tree. And then when I flap my other arm, it means that the food is in the river. There, we can use that to communicate, but you wouldn't necessarily say that was language as such. That would be like a code. And the question is whether or not these ravens are just doing code things or whether they're genuinely expressing thoughts that they have. And, and I think one of the key tests is can they, can they use the elements of what, of how they're communicating to come up with genuinely new thoughts? So, you know, could one of them express the thought of, well, it's going to be cold, not next year, but the year after. And, you know, perhaps we should go to a different mountain to find food. And like, like if their code language is restricted to a certain number of thoughts to express, then they wouldn't be able to do that. And therefore I think they don't really have language in our sense. Chris, then Peter.

Speaker A: 00:10:20

You're assuming that language is different from a code.

Speaker C: 00:10:24

That's what I do. I don't understand the distinction.

Speaker A: 00:10:26

Which it might be. And correct me if I'm wrong, Nick, you seem to be saying that the difference between language and a code is that language can extend to things which haven't been, which you haven't been taught already. Is that what you mean? Yeah. Yeah. Well, what I mean is it's infinitely combinatorial. I mean, let's hear more from Chris. Sorry, I missed the start of that point, Chris. Keep going. Sorry. I think Nick was saying that with a code, you've got a fixed number of things you can say, but language allows you to go beyond those things by combining, by making new combinations. I think that's what Nick's saying. I'm not quite sure exactly where the code concept ends and the language concept begins. It might be one of those things which is a bit of a spectrum.

Speaker C: 00:11:17

Yeah. Because if you've got, if your code is a sort of like a cipher mapping, there's a one symbol to one concept, then you can just string those concepts together, right? And then come up with new mappings to new symbols for new concepts. Well, yeah, but you think that's easy because

Speaker B: 00:11:36

you're a human, but when they taught chimps sign language, they just don't do that. You know, they use the signs they've learned. That's a banana. This is a doll. And they don't come up with new sentences like the doll wants to eat a banana, you know? But do computers? No. Well, I don't know.

Speaker A: 00:11:56

Because that's kind of the, that feels like where I'm going with this. I have no idea where we're going with this. I want to hear it from Chris, then Peter. Well, I kind of feel if a computer can take all of the data from all of the conversations that everybody's had, and then come up with a genuinely new concept out of all that, that my question is, have they really learned the language? And maybe they just have, maybe that's all it is. Maybe it's just like you collect all this stuff, and then you spit out a thing.

Speaker C: 00:12:35

I would argue that there are computers that do that. And we've all got one in our heads.

Speaker A: 00:12:42

Ah, yeah.

Speaker C: 00:12:43

Yeah. So we're gonna, Chris and I will disagree on this, because Chris has got dualist beliefs. But I fundamentally believe that your brain is just a self-contained blob of stuff that is a computer. And so you learn, as you grow, and as you grow up, you learn language, and you learn about new concepts in the world. And you exhibit this behavior that we're exactly describing, where you can start stringing new things together and come up with new ideas. So yeah, I think there are computers that can do that. And then it becomes, it's just an engineering challenge to replicate that in silicon, or whatever substrate we use.

Speaker A: 00:13:18

So we can definitely understand Wales.

Speaker C: 00:13:20

Yeah, I think eventually we definitely can understand anything. Yeah.

Speaker B: 00:13:24

I don't know. I think this isn't as straightforward as that. If you think of philosophical zombies, for example. And I would say that GPT-3, or something like that, some really sophisticated language generator. What's GPT-3? It's just a very, it's an extremely impressive artificial language generator, which you can, it's basically read the internet, and has encoded lots and lots of, you know, virtually every sentence ever written on the internet.

Speaker C: 00:13:55

It's like a chatbot for the 21st century.

Speaker B: 00:13:57

Yeah, it's phenomenally impressive. You know, you can start typing something and it'll continue it in exactly the way that you're writing it in the first place. And you know, you can have a conversation with it. And it's very plausible. It's really good.

Speaker A: 00:14:10

Is it part of your interest? But anyway, that's a diversion.

Speaker B: 00:14:13

Yeah, no, I mean, but it's not unrelated. But the issue is, I would say that GPT-3 is a bit like a philosophical zombie, in that it might be behaving exactly like an online person. But it doesn't really make sense to say that it means things, that it is intending to communicate concepts in some way. And I feel like that seems to be fairly integral. But Peter's point reminded me of the Chinese room thought experiment, which was John Searle, which is really central to this debate, right, which is where, let's imagine you're a person inside a box, and you get past these Chinese characters, and you don't speak Chinese. And so you get past these Chinese characters in strings, and you just look up in this book, okay, well, when I get past this string, I pass this other string back. So the strings of characters come in and strings of characters come out. And this book has been designed sufficiently intelligently that it really looks like you can speak Chinese, or it looks like the box speaks Chinese. But of course, you sitting there processing strings of characters can't really be said, which part of that box actually understands Chinese? The argument is, well, none of it does. So language cannot merely be a matter of inputs going in and outputs coming out. And therefore, yes, congratulations, you understand the language. But other people have said, no, that box does speak Chinese. That is what it means to speak Chinese. So I think that feels like that's central to what we're talking about here is the question of whether or not a machine behaving exactly like it understands language just does

Speaker C: 00:15:46

understand the language. Now, I want to throw a spanner in my works, right? So I've made the assertion that I believe that we can do the lumping together of concepts or generating new concepts as sort of arbitrarily. Now, I don't actually believe that we can. So I think there, I think, you know, we talk about general intelligence, and general intelligence is one that can sort of conceive of anything. And you just keep adding more compute power to it, and it can conceive of anything at any speed, right? Now, I think we have, there are certain physical limits to our brain, which will give us a ceiling of how complicated the concept we can actually hold in our heads. So imagine, imagine if in 50 years time, theoretical physics hasn't found some definitive solutions, definitive sort of algorithm, which explains the whole universe, it might just be bottomlessly complicated, there's going to be a point at which a physics graduate cannot understand any more physics, because they haven't got enough time in their life to do any more reading or discussing about it. So there's going to be a point at which the concepts are too big to hold in our heads, which will mean there's a limit to how much of this generation and lumping together of new ideas we can do.

Speaker A: 00:17:06

So look, I want to bring in Chris in a moment, I thought we were gonna be talking about having nice fluffy conversations about conversations with squirrels and salamanders, right? And yeah, we should, we should still do that. Bit of whimsy. We should do that. But here we are. And actually, by the way, I don't, I feel ganged up on, because, you know, it's all immediately got into like, machine concepts and, and be, I mean, I can't, I don't even have the vocabulary for it. And I feel totally outgunned now, because we got Chris bloody Lear on the team now. We got Chris Lear on the team, who's just another one of you. All right, let's bring it back to dogs. But no, before we do that, before we sort of bring in the whimsy, and I don't know how, um, Chris, beyond, I mean, I have no idea what any of you talking about. Chris, anything to add at this point? To the, to the kind of artificial intelligence discussion? I guess so. I think I haven't got a great deal. But I do, I do find it interesting that an artificial intelligence is trying to communicate. So artificial intelligences, as Nick says, have got pretty good, they can communicate. There's a bit of a question about whether they really understand anything, or whether they're just a sort of Chinese room. And maybe that's the same thing. But what interests me is that even when we speak amongst ourselves, we quite often mean different things. And philosophers can't even agree what meaning even kind of consists in. And of course, when philosophers talk, nobody understands them either. So the whole sort of thing with language is, is, is, is fascinating. Some of the, some of the, some of the concepts that we use often, and we consider carry a lot of meaning, which might mean something to a computer, a concept like beauty is notoriously impossible to define. But yet, we can all use it. And we all know what we mean when we use it, although we might misunderstand each other slightly. So I find all of this interesting. And, and it all blends into the, what I find interesting in this whole thing, I'm afraid I'm not that into animals, I'm more interested in the language thing. I'm quite interested in the talking to computers thing. And I'm quite interested in the talking to aliens thing, because it seems similar. So there. So that's really where I'm coming.

Speaker B: 00:19:25

If we can't talk to a dolphin, then we've got no chance with an alien. I mean, maybe not. We've got to start with the dolphins. No, I mean, so, yeah, I mean, so there's just a couple of things. When we get getting back to animals, not unrelated to philosophy, because I'm going to bring in Wittgenstein, who said, if a lion could speak, we could not understand him. And typically, Wittgenstein, he didn't really explain what he meant, but lots of other people have tried to work it out. I think, well, I think exactly. If Wittgenstein could speak, we could not understand it. Normally, people sort of assume that what this means is a lion just doesn't have enough. In order for two humans to talk to each other and properly communicate, there has to be some shared set of concepts. And he I think is more or less saying, well, there's not enough shared concepts that you have with a lion to be able to have a proper chat with it. But I mean, I don't know about that, because I feel like there's quite a lot of things that like, you know, the concept of food and being hungry or being happy or being scared, you know, that there are gentlemen and lady lions, you can imagine having a chat with a lion about that. And all the, you know, the gender politics of the lion world, and, you know, children and looking after your kids and all that kind of stuff. There's quite a lot in common. And I kind of thought, if I imagine, yeah, but if I imagine finding a tribe of humans who lived exactly like lions, they just lived exactly the same hunted in the same way. I feel like I could have a chat with them. So I'm not sure I'm not a lion pessimist. But on the other hand, there is this question of, well, at some point, the complexity or what is required to be able to speak at all to communicate might just be completely impossible. And for a particular animal. So it's like if I said, Okay, well, if I could find a triangle with four corners, what would its interior angles be? Right? Well, you go, but you can't, there's no such thing as a triangle with four corners. It's an it's not a coherent thought experiment. And I sort of think, well, in order to have a chat with an ant, which might be quite interesting in one level, it would have to essentially not be an ant, you know, it would, it would have to stop having the brain of an ant. And it's a bit like saying, you know, what's it like to, you know, if I was to have a chat with a baby about what it's like to be a baby or to or to speak to, you know, someone who's got severe mental disability or something. There is just no way to have a conversation about that without them not being that thing. So like a baby, one of the features of being a baby is you haven't learned how to speak. So I can't, there's just no way of having a chat with a baby about what it's like to be a baby. And I suspect it's the same with an ant. But, you know, but on the other hand, we can communicate, you know, with there's a spectrum of things we can communicate with. Ant is very much, you know, one end quite hard, but then, you know, as you say, dogs, possibly whales, maybe there is enough of a shared set of experiences that we we could it's, you know, it's a it's it's feasible to imagine it working. Yeah, there's a there's a I think there's a an

Speaker C: 00:22:29

important distinction to think about where so you have communicate with bit as a sort of concept here, which is very much a two way process, you're, you're exchanging information and ideas both ways. And then there's being understood by which is kind of a one way thing. So I can understand my daughter, she can sort of communicate what she needs to me without it without me being able to communicate back necessarily. So she can, she indicates when she's hungry or tired or scared or confused or whatever, by how she behaves, and I can understand her. So what I think, when it comes to talking to when it comes to talking with aliens, or versus say ants, I think, I think the one way is probably much easier than the two way when you're when you're on a different tier of kind of intelligence or processing capability, let's call it. So I think we'd be we'd be very, we wouldn't be able to talk to an ant, but we would be able to talk to an alien quite easily. And they will be able to understand us assuming they're more intelligent, because they've crossed the vast spaces to get here. But they would they would probably struggle to talk down to us, because we wouldn't have the capacity to understand them, they would have to, they would have to learn our language and talk and limit the limit the sort of size of the the concepts they're trying to get across to us in the same way that we could probably communicate to an ant, but really on a very basic level, we could probably if an ant can say food left or food right, then we could probably devise a way of doing that. But we wouldn't be able to explain politics or philosophy to the ant, because

Speaker A: 00:24:04

they haven't got the capacity to do it. Look, we need to stop fairly soon. I think we actually we've sort of covered this reasonably well. Is there anything? I mean, is there anything, anything burning anyone wants to say at the moment? Well, I just I'm just wondering how

Speaker B: 00:24:24

how we would know if we cracked the language of whales?

Speaker A: 00:24:28

This is by the way, where we were remiss, we should have had Tom Spence on this. Because if you recall, he is fluent in dolphinese.

Speaker B: 00:24:36

That's a good point. But but let's say that. I mean, what would it look like? If we could talk to a whale? I'm just I don't have an answer to this. I'm just I'm just thinking it through. Like with humans, how do you know that you're communicating? It's a kind of quite rapidly established that there's consistency in terms of what you're saying and what they're saying back to you. You know that it's sort of people aren't surprising you by what they're doing. You don't say, oh, you know, can I have a packet of crisps and they give you some cigarettes instead? It's like, OK, well, you know, there's a thing that we're talking about. Yeah. And it's very rapidly established. How would that work? Just what could we do to do that

Speaker C: 00:25:16

with a whale? I'm going to posit a slightly flippant answer. We could devise a flippant flipperant. What will we'll devise the Willie test. So Willie, as in Willie, the whale test, which is like the Turing test. So if we can if we can like communicate to a whale through a wall so they can't see us and we can convince that whale that we are, in fact, a whale, then we've succeeded. How would we do that? Would we? Well, we'd talk, we'd talk, we'd converse with the whale. They could ask us questions. Oh, they talk back. They talk back. We'd ask them questions. And if they were convinced that they were talking to another whale that they just couldn't see, like over a whale telephone or something, then they that we have succeeded. But how you actually implement that test, I don't I don't like the Turing test as a thing. It's a very science fiction.

Speaker B: 00:26:05

But the trouble is that you would you would you could do that just by playing them sounds of whales. Now, I think I think it's like it has to appropriately respond to what they're saying.

Speaker C: 00:26:14

We have to have a proper conversation with them. Well, yeah. Well, exactly. But the sounds you play would have to be driven by something that correctly identifies what to play back. And I'd say that if you if you can crack that algorithm, you crack crack to take whale talking

Speaker B: 00:26:27

algorithm. Yeah. I still don't understand how you would know that if the whales just hanging around and saying things and you're saying things back, that is not evidence that that's just might be evidence that the whale likes being around the sound of other whales. It might not tell you

Speaker A: 00:26:39

anything about whether we're getting it right. He might also just think you're just a weird whale. Yeah, he's the strangest whale today. And there was something not quite right about wouldn't shut up about mustard. Yeah. We do need to finish very, very soon. I mean, it feels point given all that we've just talked about. It seems pointless trying to answer questions or pose questions like if you could talk to a squirrel or any animal, what would you talk? Yeah, let's do it anyway, though. I mean, it just feels like so notwithstanding everything we just said for the last 30 minutes. Right. Let's do it. I mean, what would you talk to? And you're not allowed to say alien. So what animal would you choose to talk to and what do you think you might have a chat about? I'm going to start off. And the reason I start off is I've got distracted just now because looking at my outside my window, I can see a jackdaw. And that's who I'd like to talk to that jackdaw and just have a chat. And but again, what is he going to be talking about? I would I would say, what are you doing? Well, I'm just a bit hungry, really feeling a bit cold today. What about you? And I said, well, I'm doing a podcast. And he would go, well, what's a podcast? And then we just get into this whole sort of thing. And no, I think it breaks down quite

Speaker B: 00:27:49

quickly. No, there's no because you could say, well, you know, when you're singing and the birds in the trees nearby can hear you. Well, imagine if you could sing and all the birds in the whole of Lincolnshire could hear you all at once. Wouldn't that be awesome? But then I could

Speaker A: 00:28:00

blow his his tiny jackdaw mind by saying, and I'm talking about what if we could talk to animals, i.e. you? He would maybe get him on as a guest. Yeah. I think you're making a lot of anthropomorphic assumptions about jackdaw thought. Yes. Yeah. No, I think you're probably quite right. Yeah. Chris, let's have you. Who would you talk to? I would I would definitely want to I'd want to talk to him to a limpet. Okay. I don't think I'd want to talk to the limpet. I want to hear what the limp has to say. Because I think I think a limpet would be an amazing kind of stoic philosopher. Go on. I just think they would have I think they'd have a really interesting insight into being in one place and having a lot of waves washing over you. But they don't have a lot of life with it. But beyond that, they don't have much life experience, do they? How do you know? Well, because they've just been one bloody place the whole time. Again, you're assuming you know what limpets are thinking. I want to hear from the limpet. Also, there's a there's a there's a there's a there's a guy who a philosopher called Secundus the Silent, I think. I look this guy up. He took a vow of silence and thereby became a famous philosopher. I think that's pretty, I think that's a pretty cool move. And I reckon the limpet could offer at least that. Yeah, a limpet might see as much variation in his little patch of rock as you see in the whole earth. That's just the thing. A limpet stays still, stuff happens to it. And it just chills there on its little place, doesn't go very far. You know, but it's got a lot of time to think, I reckon. Yeah, it might have given names to

Speaker B: 00:29:50

all the little bumps and ridges and grains in its shell. And, you know, I think it would have a lot

Speaker A: 00:29:56

to say about life. I wonder if you went from one limpet to another limpet and then to another limpet, how much difference you would see between the limpets? I hadn't really thought of that. But that's a good question. Yeah, maybe if I if I hit on the Stoic philosopher at the start, that would, that would be brilliant. But if I hit on the kind of like the boring one, he just sits there eating the rock and doesn't really think about life, then that would be a dull conversation.

Speaker C: 00:30:24

Peter? I'd like to talk to a tardigrade, but only after it's been quantumly entangled. What's a tardigrade? So tardigrades are small waterborne creatures. They are notoriously sort of tough. You can freeze them, you can boil them, you can do all sorts of things to them, and they they'll wake up. They sort of, they're still alive. But I came across my news feed, I came across a story, I think it's University of Texas. They've been doing quantum experiments on these tardigrades firing through particle accelerators to try and quantumly entangle them. I think it'd be a unique experience that we'd never be able to experience. So basically, what that means is in layman's terms, you're able to exist in multiple places at once.

Speaker B: 00:31:14

I feel it would be a confusing conversation. Some quantumly entangled tardigrade. I think there's two, you've been imposing two constraints there, I think.

Speaker A: 00:31:24

Okay, let's move on. So, Jackdaw, limpets, tardigrades. Nick?

Speaker B: 00:31:32

Yeah, so I think, okay, if you wanted to find stuff out, I think you'd go either for like creatures who live in a really weird environment, like, you know, animals from the deep sea, who might actually know interesting stuff about the deep sea works that we don't know. So that might be useful scientifically. Or very tiny animals who might see things that we're unable to perceive or experience or animals that have a very different perception of time, like I would imagine a sloth or something, you know, being seeing things almost at a different speed. But then there's also like important animals, and whether or not we can give them a hand. And the one that I would go for, I think is the bee, I'd like to talk to a bee, find out what gets them, you know, what makes them get out of their hive in the morning. And what happens when a colony collapses? You know, why are they, what can we do to give these guys a hand? You know, what's hard for them? And what's easy? But you know, I just like the idea of talking to a bee. I just think bees are awesome. And they're furry.

Speaker A: 00:32:29

I've got a little follow up question there. Do you think you really ought to speak to the whole hive at once? Yeah, that's a good question. Because if you just speak to one bee, I don't, I'm not sure they're going to be able to communicate

Speaker C: 00:32:41

without reference to the rest. Yeah, that'd be like talking to a single cell of a human, of another person. Just talking to a nose.

Speaker A: 00:32:50

Well, no, but hold on. Would it be like talking to the borg, where you're talking, actually you're talking to an individual bee, an individual borg, but actually through talking to that individual, you actually are talking to the whole hive.

Speaker C: 00:33:00

Yeah, I mean, I've never watched Star Trek. I don't think the bees have a shared consciousness. They have a collective consciousness, but not a shared one.

Speaker B: 00:33:08

Yeah, I think you're saying that there isn't like a bee spokesman we can find who's going to speak out on behalf of the bee community. It's all of the bees or it's none of them really. It's an excellent research project.

Speaker A: 00:33:20

Yeah. And why do you assume it's one community? Even just within the hive, there could be various communities, factions, schisms. All right. Now we're talking about the stuff I want to talk about.

Speaker B: 00:33:35

Bee politics.

Speaker A: 00:33:37

Yeah. All right. We're going to stop there. Anything to add before we finish anything at all? How about you can let Wittgenstein finish? Yeah. Okay. Go on. This is Wittgenstein. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Well, you say that, or Wittgenstein says that, but that's me out of a career. I mean, that could be zapped out of this podcast straight away and general life. All right. We'll stop there. Thanks as always for listening. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Chris Lear, Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.