I think we tend to drastically underestimate animals… Keep in mind, most of our pets are insanely inbred social animals who are undersocialized and basically left in solitary confinement for most of their life

But AI has led to some interesting results - we can now plot languages as high dimensional shapes in information space, which is basically the core of an LLM. All human languages have similar shapes - so they started to use similar techniques to create language models for animal languages.

We don’t have nearly enough data to train one yet, but already we’re finding that language is everywhere - what we thought were instinctual signals turn out to be a lot more like learned, symbolic languages than we’ve ever imagined

For example, names are everywhere - cats, dolphins, whales, and birds definitely have names… We’ve found language and names everywhere we’ve looked closely enough, and in even plants and fungi this might exist through chemical and electrical signals.

My point being - animals have their own internal model of the world. Do you think programmers are magic when you watch them change a few words and modify a program? Maybe, maybe not. I think artists are magical when they draw something from nothing… It genuinely blows my mind every time, because no matter how much I study it they’re doing something impossible for me

Some animals understand - we had a Boston terrier that genuinely understood vets were necessary, he absolutely hated it but would begrudgingly hop on the table and let them pose him or give him shots… Just like a person, he would do his best to disassociate and do what it took to get it over with ASAP. He wasn’t really an obedient dog - but he was cooperative. He was stubborn as hell until our interests aligned… We established he could scratch the door to come in or out, and he would secretly go off on adventures. One day we found him a mile away from our house, walking down the sidewalk with purpose - neighbors would sometimes tell us they saw him leaving the neighborhood, but he always looked before he crossed the street and used the sidewalk.

Our next dog loved to watch dog shows - one day my sister got a medal, and we put it on her and she smiled like her dream came true… Took it off and straight face. Put a lanyard with keys on her to see if she liked the weight - nothing. Put the medal back on - huge smile

It’s really ingrained in us that humans are unique in experience… We’re not. Animals can learn arithmetic and play video games, they can use Instagram and form rudimentary systems of government (crows are a great case study). Dogs can use pubic transport to travel between their den and hunting grounds. Animals can choose to seek out drugs or commit suicide. They can learn to use money and engage in prostitution, they can learn to cook food, they can seek out humans and ask for help. They can have language and understanding of the world - the big difference is they don’t have the same motivations.

So do they think humans are magic? Some of them do, others figure out how to work the light switch themselves, others just accept that lights turn on when humans are around