#And yes--that gorilla is Koko

[real-team-luster]

Rotomblr denizens, do any of you remember the Rillaboom in a Unovan zoo who her caretaker claimed could understand sign language? I believe the legitimacy of the experiment has since been called into question, and the Rillaboom herself has since passed away, but it was a fascinating case nonetheless.

[roguekhajiit]

A debate I had on Reddit about abortion rights.

The person I'm arguing with is an active participant of the Mensa subreddit, so they already fancy themselves a genius to some extent.

Me:

No arms, no legs, no heart, no brain. Just a blood vessel pumping blood from the host to the clump of cells.

And the "But there's a heartbeat" excuse is a lie. You're only hearing the host's blood pumping into cells cause the heart isn't fully formed until 10 weeks. Additionally, the brain isn't even fully developed until 24 weeks. No heart organ, no brain, it's not a viable life outside its host body.

Them:

Yeah that's an empirical argument to deny ontology. That's not convincing to anyone who thinks there is an essence to being human that isn't tied to having arms and legs.

Me:

I'm sorry, but are you trying to use philosophy to argue whether or not someone is capable of living without a heart, brain, and lungs?

Them:

How do you determine what is human and what is not? Arms and legs? What do you call someone without arms and legs? Or a mechanic heart? You can't answer the question 'what is human' based on physical qualities only. So yes, logically you cannot answer the question without philosophy.

Me:

I think you are confusing personhood with the human species.

A person is someone who can think, breathe, and exist on their own. They have a personality and their own opinions on subjects like abortion.

A human being or homo sapiens is a species on earth that evolved enough to form social groups and cultures and, therefore, are capable of personhood. Some other more complex animals might be capable of personhood, like Koko the Gorilla. She was intelligent, learned to communicate using sign language, and even had her own pet.

I'm not discussing this subject in terms of personhood. A fetus isn't developed enough to form a sense of personhood if it can't even survive on its own at 2 months gestation.

Them:

I'm talking about the essence of what makes one a living human. As long as pregnant women before the 3rd month believe they're carrying a child, which is all of them who want to *keep* the child, I am not appealed by the argument that it's suddenly no longer a child but rather a fetus for biological/scientific/empirical reasons when there are various financial and social advantages of it being so.

The points you mention are even still different from mine.

Me:

>The points you mention are even still different from mine.

Correct because again, you fail to see the point of the argument.

You yourself say;

>As long as pregnant women before the 3rd month believe they're carrying a child, which is all of them who want to *keep* the child,

That's all fine and dandy cause it's her *choice* to do so, not yours and not the government's. But it's not yours or anyone else's place to force your philosophical or religious views on an entire nation and bully us all into following them by making your opinions a law.

Them:

It's a choice to recognise a human as a human, you're saying? So where's the end to that travesty of logic? A cat is a dog, a man is a woman, that dog is a man and that man is a dog. That's a wild world you're living in. I don't see the world that way, it defeats both logic and common sense. But it surely makes a way to justify doing whatever the hell you like doing. I won't force morality on you, but I'll tell you when it's absent.

Me:

Again, you're trying to use philosophy to argue science, and that gets us nowhere. I already stated I'm not talking from a philosophical standpoint.

You can see the world however you want. Your morals aren't always going to line up with your neighbors morals. Your neighbor might think it's immoral to eat any kind of meat. Are you gonna give up that steak dinner cause they can smell it in their living room? How would you feel if the entire government decided eating meat is a crime and, therefore, it's banned and you go to jail just for eating a hamburger. Kinda sucks when other people force their philosophy and religion on you by passing laws to get their way.

Now I know you're gonna be like, "But you can't compare pregnancies to diets!" But you're already equating philosophy with science. So, let me give you another scenario.

Do you like eggs? Eggs are just undeveloped chickens who were denied the ability to develop and hatch. Will you give up your eggs and bacon just because your vegan neighbor says it's immoral?

Since to you personhood and human are one and the same. Say aliens decide to visit earth; they have arms and legs and a brain, can speak, express emotions, and have their own culture. Are they human? Do we give them the same rights as you and me even though they weren't born on earth and are basically invading our planet? Or are they just displaying personhood?

If you say yes, they are human and deserve the same rights as you and me, then you also need to give those same rights to the "illegal aliens" that cross the border.

Why are undeveloped fetuses given more rights to life than families with children who are trying to seek a better life? Why do we value a fetus over the actual baby? Once it's born, if the mother says she needs help, she's scorned and looked down on for asking for WIC, foodstamps, and cash benefits to help feed and cloth her baby. She should have thought of that before deciding to have a baby, right? But if she decides she's unable to afford a baby, and she can't afford to take time off because the pregnancy is making it hard for her to work, she's called a murderer for seeking an abortion.

To pro-life advocates, a fetus is more important before it's born than after it's born. And you won't convince me otherwise. The same people pushing for abortion bans, banning mifepristone (a drug that's also necessary to help with incomplete miscarriages), and even simple birth control are the same people who vote to cut funding to welfare programs, free lunch programs, and to entire school districts. That's not very pro-life of them now, is it?

-------

They gave up the argument after that.

I could have converted this into a rant solely from my perspective, but I felt it would be better just to copy it as a script.

Pro-lifers are not actually pro-life. They are just anti-women and anti-choice. If they actually cared about the fetus, they would care about it after its born by passing laws and regulations that would ensure the child has the best quality of life possible and every chance to succeed. Instead, time and again, they vote against those laws.

They don't care about the fetus once it's born. Why is that? Could it be that their true goal all along is to force women back into submission because they romanticize the bygone era of the 1800s and early 1900s when women didn't hold jobs, didn't vote, and couldn't do anything without their husband's explicit permission?

I dunno, that's just the vibe I get from the anti-choice supporters. Why else would they say things like, "Stop riding dick if you can't take accountability." But then start foaming at the mouth when you remind them accountability goes both ways. When's the last time they made a child support payment?

[vampirejuno]

Mutual 1: ughhhhh I hate him I hate him so much I want to kill him and rip him apart with my teeth!!!!!! [Picture of character who is present in their url, avatar, and background photo]

Mutual 2: if another customer asks me to scan their 59 expired coupons I will dismember myself in front of them

Mutual 3: shitting again!! #diarrhea #ibs #girl dinner #student life #cottagecore

Mutual 4: poll should I move to Nebraska yes/no

Mutual 5: I need [character from children's cartoon] to vivisect me and then gently stitch me back together so I can unbecome and be remade

Mutual 6: what if we all killed our selves together. On the count of three

Mutual 7: [16 reblogs of the saw bathroom scene]

Mutual 8: baked a pie today there is still beauty in the world 😍❤️💗😌😊👍✨🥰💕👌🥺

Mutual 9: love tastes like acid in my mouth I want to rip it out of my chest but it's taken root like an invasive plant and it's covering all the walls with its vines and I'm drowning myself in pesticides and the gardener (my therapist) is shaking his head in disappointment. This metaphor has gotten away from me

Mutual 10: finally finished that little project. Not super happy with it but at least it's done [picture of 12×8ft tapestry, hand-embroidered]

Mutual 11: do you guys think they're more of a boygirl or more of a girlboy. Here's some evidence to consider [15 pictures of gerard way in mini skirts and lab coats]. Discuss.

Mutual 12: -and it's absolutely ridiculous to imply that Koko the gorilla knew real sign language when if you do even a little research you'll see that the scientists were reading too much into her responses, there was zero grammar present in her communication, they didn't even consult actual deaf people and the whole thing stinks of wishful thinking. Op should be ashamed of themselves. Also fuck Chomsky

[retroactivebakeries]

2024 Tumblr Top 10

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Created by TumblrTop10

[olyoyl]

2 suburban white moms talking about their kids “oh yes this is koko :)” and the second one is like “oh like the deaf gorilla?” And she’s like “No it’s short for Kokopelli in Native American folklore it belongs to a trickster god representing the essence of playfulness and whimsy :)” the other says nothing she just bites into her deviled egg and you can hear their cheap Etsy jewelry

[lilja4ever]

Yes i know koko the gorilla is a lie and wasnt actually communicating but when she was asked where do we go when we die and she signed "comfortable hole bye" that like changed me psychologically

[izzywhisker]

"Even My Tears Are Crying" Awards 2023

;_;

Yes, I'm jumping on the bandwagon and doing a huge contest/competition/tournament to find out what The People think are the best tears.

Huge thanks to @lutzlig @nonbiney-swag-competition @autismswagsummit @weirdgirlshowdown @worstcharacterpoll @homestuck-best-girl-tournament @dissociationswagcompetition @novafire-is-thinking @ultimatefnaf-favoritecompetition @nicejewishcharactershowdown @ultimaterobotblorbo and anyone else who paved the way.

Rules

CRYING The emotional impact on YOU doesn't matter. At least one character or person must be shown crying.

FALLING At least one tear must have fallen from the eye and rolled down the cheek (or left the eye and entered the air anime-style). Blobs of fluid sitting in the tear duct does not count: If the character held it together long enough to wipe away tears, then a tear didn't fall.

MEDIA Shows / Cartoons / Anime / Movies / Comics / Manga / Music videos / Album covers / Illustrations from books / School textbooks / Memes … etc.

VISUAL DEPICTIONS ONLY. In the song Kindness Of Strangers by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, the track contains a depiction of someone sobbing. But there is no official music video release, so this doesn't count. In the video for Ich Tuh Dir Weh by Rammstein, the singer is shown sheedding tears because of the physical stress of having punctured his cheek for the video. This counts.

Books are not allowed. …unless they have a movie/show/comic book adaption. I don't care if "the book did it better", the only text walls I want to see is everyone's love for their entries.

Tears can be for any reason. As mentioned above, if someone is odd enough to puncture a hole in his cheek for a music video, it counts. Sadness, happiness, relief, anger, jealousy, rage… Even if the character got hit and is reeling in tears from the shock.

Non-humans are included. If a character has a TV head and displays an image of crying, within the context, that is allowed. Anthro/Furry characters shedding tears is allowed. Normal animals whimpering is NOT allowed. Sorry, but there will be no entry from Koko the gorilla signing "sad, cry" when she was told her cat died. Sign language and AAC is of course allowed, but remember there must be tears. This is a tears contest, not a sadness contest.

No Runny Noses Tears of blood are allowed. Any fluid coming from the person's eye(s), whether a natural part of the bodily makeup or not.

Please only nominate each scene once. Five entries gets the scene into the contest. If you want it in, ask your friends or fandom community for help.

In the event of multiple entries per show or character "Usagi Tsukino / Izuku Midoriya / etc is a crybaby!!" "There is so, so much crying in Steven Universe!!" If there are many scenes from one show or character, I will hold preliminary polls to find out which scene will be included in the main poll.

Series of movies or huge franchises? Things like Ghibli movies can have an entry each, but huge continuities like Transformers or Pokemon will be narrowed down to one entry in preliminaries.

"Official release" only. Basically anything called "official", so behind the scenes releases from DVDs, deleted scenes, A person sobbing and thanking their fans is only valid if it's released officially. Those Markiplier videos count.

Official DVD release of the live music show where the singer cries on stage, is not the same as someone's viral video recorded from the audience. I hope that clears up the difference.

Submission Entries will be submitted to izzywhisker ask box. Write as much or as little as you wish. Pictures or videos are welcome, especially if the media is obscure. Anon is on, but I will not publish the asks unless I have permission from you (anonymous asks cannot include pictures/video as part of the post.)

Deadline is Monday 20th Feb.

Updates every few days or so until the actual voting begins. I'm totally winging it and expect to be overwhelmed with responses, but of course I can handle it. *sheds a single manly tear*

[darkwood-sleddog]

#a lot of notes in this seem very divisive for various valid reasons#I have personally taught my dog the use of many words without the use of buttons#however I Do want to get buttons for him ar some point#partially as a form of enrichment since there are very few activities he can do outside since he has lupus#and a heart murmur and many environmental allergies#but also because he seems to get very excited when I am able to correctly interpret what he tries to communicate to me#to each their own but there has in fact been and currently are active studies regarding the accuracy of dogs who learn to use buttons#and can string together complex thought and questions unprompted#its like refusing to give a nonverbal disabled person a tool that would help them communicate and understand the world better#dogs like to learn! they enjoy carrying out complex tasks! if they want to do it and it improves your bond#let them!

Hey,

I mean this in the nicest way possible, but please do not compare nonverbal disabled people to dogs. They are human beings with intrinsically different, human needs and brains than dogs and this comparison is ALL too common.

This comparison is also commonly made by the speech therapist who has recently popularized these buttons, Hunger for Words. There is deeply ableist language in this woman's book regarding disabled people and the comparison of them to animals. One of the users on this website recently did a breakdown of the book here from a dog behavior perspective and it is NOT GREAT. This upholding as human verbal language as the 'one superior form of communication' needs to stop. Dogs have a language that they speak clearly already, it just takes effort to learn it. Saying that dogs, who are not cognitively the same with language as human beings, must rise to our level rather than the other way around is pretty ridiculous.

If you find that a button helps your dog communicate with you for simple tasks, such as "outside" or "potty", or to provide enrichment, that is fine, you are clearly communicating to your dog in other ways, but do not fall prey to the idea these buttons are good for anything other than simple tasks. Also do not fall for the studies being done, they are full of red flags that will destroy their legitimacy. I have yet to see a study that is 1.) not based on self reporting 2.) employs animal behaviorists and animal behavior scientists and 3.) has worked within their study to reduce the potential for the Clever Hans Effect.

Buttons are far too susceptible to over-interpretation by humans and the Clever Hans Effect. I've talked about this pretty extensively on my blog, but basically: animals are EXPERTS at reading our body language, even if it's body language we do not intend. This causes animals to provide behaviors that will get them a positive response. Is this communication: yes. Is this use of human language in the way dog button people think it is? No. Clever Hans the horse did not know math, but the experiment still proved horses had a great intelligence for reading human body language. The lack of ability to communicate via human verbal language/human math/human sign language does not = unintelligent.

A good example of over-interpretation, much like we see on Stella, Bunny and many other modern button animals is the "sign-language" of Koko the Gorilla. She could form signs successfully, but could not use them linguistically in a string of sentences. Her handler would then provide these crazy interpretations of what Koko "said" when other scientists did not have access to her and could not confirm Koko's abilities outside of the supervision of her owner/handler. I covered that a bit in a reblog of an old post HERE.

Dogs are so good at reading our unintended body language that drug sniffing dogs are effectively unreliable because they often pick up on their handler's unconscious biases towards people of color and false positive these people at a very high rate compared to white people. I covered that HERE. If a highly trained drug sniffing dog can fall prey to this, certainly the average pet owner training buttons at home is also going to have their pet reading their unintended cues and/or associating a button "incorrectly". We will have no way to know.

I understand your tags were not in any sort of malice, nor is this reblog. I am only seeking to spread awareness within my own posts on the subject of WHY we must have extreme scrutiny of this trend.

If dog buttons have one hater I am that very hater.

Communicating “in the same language for the first time” through dog buttons as Christina Hunger describes in her book is a failure of the most human proportion, putting too much value on the human (English) spoken word and ignoring that every detail, movement, twitch of our dogs is an act of communication itself. They are already communicating with us, just as human and primitive dog first did thousands of years ago. Just how we have shaped each other’s evolution by our very relationship. The dog understands you without buttons. If you can’t understand a dog without buttons, or “speak the same language” without human spoken language that is your HUMAN failure.

[aokozaki]

Yes I'm thinking about Koko the Gorilla's "final message" to humanity, how could you tell?

[tenaflyviper]

Remembering Betty White's Legacy:

(January 17, 1922 - December 31, 2021)

Today, the world lost more than just a beloved television icon.

Though she later became known as the "First Lady of Television", Betty White put her early career on hold during World War II in order to join the American Women's Voluntary Services. Beforehand, she had worked in radio, theater, and modeling (the latter in spite of film studios telling her she "wasn't photogenic"). She drove a supply truck by day, and at night she participated in send-off dances for servicemen shipping off to war.

In 1954, she got her first nationally aired television show, The Betty White Show. During a time in which men still dominated the entertainment industry, Betty was given full creative control of her show, and even hired a female director to run it. This was long before the feminist movement began its rise to prominence.

The program frequently featured black tap dancer Arthur Duncan, to the point where he is credited as the first black series regular on a talk/variety show. Betty and the show were both heavily criticized, and threatened with boycott from many viewers in the South. Betty stood her ground, and famously replied,

"I said, ‘I’m sorry. Live with it.'”, before giving Duncan even more screen time. Sadly, repeated changes in time slots--and the resulting lower viewership--eventually led to the show's cancelation not long after.

Aside from being an entertainer, Betty was nearly just as well-known for being a pioneering animal rights activist, and was very passionate about animal conservation.

She donated to numerous animal charities (and a few human ones, too!), including:

American Humane Association

Morris Animal Foundation

Helen Woodward Animal Center

PAWS/LAPetco Foundation

SPCA-LA

GLAAD

Elton John AIDS Foundation

NAACP

Human Rights Campaign

Red Cross

American Heart Association

Special Olympics

St. Francis Food Pantries and Shelters

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital

And several others.

Over the span of her seven-decades-long career--which Guinness World Records officially certified in 2014 as the longest ever for a female entertainer--she took home five Primetime Emmys, one competitive Daytime Emmy, a lifetime achievement Daytime Emmy in 2015, and a Los Angeles regional Emmy in 1952.

She left behind so, so much more than that. From being "The First Lady of Television" to "America's Grandmother", Betty White touched the hearts of millions--both human and animal alike. She may no longer be with us on Earth, but she has many friends where she is now.

[gayluigi]

One thing I see from critics of things like gorilla ASL and animals using buttons is like “how dare you compare these animals to disabled people?!” when people talk about how these forms of communication are discounted. I don’t think it’s harmful to disabled people to say “hey, we took these methods of communication that work well with disabled people and applied them to animal behavior as an experiment, and it worked surprisingly well! these animals can tell us what they need now! that’s so cool, right?”

Like, I see that argument as offensive to disabled people, personally. You’re calling their way of communicating inferior, saying it doesn’t count as language, when for some people, yes, human beings, the only way they can communicate is through AAC devices or rudimentary sign. I know of a little girl who has a service dog through our local program who is very developmentally disabled who can only speak through AAC, and she can’t really form sentences— she just presses the picture that corresponds to what she wants or feels. Are you telling me that she’s not speaking through her AAC device? Are you telling me that her way of communicating isn’t valid? Without her device, she would be voiceless, and her parents would have no idea what she wanted, needed, or felt. Her understanding of language is very rudimentary. She can’t really hold a conversation with you. But she can express her preferences and feelings when asked, and that is HUGE for her!!!

People have such a narrow mindset when it comes to communication. Sure, Stella the dog may not be forming full sentences when she presses the buttons for “outside walk park”, but doesn’t the owner still get the message? The dog is telling you she wants to take a walk to the park, and her owner, through her experience as a speech pathologist, has given her the tools to express that desire! That’s INCREDIBLE!!

And people are like “if you know dog body language, you should know what they want just by reading their cues.” That’s all well and good, but sometimes, a dog will just stand there and stare at you and wag their tail, and you’ll have NO IDEA what they want. Do they want a snack? Do they wanna go outside? Do they need their medication? That dog cannot physically form words. Button training is a huge hassle, and I’ve never done it myself, but with my late dog, sometimes I would’ve given anything to know what was going on inside her head. I feel like buttons would’ve made her life a lot easier if I had known about them when she was little so she could tell us if we skipped a dose of her medicine or if she was in pain, since she was medically complex.

Is it language? You can argue about that until you’re blue in the face. Is it communication? Absolutely.

And you can debate the ethics of the primate signing practices all day too. I don’t personally think those experiments were conducted particularly ethically. But they did teach us that these beautiful creatures are far more intelligent than we previously gave them credit for! I think that counts for something! A generation of kids fell in love with gorillas after reading Koko’s Kitten and learned that these incredible creatures are capable of complex thought instead of only being brutal beasts! I think that’s pretty phenomenal.

Koko the gorilla didn't know ASL but, like, you could say that without invalidating the existence of speech-supporting signs

[fic-dumpster]

After reading It's cold

Y/N remembers she knows how to knit and makes Kakucho a Sweater and for Mikey some socks because that man know no other way of footwear than flip flops

Y/n: here for you :3

Kakucho and Mikey: *dying from cuteness*

The boys planing how to get a handmade gift because peace was never an option in this gang

I feel like I made a lot of ask but I can contain myself this au is so damn cute

Headcanons? 😅 NANDIJAKDOF ta-da?

And they don’t know shit about crafts and handmade stuff.

Like I can see them trying to make soap bars and following YouTube tutorials and Sanzu trying to chop the soap with his Katana.

Then maybe after that doesn’t go as planned and trying to stop Mikey from biting the colorful soap bars, Ran and Rindou searched the Internet for something like “handmade for girlfriend. Gifts easy to do” 😂💕 and somehow they find crayon art...

Abort mission. Somehow Kakucho accidentally blew the wax towards Kokonoi and now his hair is kinda burnt... He screamed.

We skipped Takeomi and Kakucho going through the school section at the store... That was something....

Just imagine two big dudes with scars on their faces... Buying a cart of idk crayola crayons in the american section because the tutorial had that american brand.

Takeomi:buy any crayons!It's the same🤦🏻‍♂️

Kakucho: No☝️, the video showed the American ones.

Btw, Mochi took you out for some shopping as an excuse to keep you out of the house.

Handmade chocolates were out of the question. They all remember the White day fiasco (dont ask I will elaborate soon)

Rindou found this “Reasons why I love you” DIY idea. And they tried.

Koko: *sees what Sanzu wrote* you can't tell Y/N that!

Sanzu: why not? Is true.

Ran: you cant because I already wrote about her butt.

Koko: that’s not-

Takeomi: be more creative, you idiot

Kakucho: Mikey wrote about her soft boobs.

Rindou: yeah, exactly. Look at mine; I wrote about her pussy's gorilla grip.

Koko: *face contorted in pain* no...

Koko burned it all... Shouting about how they were a bunch of degenerates. The intention was there, but their wording... 😔

Finally Koko had enough and purchased tickets to a cruise…

Y/N: *arrives* *smells smoke* Takeomi! Don't smoke with the windows closed!

Everyone: *hiding everything* YES TAKEOMI!

Takeomi: ಠ_ಠ

To be continued? 😣

[ihatebnha]

Yesss! Men do need to love animals! All Might like all animals, but especially the huge, fluffy dogs and cats, like Samoyed dogs and Maine Coon cats! Present Mic especially love talking birds like parrots and Mynah birds. Stain occasionally feed stray cats and dogs, and is quite fond of domestic rats because of how social and smart they are. Spinner will never admit it, but he has a soft spot for reptiles and barely can stop himself from gushing when he see cute geckos, turtles, snakes, etc.

*crying* yes... yes.............

Crying at the thought of All Might going nuts when he see dogs... even tho he has preferences, he can't help but giving all of them the ol' watermelon slap. I also see him looking good with little wiener dogs and corgis who wag their little butts at him... dogs probably LOVE him, too (because he's so bad at resisting puppy dog eyes at the dinner table)

Present Mic liking birds is making me laugh tho!!! looks like and LOVES parakeets, as well. anything colorful i feel like... also probably weirdly obsessed with like... koko the gorilla too LOOOL and other cute monkeys.

ALSO STAIN OMG... he's a fucking weirdo but i definitely imagine in a normal!au he's that guy who's like... always talking about how cool rodents are. probably even has a few that he plays with all the time and carries around LMFAOOO... but yes absolutely takes care of strays...

and spinner... YES!!!! ofc he's nice to ALL animals bc they are his Kin but especially in regard to what u said. gets into so many heated debates about the proper care of them and probably is obsessed with you if you have one. it's berry sweet, honestly.

ANYWAY... i was mostly thinking cats and dogs, but this was perfect anon, so thank u!!! thinking about this topic makes me all fuzzy inside tbh <333

[marlynnofmany]

I have been sick and in my bed for a couple of days, but have been saved from being completely miserable by reading A Swift Kick to the Thorax. Thanks for writing it and putting it out there. Such a fast paced, fun adventure! So many marvelous characters, but if I had to choose a favourite? My heart belongs to Dragon! 🥰

Thank you! I'm sorry you're sick, but so glad you're enjoying the book. And yes, Dragon has a special place in my heart too. I read Koko's Kitten at a young age, and have thought highly of gorillas ever since. One of my friends even went on to work with Koko, and I checked with that friend to make sure I was writing Dragon right. He deserves the best!

[meggtheegg]

💞✨

what was your first special interest?

Animals, in various forms. I was a very strange kid who desperately wanted a taxidermy bison head because my grandparents took me on a trip to Yellowstone and I thought they were the coolest animals ever, and then my favorite restaurant had an animatronic singing bison head, so little me’s brain just went “yes. this is a thing I need in my life.” I apparently used to go on ebay and print pictures of bison heads out to show to my teachers. then the animatronic one at the restaurant glitched out while I was eating there and it was an immediate 180 because in that moment I realized taxidermy was actually dead animals and not magical singing creatures that could be my friends, and it turned from a special interest to a massive phobia that haunted me well into middle school. At the same time that I was printing out pictures of taxidermy, I was also obsessed with a book series about kids whose parents like owned a vet clinic and my amazing parents found the one kids’ vet simulator game for windows xp and I played it every moment I was on the family computer. Then, I discovered Koko the gorilla, and though I remember very little from that phase, I reconnected years later with a girl who went to my school at the time, and when I reminded her of who I was, she said “oh my gosh, you were the gorilla girl!” So, yeah

do you own any stim toys?

I have some stress balls and one squishy, somewhere, plus some of that “crazy aaron’s thinking putty,” but nothing that’s strictly designed for stimming. My little brother does, though, because he was diagnosed at a really young age and got a ton of stim toys that I was constantly stealing from him. most of them are gone, by now, but there are still a few things he has left over.

[baeddel]

no-rx

i think the use of grammaticity here is itself kind of problematic especially with the discursive affordances

no-rx

frankly dogs are already grammatical creatures in any sense we should expect them to be. a bigger red flag in that discourse for me was [does "sad" mean "how sad"]...

no-rx

i might be being outrageous tho

right, yeah I get what you mean. Among linguists, a position like Chomsky held that language is unique to humanity is now in the extreme minority, the most prominent I think is that our language evolved out of pre-human linguistic structures used by our ancestors. Animals communicate with each other in tremendous detail, and straightforwardly understand one another, and we do not find this surprising. The problem that this kind of discourse encounters is that theres a presumption that speaking the language humans do requires some extremely high level of intelligence, that it is a special unique privileged position that we either should not assume animals have (so its a hoax etc) or we should assume animals have (because we have cognitive biases about how special we are etc) - either way familiar human languages are awarded a special position that it probably shouldn’t have.

So my concern with saying the dog understands and uses grammar is that it makes us think a certain way about grammar, or the grammar we use, that we assume that if a dog can communicate something to us it is capable of something surprisingly intelligent, etc. but dogs communicate to us all the time, for example with ‘gaze alteration’ (they look at you, look at what they want to show you, look back at you, etc... my dog does this all the time with the fridge and he is saying: get me ham!) We already find a highly sophisticated form of communication between human and dog, developed as much by dogs as by humans.

but yeah, re: “how sad” etc... My biggest issue w/ some of this discourse is that the ‘skeptical’ position is like, okay, sure, they can say it, but do they understand it? One reblog said “this is just the Chinese Room, we did this already.” Its kind of correct to connect it with the Chinese Room but we have definitely not done the Chinese Room already, for some reason people who hear about it think it proves something but its really not solved... (And is there a thinker more degraded now than Searle?) [For those who don’t know, the ‘thought experiment’ goes like this: a guy who doesn’t speak Chinese is in a little room and people give him instructions about what Chinese word they want. He reads the instructions, goes and gets the word and gives it to them. Despite being able to use Chinese, he doesn’t understand Chinese.]

My favourite objection to the problem goes like this: the guy in the Chinese Room actually does understand Chinese. This sounds totally crazy and it takes a lot to explain I think lol but you can sort of see that in terms of the dog. Say you teach the dog to say “bye”, and you teach it to use it whenever someone leaves. It understands “bye” as “the thing you do when someone leaves”. Does it understand what “bye” means? I feel like we have to say yes, it does. What do I understand by “bye”, other than what I say when someone leaves? I don’t have some kind of deeper true understanding of “bye”, I simply know its place in the structure of everyday life, ie. I know how to follow the instructions and get the right Chinese word. In what deeper sense can I be said to understand the word “bye”? So the dog and I understand “bye” in just the same way. If we accept this it starts to destabilize a lot of the common sense objections to the dog’s understanding (and to an A.I.’s understandng).

This leads us to wonder: in what sense could Clever Hans not count? We might see this as a problem for this position or we might not.

I will say though, this kind of thing, I try to be careful because of Koko the Gorilla & stuff like that... Most people don’t really know this about Koko but she was like, chronically sexually abused by her handler, and her handler used her to sexually harass her female employees. And the work she was doing was ethically compromised in a lot of ways besides. But she got kind of a big reputation because she had this talking Gorilla, which she marketed in a kinda sensationalist way... In the 70s, in the middle of the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy and in academia in general, you had a lot of these experiments to try and teach different animals how to speak a human language, and they all ended in these really bizarre catastrophes. Why should this be the case? I don’t really know, but perhaps there is just something wrong about trying to force a familiar model of communication onto another animal. So seeing just this kind of experiment repeated (by a speech therapist, no less) and made into like an instagram thing, yknow... I’m not saying its wrong necessarily, my mum puts as much enthusiastic content about our dog on instagram after all, and I am always trying to find ways to communicate more effectively with my dog, but its hard not to associate it with that stuff...