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simianwords • yesterday at 4:02 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

there's this notion that things are so arbitrary and beings are so different that one can't understand eachother. I find this fascinatingly wrong.

No, we can't understand lions because lions are kinda stupid. We can't understand lions also because we haven't researched them enough.

My bet: once "beings" cross an IQ threshold, they can start to understand each other.


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EarthBlues • yesterday at 4:57 PM

You might be right. I dont think its certain though. Humans seem to be able to communicate across language gaps in ways we can't with animals. Things really could be that different. For example, all human languages that we know about have some idea of a who doing something to a whom, even if they express it in drastically different syntax. For all we know (I'm just making this up, don't take it too seriously), whales might experience the world as a stream of objects. Maybe that's perfectly fine for whale existence. But we can't even really conceptualize that! And how would we know, anyway?

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