Eccentric Flower:199908/Talking to Koko

The students are back. I have to remind myself that it's not that I don't like college students; it's just that I don't like large crowds of people all trying to do the same thing at the same time.

I was going to follow up on the "crush film" silliness today, but something else happened instead, and I'd rather devote the rest of this entry to that. So if you want more on the crush films, for whatever inexplicable reason, go see this week's mouth organ.

I got mail from Rose this morning about Koko the gorilla. It mostly contained a copy of a message Rose wrote to another mailing list recently. Apparently they've been discussing Koko too.

I don't mean to fan the flames, but:

I have been a totally uncritical admirer of Koko and the scientists involved in teaching her ASL/GSL for at least twenty years. I was a child when the first stories about Koko and her kitten came out, and it's always been one of those, "Wow, isn't that lovely and fascinating" kind of things.

When this discussion started, I was delighted to learn that Koko had a web site, which I visited. There was a link to a "conversation" that Koko had participated in on AOL, on Earth Day last year.

This was one of the most incredibly dismaying and disillusioning things I've ever read, honestly. Koko seemed no more (and probably less) intelligent or articulate than a 1 1/2 year old child. Her interlocutor spent the entire interview translating what Koko had signed, most of which seemed tenuous to me at best. The interview took place in real time and was unedited. I really felt crushed reading this, and I have to admit, I feel had.

What I didn't get was why this was on their pro-Koko web site. If in fact these folks view this transcript as an example of Koko's linguistic abilities, then they are sadly deluded, as has already been suggested.

I, too, am a little surprised that they'd allow Koko to participate in an AOL chat ... it smacks of "publicity stunt" to me, and generally the Gorilla Foundation folks seem above that sort of pandering. But, hey, they're trying to build that big preserve on Maui ... maybe they need the money.

At any rate, I don't think a chat room is the ideal medium for someone or something that can't articulate English sounds and whose primary communication with humans is through gestures. To put this in perspective, imagine that you have a deaf human who cannot read or type who is going to participate in an online chat, and you'll see that some of the difficulties are not related to Koko's intelligence/lack of, but are limitations of a poorly-fitting medium.

As for Koko's intelligence itself, when I wrote my comments about the PBS program, I said I was convinced of her intelligence; I didn't say anything about what level she was functioning at. As it happens, I believe that Koko is perhaps as intelligent as a small child, and with about the same attention span - as is evidenced from the AOL transcript as well. Note how Koko is much more interested in playing around or getting candy from Penny than in actually answering questions.

Frankly, given what I've seen of Koko, I'm not surprised she had little interest in the proceedings. Not her kind of game. When she turned her back on it, that was it for her, but she obviously wasn't very interested from the beginning.

To really get the gist of Koko, imagine a small, rowdy child with the ticking biological clock of an adult woman in her thirties who wants to have a baby. She's less self-centered than a human infant, or a cat, but that doesn't mean she's patient either.

As far as I could tell, Koko was most effective at communicating when she wanted something - food, information, toys, attention, a hairbrush, et cetera. But even that is impressive to me. My cat may be intelligent, but my cat doesn't know how to tell me "I want to be brushed" vs. "I want attention" vs. "my litter box is filthy." I have no doubt - based on the way that my cat is squawking at me all the time - that he is attempting to convey message units. But it's hard to tell them apart.

Sometimes contextual clues and tonal clues help - if he's hollering by his food bowl, for example, the message is clear, and the "I'm annoyed" noise doesn't sound like the "I'm needy" noise ... but these aren't really effective communication, not by human standards.

Whether we like it or not, a large part of the way humans think of "intelligence" has to do with communication. This is why some ill-bred humans tend to think that deaf people using ASL are also retarded.

H. Beam Piper's first Fuzzy book (it's been a while, so I can't remember the title) has this as its central problem: Here is an alien species which seems to be doing intelligent things, but we have no way of really communicating with them - how can we tell if they're sentient ... and therefore inviolate?

That brings us to the final question, which isn't scientific but political. We are much more inclined to be kind to other species on this planet if we think they're intelligent. Just like the old farm rule says "never name anything you intend to eat," it's harder to exploit something once you've had a conversation with it.

Maybe gorillas are more intelligent than we think they are. Maybe less. But they are definitely endangered, hunted despite protection laws, and running out of habitat. If having people think gorillas are smart gives them more protection from humans, then it's a Good Thing ... no matter how true it happens to be.