Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Alien Contact: Part 2 (#016)

Episode Date: April 1, 2018

We’re continuing our conversation from episode 14 about alien contact by focusing on language barriers: barriers betweens humans and aliens, humans and animals, and, in what some consider the most alien encounter of all, between scientists and artists. With acclaimed science fiction writer Ted Chiang, dolphin researcher Christine Johnson, and visual artist Lisa Korpos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Five, four, three, two. In the film Arrival, aliens park their vessels in 12 places around the earth and begin trying to communicate with humans who speak different languages and exist in different cultural contexts from each other. More objects have landed around the world. This is one of 12. I'm never going to be able to speak their words.

Got two days. Figured something out. But it's slow going and fear starts to overrule. What is this say? Offer weapon. I don't need an interpreter to know what this means. We don't know if they understand the difference between a weapon and a tool. China just threatened to destroy their shell.

Whatever they do, France and Korea will follow. We could be facing global war. In another film, this would be where humanity across the globe, unites to repel an alien invasion. It's a common trope that an existential threat is the one thing that can bridge our national divisions. Mankind, that word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore.

We will be united in our common interest. Perhaps it's fate that today is the 4th of July. And you will once again be fighting for our freedom, not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution, but from annihilation. In arrival, the trope gets flipped on its head. You know, they don't actually unite to combat an alien threat. That's Ted Chang, and this is a good time to say, mild spoilers ahead. What happens is that a gift of communication is what allows the nations to unite. And it's that gift of communication that is actually offered by the aliens.

You're listening to Into the Impossible, a podcast about how we imagine and how what we imagine shapes what we do. from the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. I'm Patrick Coleman, and today we're going to continue our conversation from episode 14 about alien contact, but this time focusing on language barriers, barriers between human and alien, human and animal, and in what some consider the most alien encounter of all,

between scientist and artist. Now, getting back to a rival, Amy Adams plays a character named Louise Banks, a linguist who begins to decode the aliens' strange verbal and written language. Sonically, this is what she hears. The aliens, nicknamed Heptopods, right in the air, using a floating, inky, cloudy script, dominated by circular forms and little glyph-like variations.

It turns out their language, is non-linear. It doesn't move beginning to end, left to right, or forward in time, the way some of ours do, the way we experience time as people. And as Louise learns this language, her perception of time slips. She sees her past vividly and becomes aware of her own future in the same way I might become aware of a squirrel in that tree across the way. This idea that language shapes thought is referred to as the Superior Wharf hypothesis among linguists. Ted Chang, the celebrated writer of many award-winning science fiction stories, including the one that was adapted for arrival, joined us for the San Diego premiere of the film last year,

and told us about how this alluring idea entered into his conception for the story. But then, you know, I was not thinking of the Superior Wharf hypothesis, which is the idea that language can shape not only your thoughts but your perception of reality. And even though sort of the strong version of the Superior War hypothesis has been discredited by linguists, I have always thought

it's a really fascinating idea and it has been the basis for a lot of interesting science fiction stories. And I thought having a story in which my protagonist learns an alien language and in that way gains knowledge of what lays ahead. That seemed to me a really interesting way to tell this story as a sort of dawning grasp of the understanding of time

as the protagonist learns this language. And this has implications for the larger global plot of the film. which sees world powers misunderstanding what the aliens are trying to communicate, and in doing so, move closer and closer to preemptively obliterating them. A smaller scale storyline of the film, it's about language and understanding. And that the global conflict in the movie, it is about language promoting, you know, creating understanding. sort of writ large.

Louise's new cognitive capacity, enabled by the alien language to see time in a non-linear way, is also what allows her to see and accept great personal tragedy and ultimately what allows her to stop global calamity and foster international harmony. It's a win for international and intergalactic communication. It's amazing for a Hollywood film that the central drama of the second act

is watching a linguist try to figure out how to conceptualize the way that a creature from another planet with seven legs and no clear front or back would communicate. Even among us humans, there's variation, and these variations imply how language shapes the way we think, and interposes in how we experience the world through our bodies. As Lira Boroditsky, a linguist at UC San Diego, has noted, in some cultures the future is envisioned as,

in front of us and the past behind, while in others it's the opposite. The past is imagined as being behind, and that aspect is featured in their language, because we can't see the past, just like we can't see what's behind us. For a tribe of North Australian Aborigines, they maintain a sense of cardinal directions at all times. Think saying your northwest leg instead of your left leg. When ordering a series of narrative photographs, these Aborigines didn't arrange them left.

to write the way we might in following the order of words in a sentence, but from east to west, following the track of the sun. As we touched on in the last episode with Jeff Vandemir, even understanding our nearest neighbors in the animal kingdom is incredibly challenging. I was curious to explore this more and turn to Christine Johnson, who leads the dolphin cognition laboratory here, and Lisa Corpos, a visual artist who explores non-human subjectivity through her work with scientists. And how we imagine non-human subjectivity is bound by these same constraints of body and language, starting with our very common Southern California, seabirds.

Gulls, this kind of seagulls we see around here that are black and white and gray that you see every day, you know. That's Christine. They're actually a color that you can't see. In addition, they have ultraviolet markings on them, and they can see ultraviolet, but you can't. And so even, and it isn't like violet is, ultraviolet is like violet only more so. It's a whole different color that, in fact, you can't even imagine. I think even though I sort of think of imagination as boundless, it really isn't boundless.

It's bounded by the, why the sensory constraints. So we see this range of visible light, and our machines can tell us that there's ultraviolet light or infrared or whatever, but you can't even imagine a color that you can't see. Or at least, in my opinion, imagination is sort of you have the stuff you can work with and you can make new combinations and think of these in new ways and all that, but you're always just given the stuff you're stuck with. So in my animal cognition class, we talk a lot about, okay, well, what are the limits on our perceptual abilities? What are the motor constraints? What is having hands do to how you relate to the world? You know, all their animals eat with their mouths. We eat with our hands.

We primates, you know, mediate our interaction with the world through our hands. It's a very different way to go about things. The dolphins, of course, they have five fingers, but they're all wrapped in those. little flippers, so they're not grasping or doing any of this kind of stuff. So that's not part of their reality. You know, we each kind of live in our own reality. And just to try to convince students, I think, that their own reality is constrained the same way dolphins is or chimpses or dolphins is, that then you start to realize that cognition

operates within those bounds and whatever system you're talking about. I asked Lisa how we should think about imagining animal consciousness too. So I think it's about striking a balance to some degree, because on one hand, I think it's extraordinarily important to acknowledge that different species do exist in radically different sensory worlds and because of evolution they have adapted to sense and to think and to process the world in radically different ways and so there will always be this the specter of the kind of alien or radical otherness and and in a way attempting to um to to worm your way into the into this

rabbit hole of non-human cognition is always a speculative exercise. On the other hand, I think that we have, and this is extraordinarily harmful, we have had this history towards anthropocentrism and towards extraordinarily hierarchical thinking, where we assume that we are the apex of evolution and we're at the very top of the ladder and no other capacities equate to hours. And I think that's an error as well. You know, if I say dog to you, you get an image a picture of a dog in your head, right? If I say dog, if I could say dog to it often or shark or something to a dog, they wouldn't probably get a picture.

And they'd get a sound, you know, because they're acoustic-based the way we're visually based. So knowing what stuff is made out of how big it is, what it's shaped like, we do all that visually, they do all that acoustically. So just trying to wrap your head around that. You know, it's always a nice, sort of one of the goals of my animal cognition class is just to get people to sort of break out of their primateness a little bit and try to think about, you know, try to understand how these, the constraints operate in each of these systems. And one of these constraints we always have to be mindful of is our narrative drive, our eagerness to put everything into a story that renders its meanings clearly to us. The tendency, I think, is to use our human storytelling tendencies and our interpretations of our own motivations and of one another's motivations and all that,

and just cast that onto what are animals. So we right away think, oh, they're trying to do this, or they believe this, or they're they meant to do this, or they're communicating this. And as a scientist, I'm always sort of reining that in and saying, well, you know, you can't just look inside your own mental process and assume that the bunnies are doing that, or the dolphins are doing that, or chimps are doing that. So, you know, the monkeys that move off into the bushes to have secret sex, you know, and they're checking for the dominant male if he's watching them, you know, are they thinking about what he's thinking, what he knows or doesn't know, or maybe it's just that, you know, when his eyes are on them, trouble follows and they've just learned that correlation. It's not really about theory of mind, thinking about what he's feeling or thinking, but just

the fact that under the circumstances when eyes are pointed at me, consequences follow. Or maybe it's even when eyes are pointing at me, I'm too nervous to have sex. And so I can't, you know, I mean, so any of those things could account for running off into the bushes. You know, but people right away have its tendency to attribute human emotions, human cognition, human. So I'm always pulling people back from that and saying, well, you know, let's, think about what the animal is. Let's think about what we know about. And Lisa,

of course, is his. Anyway, I'll come back around to that a second. So I feel like I'm a lot of times trying to curb imagination a little bit.

Or at least to set up, you know, say, well, let's get the facts straight first, and then we can run with those. Once we kind of know what the particular are. Lisa and Christine collaborated on an art installation called Speculative Dolphin Theater.

In the gallery, you're surrounded by projections of video footage taken from the underwater habitat of the dolphins, Christine Studies. It's like you're swimming with them. So the installation was

a three-channel video. It was immersive, which meant that Christine's videos were projected onto three adjacent walls, and when you were in the room at Cal IT2, it was as though you had walked into the aquarium and were kind of amongst the dolphins. There were three different auditory soundscapes or worlds superimposed upon the same video that Christine and I basically co-wrote together. She had a real influence in terms of the direction of that.

Each of these three scripts allows you to experience being with dolphins and imagining their subjectivity in a different way. The three narrative scripts, one of them was the more objective, empirical, behavioral-based script, and it was almost as though a researcher was talking into, what's the little apparatus, just a voice recorder, I suppose. and observing the dolphins' actions and interactions moment by moment in the way that Christine would in the lab. So it was very much, it was this representation of the objective, mechanistic, scientific way of looking at things.

And I think superimposed on that was also some auditory cues about, well, they were from the zoo. They were actual recordings from the zoo as well. So it was also about this space being one of leisure and people sort of observing the animals as well. I think it was impossible to get away from that environmental constraint. Like that was a reality of their existence. So I thought it really important to integrate into the soundtrack. The second superimposed narrative, and this is all on the same video

was actually our, it was our flight of fancy in terms of interpreting what the dolphins were doing in that eight minutes. And we had three or four different explanations or it could have been something as simple as just play or it could have been something like a romantic drama

or jealousy or it could have just been outright antagonism where the dolphins were scuffling with one another. And so that was much more about what was actually, without really disnifying them too much, that was a little bit more about what was really occurring in the tank than the sort of scientific interpretation of that. And then the third narrative loop was my attempt at capturing a kind of cetacean phenomenology which became really, really invested in bringing the viewers' attention to the auditory and acoustic world. So it was a bunch of bubbling and gurgling and chiming.

And the dolphins were also talking about life in the pod and the kind of fluidity and interconnectedness of their. existence just because they were such social beings and I felt that I truly had to speak to that as well. These bring forward or metaphorize aspects of dolphin cognition and its unique frames of reference based on the detailed observations of the dolphin cognition lab. Christine and her interns, her researchers, is the lab, do have have it parsed out second by second. So it's not as though I was just watching these recordings and blindly trying to come up with a narrative in response to it. I was going through her Excel spreadsheets and seeing who was with who and whether they were turning their bellies to one another and who had elicited calls in the moments prior. And so really,

whenever the dolphins speak in this sort of disnified way, in the recordings, they did actually elicit whistles or clicks or sounds in real life as well. And this involves tracking very closely to how best to imagine what a dolphin, with its different environment and sensory tools, perceives in the world around them. They live in an acoustic world, that they see through echolocation, that they feel the things around them.

And I think that a lot of that came out in the kinds of things that the animals said about how they were impacting one another or the poor, what are the humans called again? The sky swimmers? Sky swimmers, right? Couldn't, you know, how their perception sort of ends at the outside borders. Where with echolocation, you know, you can see into an animal and get sort of like x-ray vision because you get one set of echoes from the bones and a different one from the flesh and a different one from the air pockets. And so you sort of see what somebody's made out of literally or, you know, what they're feeling like

in terms of what muscles are tense or whatever, you know, that. And of course, for humans, it's all surfaced. Beyond sensory differences, there's also the unique ways dolphins understand themselves socially. Not just our work, but a lot of research with dolphins suggests that they're mimetic, that mimicry is an important sort of signal that they use, kind of like people do. You know, if you mimic somebody that sets up a nice rapport, and there's research that shows that after you've been mimicked, we're more likely to give to charity and do, you know, sort of that's kind of, so we're really kind of, we're very interested.

We have, from various kinds of research that's been done, lots of evidence that dolphins are great. Mimics, they can, you know, in experimental conditions, they can mimic human behaviors. I'm actually mapping. Talk about a cognitive feat of recognizing interspecies. similarities, you can actually train a dolphin to imitate a human, and it does the mapping. So if you go like this, it realizes, oh, that must be my pack, or if you wave your foot, it goes, okay, that's my tail. You know, and the bodies are not that similar, so it's quite kind of remarkable to see the

kind of mapping that they're capable of doing. We know that they'll copy each other's whistles sometimes. You have signature whistles where each individual has a call that's, that's basically operationalized as the call that you make most of the time, 80% of the time, and everybody else in the group makes 20% of the time. So it's kind of like a name, but not really. I mean, I'm more likely to use your name than I'm to use my name. But in dolphins, they're more likely to sort of announce themselves with this name.

But they do sometimes mimic it. And, you know, we're very curious. What we're trying to find out, and not, don't have answers yet, but working on this. later today is what role this mimicry plays in the day and day out natural flow of their lives. We know they have these skills, but we don't know how they function for them. But we have these bits and pieces that the story, over and over, the story is always going to be with dolphins is that we know this much, holding up my fingers very close to each other, you know. And what we don't know is as much.

And that's the hard part, I think, for how we imagine animals. On the one hand, there's still just so much we don't know, so much more to learn. And yet on the other, we humans don't have a great track record at things like recognizing our limitations and approaching difference with those limitations in mind, with a kind of humility and respect for other ways of being in the world.

Dolphins, to continue with them, can be, well, misleading, which to say we can easily be misled by our desires for what dolphins might represent. Dolphins have a way of kind of, there's something about them. You know, there's something very charming, very beautiful, very, you know, they're playful and smart and cute, and, you know, they got a permanent smile and all that kind of stuff, you know.

And all my career, I've been embarrassed by some of the presumptions that people make. And when I went and some of the scientists make, I mean, way back in the day, Lily was the first John Lilly wrote, you know, books about how the dolphins had ESP, and they, you know, came from the dog star, and they were smarter than us, and they were, you know, when I was a graduate student, I had an interview. at Harvard for graduate school, and I told them I wanted to study Dolph and Cognition. And the first question out of their mouth was, did you believe in ESP? So I've sort of been up against this kind of loony factor for a long time.

It's probably true, in fact, that I probably could not have had this collaboration with you. Lisa, when I started my career because I was afraid of artists and such. people thinking about dolphins because our science was suffering. We were definitely very hard to find funding, very hard to find. You know, it took a long time before people started taking dolphins seriously as another mammal to study. Large brain, social mammal, why would you not want to, you know,

learn stuff about this? Which begs the question, how did this scientist and this artist find a way to work so well together? It can vary from case to case, but here it's a mutual understanding. of each other's disciplines and trust to let the two methodologies of art making and of the scientific pursuit push at each other's outer limits. This interaction with Lisa, who I know understands the facts, you know, and who we've had

so many talks and she's going to the classes, and she's brilliant. So I trust her to make those... flights of fancy. And it's been great for me because I get to allow them, you know, and enjoy them in a way that I'm typically not allowing myself to do. So for me, that's been particularly nice. Well, I also want to build off that a little bit. It was particularly nice for me working in a laboratory and being in this space of science because I feel that there's, I always refer to this as the detritus of science. There are narratives, there are anecdotes, there are all kinds of beautiful moments that don't fit within that really mechanistic or empirical way of forming knowledge.

And that makes perfect sense and I'm not here to, you know, wreck the scientific method. That's a really, really important way for humanity to move forward. forward. But I also felt as though incredible tidbits were being left behind because they can't, they by their own nature, cannot be part of that discourse. And my power as an artist is to come sift through, you know, stories about baby dolphins blowing their mother's milk to emulate cigarette smoke or to steal sonic punches and appropriate those into a movie or even, And goodness, the surveillance footage itself, like this incredible turquoise underwater choreography that was captured on surveillance camera, so it was simultaneously really voyeuristic and creepy

and yet beautiful. Like, I, of course, was having an aesthetic reaction in addition to just being amazed by the science. And I thought that the poetics and the aesthetics of that space, or something that could be brought out and should be embraced as well. You can hear the trust that provided the foundation for this collaboration, the affection for one another's work, when Christine and Lisa talk to each other. It's certainly there in hearing about Lisa's prior work

to engage artistically with other forms of animal subjectivity. One of my favorite exhibits of hers has been the rat habitat that she built that was really taking, again, sort of what, seeing the world from the rat's point of view, what matters to the red textures, tunnels, certain colors, certain smell, certain. And then using that information, she designed the perfect playroom for a rat

that just suited everything that we know about what rats are and do it. And, you know, that being able to take, and plus it was absolutely beautiful. So being able to take this knowledge and translated in a way that reflects the animal's reality. And then also sort of putting that human, you know, there's poignancy and, and, and, and, power to these installations that she does that are all about her that makes for just an amazing, I think, very, very, I have felt both intellectually stimulated and sort of emotionally probed by the stuff that you do.

Is that that combination? That's so touching. I'm like getting emotional over here. But the piece that Christine is referring to is called Interspecies Wonderland. And it was supposed to be this performative and participatory installation that I did last year for the Graduate Open Studios here, where on one level it was very much supposed to behave as an explorable. and immersive landscape for rats. And I took their color vision into account,

the fact that they're dichromats and really only see greens and blues, and the fact that most of their incoming sensory information seems to be through their whiskers. It's very somatosensory. They're very tactile creatures. And so it was all about creating interesting spaces and tunnels and and using varying planes and playing with space in a way that actually generated what for the rats was a landscape and really embraced their sort of agency and autonomy. And it was a celebration of that particular form of sentience, right?

But simultaneously, people, visitors were also invited to come and be part of the space and sort of lounge around on these pillows and blankets and this kind of mingling of different consciousnesses was what I was aiming for. And there's something to affection too in how we imagine possibilities, in relationships, in the minds of animals and aliens and what may come down the pike.

It's there in Chris's early love of watching dolphins or Lisa watching rats. or the two of them talking about their work together. That mix of trust and enjoyment, kindness and humility, a certain depth of feeling, opens up channels of communication, not unlike the aliens in arrival, that seem to me designed to come up against barriers,

and then to cross them. This has been Into the Impossible, a podcast of the Arthur Seek Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. We'd like to thank our guests, Christine Johnson, and Lisa Corpos, for speaking with us, as well as to acknowledge our generous patrons and sponsors, including Viasat Inc., members of the Founders' and the James B. Axe Family Foundation. We appreciate your support. To find out more about the Clark Center and our upcoming projects, research, and programs,

as well as how to support our mission, please visit imagination.ucsd.edu. Coming up on April 25th, we have an event with UCSD Cosmologist and Clark Center Associate Director Brian Keating to launch his new book, Losing the Nobel Prize. You won't want to miss it. He'll be in conversation with science fiction writer David Bryn. And then on May 8th, we have the creator of PhD comics, Jorge Cham, with his collaborator, Daniel Whiteson, to speak about their news. new book, We Have No Idea, as well as USC physicist Clifford Johnson speaking about his graphic

nonfiction book, The Dialogues. Two examples of using comics to engage science, and it'll be great fun. We hope you can come. Audio production of this podcast is by me, Patrick Coleman, produced by Patrick Coleman and Shelton Brown. And thanks to all of you for listening and continuing to share the podcast with your friends. We really appreciate it, and we look forward to sharing some really exciting interviews and stories with you in the coming months.