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This would be pretty cool, but I don't see how it could go beyond translations like "I feel positive emotion related to nursing" and "I feel negative emotion related to pain."

What if an adult pig makes "positive emotion related to nursing" grunts? Does that mean they are thinking about nursing? Or has the meaning of the grunt has changed over time? Are they reliving a childhood pig-fantasy? Is the meaning of their adult-pig desire structured by their child-pig experiences in a vaguely Freudian way? Does the grunt mean "food enjoyment" or "food enjoyment + recollection of nursing" or "food enjoyment + recollection of nursing + nostalgia for the Jungian archetypal teat"? These questions may seem ridiculous (and I suppose I am stretching them a bit for humour's sake), but I think ignoring them just leads to an impoverished behavioural science. Maybe that's the best we can do.

I just don't see how we can make the leap from correlating events with acoustics to saying that we understand the meaning of a pig grunt. The idea that we could somehow discover a rich, nuanced emotional/meaningful life of pigs via such a means seems to me fundamentally misguided. We would need to be able to ask a pig what such and such a grunt meant, which obviously presupposes a fairly complex shared language. In the absence of this, we are just making assumptions.

On the other hand, these assumptions certainly may be very plausible, and it seems reasonable to think that it would be very cosmically odd if such assumptions were dramatically off-base, due to our shared evolutionary history, physiology, and neural circuitry.




> The idea that we could somehow discover a rich, nuanced emotional/meaningful life of pigs via such a means seems to me fundamentally misguided.

Decoding vocal communication and basic emotional states, however simple and unstructured both of these might be, could easily enable us to bootstrap training of pigs for other forms of communication, such as computer-assisted button boards. AIUI, this has been done wrt. other comparable mammals, with some measure of success.




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