This blog post is a more thorough explanation of the ideas in our zine “How to Communicate with Other Species” (Unfolding Connections Issue #56). Zines require us to fit a bit idea (often that we have done quite a bit of research about) into a bite sized format. We are excited to share a bit more of our thinking for those of you who want to go deeper.

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History of this zine (why it’s not called “How to Make a Non-human Friend”)

Before we began publishing a monthly zine, the very first zine we made was one that Jules created as an example for an assignment for her student teaching unit when schools went remote during the initial days of the COVID-19 pandemic. She needed an assignment that could be done at home and engaged students, ideally without requiring them to be glued to a screen. Enter: the very first zine, titled "How to Make a Nonhuman Friend."

April 2020

Jules didn’t know a lot about zine making yet

Flash forward five years and over 50 zines later, we wanted to revisit this topic. Our first attempt was to rewrite the text, but keep the name. Kristian recounted a story of helping swans survive a rain storm which led to flash flooding of their nest by bringing them straw with which to prop up their eggs. However, as we explored what it truly means to be friends with someone we felt that this example did not reach the threshold of friendship because the swans did not seek Kristian's companionship after this event, and they did not have a reciprocal relationship. While Kristian had a respect for the swans and recognition of their personhood, it was not clear how the swans understood Kristian.

Our second attempt was to approach this topic as a question: Can humans and a member of another species be friends? (This time we were exploring hypothetical friendships with coyotes and you will see why in a minute.) The angle that we started from was that we have many examples of human friendship across differences (religions, genders, political inclinations, cultures), might there be a lesson in that to show us how it is possible to befriend across the difference of species. As we explored this question, we felt that it was not accurate to call pets friends with humans, because they are not often entering into relationships freely as equals, they often have little freedom to leave the relationship, they are largely dependent on their keepers for food, shelter, and safety, and in many cases their reproduction is entirely (and honestly kind of creepily if you really think about it) managed by their keeper. Even their biological reality illustrates this relationship dynamic as domesticated pets have been selectively bred over thousands of years to express the traits that humans want them to have: snugglyness, joy at seeing us, cooperativeness. That brought us to the question of coyotes. If dogs are supposed to be man's best friend, but are unable to voluntarily consent to friendship because of their dynamics inherent in their domesticity, might coyotes, a close wild relative, be a candidate for friendship? Probably not. This is where our thinking got stuck again in reality, we really don't see coyotes choosing to be in relationships with humans. While humans have meaningful experiences of coyotes (see our friend Josh Morse’s work for more on the ways humans value the coyotes who live near them) humans and coyotes can’t really become friends, because of the way our goals and lifeways do not align.

At that point, we decided to walk back our thinking to a more basic question:

Can humans communicate with other species?

This is a question which has fascinated us both for a long time - before we had even met! In 2018, Kristian began work on a paper about understanding whale well-being as a type of communication. In 2017, Jules first read How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human by Eduardo Kohn, where he explores more-than-human thought and communication based on his anthropological field work with the Runa of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon. This book prompted a profound shift in Jules’ thinking based on Kohn’s description of thought in a more-than-human context, drawing on Charles Peirce’s exposition of semiotic communication. We explained this in the zine, but I think it is worth tackling it again here because we initially struggled to understand these concepts, and so it might be helpful to flesh it out in more detail than the zine affords. Essentially, there are three modes of semiotic (relating to signs and symbols) communication which build on each other: icons, indices, symbols. I'm going to try to explain them each as clearly as possible.

**Icon:** An icon is a direct representation of the thing itself. It re-presents it (i.e. it “presents it again”). An example of this would be a stick figure, which has a one-to-one correspondence with the body of a human. However, in order to see a stick figure and a human as equivalent, one has to ***not notice*** their difference: you have to not notice that a real human is three-dimensional and a drawing of a human is two-dimensional and missing a lot of details. An example from *How Forest Think* is a scarecrow which represents a hawk. Ideally, the birds the Runa are trying to deter don't notice the difference and are therefore scared away.

**Index:** An index “indexes” or “points to” the thing it is *re-presenting*. One example that Kohn lays out in *How Forests Think* is the snout of an ant eater which has evolved to be the shape that it is in response to the way that anthills are shaped. (Just to be clear, it’s not that anteaters *chose* this shape, it’s just that the ones whose snouts were more fitted to the anthills survived better and therefore passed their genes on at a higher rate.) In this way, to see the anteater snout gives you some information about an anthill even if you have never seen one. To put it more generally, indices in some way tell us something about that which is not present. Another example might be what’s called a “wolf tree.” When a tree grows in place without much competition for sunlight, like in a field where they are the tallest being around, they typically grow wide and bushy, as compared to a tree growing up among other trees in a forest which tends to grow more tall and narrow as they compete for limited light in the canopy. If you find a big bushy tree in a forest, it often indicates that there used to be a field there at the time when that tree was young and that the other trees in the forest have grown up more recently. In this way, the bushy tree “points” to an environment which is no longer present. The tree's form communicates something indexically about their life story.

**Symbol:** Symbols are a leap beyond icons and indices because they are not directly related to the thing they are representing; they are arbitrarily related, and based on habits and patterns. They only make sense because of some agreed-upon convention among users of the sign. For example, the word, “pig” only conjures in your mind the snouty mammal because you already know what “pig” means - nothing about the word itself has anything to do with pigs. Most of human language is symbolic in nature. This has the advantage of creating vast new ways for us to communicate, but can have the disadvantage of being disconnected from reality.

Research into More-Than-Human Communication

There has been a lot of exciting and concrete (not just theoretical) research happening over the last few years about the possibility of more-than-human symbolic communication (e.g. translation of animal languages). We were really inspired by some of the talks that we listened to from the 2024 Interspecies Internet Workshop, Animals in Translation: Imagining Criteria and Frameworks for Decoding Communication in Other Species. Here's a brief summary of some of the research that is happening right now:

Sperm whales have an alphabet
Prairie dogs have different words to describe different species, even shapes, sizes, and colors
Earth Species Project is trying to use AI to decode other species’ communication

We were also able to attend the MOTH (MOre-Than-Human) Festival of Ideas this past spring at NYU School of Law. We were particularly excited by a presentation on Project CETI which is currently working to decode sperm whale speech using AI (sort of like building a ChatGPT for whales). So far, researchers have discovered what seems to be a whale ‘alphabet’ of repeated sounds (called ‘codas’).

The MOTH conference was specifically focused on the legal dimensions of more-than-human communication and one of the points emphasized in this presentation was that as scientists decode the language of whales, legal scholars need to consider how whale testimony could be the missing piece to ensure that whale rights are upheld. We were a little skeptical of this line of thinking, however, because drawing on the Peirce/Kohn theory of semiotic communication, we are not convinced that symbolic language is unique in its ability to communicate compared to icons and indices and weary of the assertion that it would require symbolic language to make whale testimony admissible in court because many species likely do not use symbolic communication (e.g. all plants). For us this means that even before we can interpret whale vocalizations, we should be listening to biologists, botanists, animal behaviorists, etc. when they interpret the more-than-human communication through the available icons and indices. For instance, we should be able to acknowledge that a whale’s emaciated body is an icon of starvation and an index of decimated fish populations. These signs can be translated to human language (in fact we just said it in human words in the previous sentence) and therefore could be just as admissible as testimony. In other words, we do not need to wait until other species' vocalizations can be translated to recognize them as agential and communicative beings. Whales, and all other species, are communicating to us with their lives, their acts, and their forms.

What about AI? Are AIs communicating their thoughts with us?

This zine is also coming out at a time when discussions of non-human sentience are often paired with questions of the sentience of artificial intelligence (AI). Large Language Models (LLMs) are an interesting case study in terms of the three modes of semiotic communication outlined by Peirce, because they operate entirely in the realm of the symbolic. (We are planning an upcoming zines about LLMs as disembodied symbols and what that means about their ability to think and feel.) For now we can say that at this moment LLMs are not subject to the forces of evolution because they are abiotic and therefore their form (embodied in data centers) is not inherited and cannot be understood as a type of evolutionary memory (like the ant-eater snout). They are also not connecting the symbolic to the material world (e.g. interacting with embodied things, although photos might begin to provide them access to icon representations or even indexical evidences of material things). We have some more thinking to do about what this means for their thinking, but perhaps this is part of why they have a tendency to hallucinate—the 1:1 correspondence of the symbolic to the material (real) is more tenuous for them.

So, can humans really communicate with other species?

If the question that this blog post is supposed to be answering is "Can humans communicate with other species?", our answer is yes. Symbolic communication (e.g. human language) is pretty narrow, and even among humans it is just one way that we communicate. We also communicate, though sometimes indirectly or even unintentionally, through icons and indices. Messages are communicated to us through many modes like body language, sight (blood on someone might indicate they have been injured), or smell (no example needed :p ).

Communication between species, especially those that don't use symbolic language, requires an openness to legitimize non-symbolic forms of communication as "texts" which can also be interpreted. We already do this. If a baby is crying you can guess what they need (food, diaper, sleep, different temperature), translate their need into a concept with associated words in our mind, and respond appropriately based on the need and the context. We don't require them to be able to say the word for their need. We also understand that if they are laughing or smiling they are likely expressing something that could be translated to the words “I am happy” or “I find that silly.” Other beings have similar and very different non-symbolic cues which can also be interpreted and "translated" into human language languages. We just have to be willing to “listen” to what they are "saying."