The Great Disappointment

Every morning before work I walk to my local coffee shop, pull out my pad of paper and green canvas pencil case, and draw. I usually draw people. Recently, I started drawing old mugshots (from the British slang “mug” for face).

Experimenting with imaged for the Fox Sisters Comic.

Experimenting with drawing William Miller and Family for planned Great Disappointment Comic.

A  comic inspired by the Roald Dahl story, "Death of an Old Man." 

For my Renatured final project, I’ve been exploring the idea of non-human personhood, particularly as it pertains to dolphins.

Personhood is not a simple issue, in practice its use has many practical and ethical entailments. While our colloquial use of the word “person” may lead us to believe that all homo sapiens are naturally considered “persons,” both the abolition of slavery and the women’s rights movement significantly expanded the accepted notion of personhood in the last 200 years. As recently as 1931, women in Massachusetts could be ejected from a jury because, as the law required that jurors be “persons,” they could be legally excluded. On the other hand, the first non-human person was named in 1886, when it was granted by the Supreme Court to the Southern Pacific Railroad. As of 2010, some personhood rights have been extended to all corporations.

Beyond the question of corporations, non-human personhood for animals is an area in which scientific research continues to raise ethical and legal questions. Modern science places all creatures along continuums of intelligence, self-awareness, complexity of social and emotional life, and brain anatomy. Some animals (like dolphins and great apes) are quite close to us on each continuum. For example, very few creatures on earth recognize themselves in mirrors, a test used to judge self awareness. But humans (after the age of two), dolphins (also after the age of 2), apes, orcas, elephants, and magpies all recognize themselves.

The scientific literature about dolphin intelligence is too vast to cover in detail, so I’ll list a few examples. In one experiment (by Karen Pryor), two dolphins were rewarded whenever they came up with a new behavior. Because the idea of rewarding novelty is so abstract, it took the trainers quite a long time to convey their directions to the dolphins. But once they did, the dolphins came up with such strange and complex behaviors that the study eventually had to be stopped because the trainers could no longer follow each behavior’s complexity and so could not reliably reward novelty. When this test was done with humans, they took about the same amount of time to understand the game and were not able to create as great a range of behaviors as the dolphins.

Another famous anecdote about dolphin intelligence involves Kelly, a dolphin at the Marine Mammal Studies Center in Mississippi. All the dolphins at Kelly’s facility are trained to pick up litter thrown into their tanks and hold it in their mouths until a trainer can take it from them. For each piece of litter, they receive a fish. Kelly began hiding litter under a rock in her enclosure, then when a trainer was around, she would tear off little pieces of the trash and be rewarded with a fish for each piece. This behavior indicates that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification.

Kelly’s ingenuity went further when a gull fell into her enclosure and she was given many fish as a reward for giving the gull to her trainer. After that, she began keeping one fish under a rock after her meals and later bringing it to the surface to lure gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy she taught her calf, who taught other calfs, and now gull-baiting is a big game among the dolphins at her marine park.

The question of personhood boils down to moral standing. A creature has moral standing if, when making moral decisions, we feel obligated to take the individual’s welfare into account, for the individual’s own sake and not for anyone else’s benefit. The classic argument about human exceptionalism is that humans are the only animals to reason and so all other creatures are in our service. Immanuel Kant wrote in the 17th century, ”So far as animals are concerned we have no direct moral duties; animals are not self- conscious and are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man.”

Since Kant’s time, evolution and genetic analysis has made the similarities between all living things abundantly clear. So, as Stephen Wise says in, Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights, “On what non-arbitrary ground,” he asks, “could a judge find [that a] little girl has a common-law right to bodily integrity that forbids her use in terminal biomedical research but that Koko [a gorilla with an IQ equal to that of a 4- or 5-year-old child] shouldn’t have that right, without violating basic notions of equality?”

That claim for Koko powerfully pulls on us for two reasons. First, because Koko is an intelligent animal. Second, because Koko is like a human child. But Koko is not a child. Today, she is a 41 year old gorilla. But because she scores as well as a child on a traditional IQ test, Koko falls comfortably within the rhetorical realm of cuddly, furry things we infantalize. So how do we value dolphins, who are “wild”, “magical”, “sumblime” and utterly alien?

My Renatured final project is about exploring the realm of the intelligent alien. In particular, I want to create a circumstance for humans to encounter dolphins in a way that neither infantilizes them nor exoticises them as a part of sublime nature. This immediately raises the question of how to notice and evaluate intelligence that does not resemble our own. To do this I learned about the dolphin vocabulary for self-expression. Dolphins have a vast vocabulary of sounds and body movements, but marine biologists only understand what a few of their non-verbal behaviors mean. After doing a bit of research on dolphin body language, I started collecting videos of dolphin behaviors in the wild and, based on my research, added closed captions interpreting the behavior on each of the videos for human comprehension.

Then I constructed an application that allows users to talk with a dolphin through the Google Hangout video chat interface. The application consists of the captioned dolphin videos which I cue in response to the user’s conversation. The dolphin videos all represent one dolphin, which I named Rebumbum. In each conversation, Rebumbum becomes my puppet and I try hard not to respond to anything beyond what is clearly articulated by the user to whom I’m speaking. While creating real connection with alien creatures is difficult, I designed this application to create a space between humans and dolphins which tries to make dolphin behavior legible and intimate without overly anthropomorphizing it. I chose the venue of Google Hangout because it’s where I have the intimate conversations with friends online.

In my user feedback, I received a lot of advice about how to make the dolphin seem “cuter” and “more playful.” But speaking with a dolphin should feel awkward and unnatural. I think this gets to the heart of this project: chatting with a dolphin is a fundamentally alien act, so as much as I wanted to make the conversations more clear and evocative, those were all steps away from authenticity. And so this project may not convince anyone of the value of dolphin personhood, but at least one of my users said that she has thought of dolphins often since her user test. “Just having them in from of me,” she said, “put them on my mind.”

Here is a prophecy generator, inspired by the writings of Michel Nostradamus, the 16th century French apothecary and seer. Nostradamus claimed that, in the night, he was possessed by a spirit who fed him vision of the future, which he took down in quatrains. The verses that resulted are full of nonsensical imagery and strange language, in other words, just the sort of product that a computer could nearly generate.

Here’s an example of Nostradamus’ verse:

For seven days and seven nights Man will watch this awesome sight. The tides will rise beyond their ken To bite away the shores and then

A fiery dragon will cross the sky Six times before this earth shall die Mankind will tremble and frightened be for the sixth heralds in this prophecy.

The great star will burn for seven days, The cloud will cause two suns to appear: The big mastiff will howl all night When the great pontiff will change country.

I tagged the words in the above verses with the NLTK part-of-speech tagger and then wrote a python program to skim words off of a webpage, tag them with their appropriate part of speech, and reconfigure those words to follow the part-of-speech pattern from the Nostradamus poem.

Here’s the code.

My source text is an article about women watching porn from Oprah.com. I originally sought text which used interesting language: internet erotica, color commentary on Indian cricket, or an academic paper, but instead selected Oprah article because of time contraints. I’d like to plug some new source material in to the program.

After producing a few version of the 3 verse poem above, I realized you get a much more ‘logical’ poem if you limit its length to a single verse. You’ll see the best single verse poems below. (I generated the titles and added punctuation).

Buffy Gallagher

About ten women and 2004 exploits:

I will conjure the story Buffy Gallagher.

Should porn on her Gallagher story

finally the discriminates? But once.

American Transgender Society: a future review of our organization

On ten women and three months:

Pure who want the guy Life

Female is who accept of her study

To measure up the organizations.

Women in Academia

On million researchers and one women.

Northwestern will accept a smart Female;

Northwestern is who accept that their smart,

To like up the people.